We dropped the rental car off very early in the morning and took a shuttle to the airport. It was raining hard when we arrived at the airport in Sydney and the weather delayed the airplane. Fortunately, the flight from Sydney to Queenstown is only about two and a half hours. When we approached the small airport just outside of the quaint town where we were to spend our first night, it was clear and sunny as the captain asked the crew to prepare the plane for landing. We were told that views through the windows for the remainder of the flight would be amazing, and they certainly didn’t disappoint. Queenstown sits on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, cradled by the mountains of New Zealand’s South Island. The airplane flew between the steep mountains of the Southern Alps for quite a while. Queenstown and the South Island are famous for this scenery and the adventure tourism that can get your adrenaline flowing.
New Zealand gets its name from Dutch map makers that thought it reminded them of the coast off their homeland which was called Zeeland. The islands were the last country to be inhabited by people, though it was not the Dutch. The first people were the Māori. These indigenous people arrived sometime in the late thirteenth century from Polynesia. Today the country is a sovereign English-speaking country that traces its routes to a treaty in 1840 between the British and the Māori.
We started our adventure in a small hotel that caters to backpackers. It was a good place to start the last country on this adventure. The photo above is from the deck of the small restaurant at the hotel looking towards Queenstown shortly after sundown. If you would like to see more pictures click here.