Surrounded by the Remarkables (a towering mountain range) and the Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown is a beautiful sight. But the small town is busy enough to be in competition with a full fledged metropole. It's calling itself the Global Adventure Capital, is overcrowded with young folk looking for an adrenaline ride, and could well be the mekka for adventure seekers in New Zealand. 

Queenstown offers a huge array of activities from simple golf (which comes in 3 variants, the standard golf, the mini golf and the frisbee golf) or lake cruises, to mounain biking, jetboating, river rafting, bungy jumping, sky diving, skiing, safaris, heliski, etc. etc.. Anything you always thought you would never do you can find in Queenstown. And as you can imagine, the prices are accordingly high.

We went for the middle ground ourselves. We decided to head for the Skyline Gondola first (a cable car), which brings you up the mountain for fantastic views over town and lake. Unfortunately it was Saturday before Easter and the town was being crowded with people, so we first had to stand in the queue for 45 minutes before boarding the gondola. But once on the top, we were rewarded with wonderful views and sunshine. Also located there was the Skyline Luge, an 800m track for three-wheeled carts. It was quite child friendly but still fun well worth the ride.

Having slightly aclimatised ourselves to the thrill we headed down again for the next item on our to-do-list for Queenstown. As our adrenaline (and not child friendly) activity, we had selected the Hydro Attack, since Queenstown is the only place in the world you can do this (for now) and it just sounded plain cool :), the description being as follows:

You’re inside what feels like a cross between a fighter jet and a torpedo.

It’s skimming across the top of Lake Wakatipu… At 80km/h.

Yeah, you read it right – 80 scenery-blurring, perspective-destroying mind-numbing kilometres per hour… then it dives under the water.

And seconds later the pilot points it at the sky and it blasts back out again, into five metres of fresh air before shattering the lake into a million crystal shards on a screaming re-entry.

And it really was as cool and fun as it promised. Admittedly it might not be as good as a fighter jet, but it did give an impression of a torpedo. And it dived about 2m under the water! before launching itself almost 6m into the air!!! AWESOME!

Well after that we were hungry and wanted to get ourselves a famous Fergburger. Unfortunatly about another 50 people had the same idea and the queue started about 3 houses down the road... Unsure what to do we went to the bakery next door to get some pies where we were kindly informed that the queue has been and most likely will be like this for the rest of the day. So we abandoned that chase and went for a Devil Burger instead before heading out of town again.