Saturday, January 13, 2018

13 January 2018: traveling to Queenstown

By Harley Illingworth (Nursing ‘20)

Talk about getting ready in the dark!! We all woke up to the power at our hostel being out due to a tree falling on the power lines last night. Let me just tell ya the hostel was pitch black, but thankfully a few of us had flashlights and headlamps to help get ready for the day. After our crèche (morning meeting), we headed out toward Queenstown to start the day with nothing really planned other than finding interesting pitstops along the way.

We started today’s journey by pulling off on the side of the road to try one of New Zealand’s finest delicacies, whitebait. Whitebait are juvenile fish in Family Galaxiidae that are caught and then thrown in an egg mixture and grilled. After the initial hesitancy due to the little fish eyes staring back at everyone, we all decided that it didn’t taste terrible. Then we were off again.




Our next stop was at the “Blue Pools” near the Haast Pass in Aspiring National Park, where we had to cross a few swinging bridges to see the incredibly blue pools along the Makarora River. Let’s just say some people had a little bit too much fun shaking the bridge to freak out some members of the group! Once we got there the water was a beautiful Caribbean blue, it was breathtaking. From there we decided to head to Lake Hāwea for lunch.


Lake Hāwea was astonishing. With the mountains butting up next to the water, it made the lake look like it was only a mile across when in reality it was about 4+ miles across. We all swam around in the freezing cold water, took some pictures, ate our lunch, and found some bones. Then we were off to our final stop: Queenstown.



After we left, we saw a cool little lookout along the Karawau River called ‘Roaring Meg’ that we decided to stop at. We learned that at the lookout, the Department of Conservation (DoC) was in the process of getting rid of the pine trees that were invading the land because it was killing and taking homes away from some of the native animals. Then after reading about their project we were off once more for Queenstown.



After arriving to Queenstown, the group decided to retire early for the night because we all had to get up at 3:15am to go kayaking at Milford Sound.

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