QT. A beautiful day - perfect. Walked around park. Did washing $10! Drove to Arrowtown - pies v. good. Nice village. Walked along by the river - car drove right down the middle of river! Began to pack for Milford Sound. It's going to rain!
After a morning of mooching about Queenstown we decided to head for Arrowtown. The plsce sprang-up in the 1860s as a gold rush town. I posted this on Facebook at the time - what more can you say. The place is a very pretty tour group trap.
Afterwards we took walk. I felt Facebook needed to know about that too.
Here's a few more photos:
The number of places around Queenstown geared-up to fleecing visitors one way or another is truly remarkable. For a smallish fee you can hire a spade and pan and go hunting for gold in the Arrow river.... I guess it could be fun if you had kids.
A kilometer or so up-stream from Arrowtown there is a stretch of shallows now famous (and marked on our road atlas) as the site of the 'Ford of Bruinen'. It is the location for one of the more dramatic moments in the first of the Lord of the Rings films when Arwen, daughter of the elfin king Elrond, outrides the Nazgul to save the injured Frodo. Aficionados must be a tad disappointed to learn that the spot is also a favourite place for 4x4 off-road safari trips which somewhat spoil the romantic connotations of the spot.
The path we took became somewhat vertiginous. Not good for Gill who suffers from vertigo. She was rewarded for her bravery with many interesting geological finds - to me they all looked like slate, but as Gill explained there are many varieties of the rock and she seemed mightily pleased with this particular example.
She also happened to be looking a somewhat gorgeous too...
