New Zealand – Day 30 – Thursday – March 23, 2017

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Queenstown +17, sunny no wind

So we arrive at our last day (the real last day is just traveling back home).

What a better way to spend our last day but to explore Queenstown. First, we tramp up Queenstown Hill to an elevation of 907 metres. An interesting tramp on steep well-groomed pathways through a douglas fir forest. After an hour and a half, we arrive at the peak and are rewarded with some great 360 degree views of Queenstown, the surrounding valleys and mountains. We have learned over the past few days that the population here in Queenstown is only 14,500 add to that the surrounding towns it creeps up near 30,000. The tourism population in 2013 hit 950,000 visitors with this number continuing to rise annually. When we explored the town we saw many hotels, motels, and other types of accommodation that would be needed to support the tourist numbers.

Queenstown is known as the “Adventure Capital” of the world. Evident around the area are signs of the extreme adventure activities offered here such as paragliding, parasailing, speed boating, sky diving, and more. We looked into the cost of these activities and found that they were quite expensive, not that they were of any interest to us. Much younger crowd of tourists here and more back-packers.