Adventure Across the Ditch: Extreme Adventure Edition

On Saturday The Crew was reunited in Queenstown, New Zealand.  Joel, Dean and Alana had spent the last five days road triping to Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road while I stayed home and worked to fund the trip!  They had a red eye from Melbourne via Auckland to Queenstown.  I had an early flight from Sydney, and my flight arrived half an hour after theirs.  (For those questioning this posts title, "Across the Ditch" means crossing the Tasman Sea, traveling from Oz to New Zealand.)

It was cool and drizzly when we got in.  We all fell in love with Queenstown right away- so beautiful!

First thing on the agenda was the Nevis Bungy Jump and Canyon Swing.  Joel had seen this on Departures (awesome Canadian travel show) and decided he must do it.  Which meant Dean had to do it too.  Alana and I were not interested, but had to accompany the boys as photographer and videographer.

 The bungy platform is over a canyon.  We had to take gondolas out to it.  As I'm terrified of heights, I didn't enjoy this part.  It wasn't a fully enclosed car, so we got hooked in with harnesses.

Dean was getting a little antsy on the way out, but Joel was pretty calm.  Check out their ultimate bromance moment!

The bungy tower is 134 m tall, the second highest in the world.

I don't have any photos of the boys actually jumping on my camera (just video), but they did pretty good!  Joel was all pro and just went for it.  Dean hesitated at first, but did it.  They were both pretty high on adrenaline after!

Next up was the Canyon Swing.  This is the world's largest swing and swings you out over the canyon.  Scarier then bungy, as you don't pick when you drop.  The jump platform was also in the middle of the canyon and this time we had to cross a suspension bridge to get to it.  This was my extreme NZ adventure and I did not like it!

The boys did this one tandem.

The operators forgot to video the boys swing, so they got to go a second time for free.  They had to buy the video, which was only $40, a good deal considering how pricey the swing is!

It was pretty cool going up and watching the boys jump.  Also got pretty excited to see a little snow at the top of the hill- didn't expect I'd miss that!

With the bungy out of the way, it was time for lunch.  We headed to a local favorite, Fergburger.  You can't go to Queenstown and miss this place.  Huge, delicious burgers.

After dinner we made our way into the Queenstown.  We explored the town, then hit up the Wine Center for some tastings.  Unlike the wineries, this one wasn't free, we had to pay for sample.  Prices weren't bad and we tried a bunch.  We picked our two favorite bottles to drink later.

By the time we left it was dark and everyone was hungry again.  We found a little pizza/pasta place called The Cow, which was BYO (bring your own booze).  They wanted to charge us a big corkage fee, so we decided to drink it elsewhere.  And where else would you drink that when in Queenstown?  The back alley of course!  We are classy people.  We made a little circle and passed the bottle round till it was finished.  Funniest moment of the trip.  Then back to The Cow for awesome spaghetti, followed by more drinking at the hotel and some crazy dancing at Winnie's nightclub.  Joel almost took out a few people Gangnam Style.   Good night.