THIS BLOG IS PART 6 OF MY JOURNAL ABOUT MY UNEXPECTED JOURNEY TO NEW ZEALAND, AS WINNER OF THE HOBBIT FAN FELLOWSHIP CONTEST!
DAY 4: Discovering Queenstown & Mt Nicholas
This afternoon we got to choose between four activities: the adventure experience (jet boat & canyon swing), the wine tasting experience, the cycle trail experience and a boat cruise & sheep farm experience. We choose for the boat cruise with Southern Discoveries. The ship took us around the scenic lake Wakatipu and Bob’s Grove, or Te Punatapu, the sacred waters. The view was breathtaking: we were surrounded by The Remarkables mountain range, the blue lake and fifty shades of green trees…
The ship sailed us to Mt Nicholas farm, where we experienced the life on a Merino sheep farm. Mt Nicholas is of the largest stations in New Zealand (with 400 000 000 m2 of land) and is home to 30.000 Merino sheep and 2.200 Hereford cattle. We were served a rustic lunch, from which most of the food is grown on the farm itself.
After the lunch, we did a 4WD Farm Tour around the station. Here we saw some day to day farm activities and the sheep and cattle enjoying their enormous habitat (I’m quite jealous to be honest). The views were amazing. It was such a relaxing trip!
The rest of the day we had spare time to discover Queenstown! So this morning we roamed around the pretty Queenstown with our Finnish friends to get some breakfast and coffee. We visited the Lord of the Rings shop, bought some kiwi souvenirs and I fell in love with a beautiful replica of Nenya at the jeweler. Nenya, the ring of Adamant, is one of the three elven rings of power in The Lord of the Rings and is wielded by Galadriel. The replica is made out of silver with a blue zirconia. I feel really lucky, because my precious boyfriend gave it to me as a gift! Since I have tiny fingers, it was too large, but luckily the friendly jeweler was happy to costumize the ring to my size.
Back in Queenstown after the cruise we were kidnapped by Manesha and Hazel who took us to the most scary experience of my life: a 4D shooting zombies game at X.D. Dark Ride. This interactive motion ride was so immersive because of the 360 surround sound environment, 3D stereoscopic graphics and special effects for a multi sensory experience, like a moving chair and wind effects. You are placed in a The Walking Dead scenario where zombies crawl over the border of the screen towards you. You only have a laser gun to shoot them down, while your car falls of a cliff… It only takes about 10 minutes, but it’s so worth it! It was really, really scary! What we didn’t know is that there taken pictures while we were screaming and shooting. You should have seen the look on my face on the picture… pure horror! I really recommend to do this if you ever have the chance!
We concluded our day in Queenstown with a lovely diner at Captains Restaurant, a last stroll around the city, the docks and the lake that we were so going to miss.
Take a look what our fellow hobbit fans experienced in Queenstown this day in the video blog by Tourism New Zealand:
In my next blog I will talk about our last, but not least, day in New Zealand! It was the day we were all looking forward to: meeting sir Peter Jackson and the private screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in Wellington!
