February 7th: Arrowtown
We were undecided what to do. Torn between staying in the tranquility and beauty of Tekapo or to start driving further south. I went and did my daily email checked at the holiday park Internet terminal and we pondered.

We decided it's time to move on. With a full tank of petrol, clean water and other urky parts of the van that needed to be cleaned we drove out towards Twizel.

On the way we stopped of at Lake Pukaki. The vivid turquoise water made the pictures I had taken look wrong. But it really does look like this.

Twizel is a new town that evolved in the 1960s. It was built to service construction of the nearby hydroelectric power station. It is a well kept town with proud residents that look after it. We stopped for lunch, some locally caught Salmon in Rosti, top up our mobile.

We continued along SH8 through vast rugged valleys and mountain ranges. At Cromwell we turned off onto SH6 towards Queenstown and Arrowtown.

At Arrowtown we found a Holiday Park that was undergoing considerable groundwork's but the only powered site in the area. We are reassured the diggers don't start up until 9:30am! Still we have the Remarkable's mountains to look at ..behind the diggers. We had traveled about 250km - pooped we turned in.

We went into Arrowown and looked around and had breakfast. Arrowtown is a small, quaint touristy town. A gold mining town and settled in the 1860s, it has retained many of the original buildings.

We moved onto Queenstown about half an hour drive from Arrowtown and resting on the shores of Lake Wakatipu. A thriving, buzzing town, the epi centre of all things thrill seeking. We book up for the Shotover River Jet.

Later that afternoon, after we had found a holiday park to stay at we walked into the town to get the bus to the Shotover River.

They gave us life jackets and a rain coat. The jet boat feels immensely powerful. The driver flung us around, performing 360° spins on the length of the boat, that sent cascades of water up over the boat. I sat on the outside edge of the boat. The rocks were only a few feet away. We skimmed through narrow canyons, sometimes in only 3 or 4 inches of water. Every now and then the driver stopped in the canyon and gave us some facts about the area! Then we tore off spinning and getting soaked.

After the trip we bought pics they had taken of us, suckers I know, but great mementos.

Back in Queenstown we walked around. It was getting late in the day, hungry, of course, we went to Wai an excellent waterfront restaurant. We walked back to the holiday park. It had started to rain, hard. We got soaked through, but it was good fun!