Queenstown (Day 184)
Queenstown is small mountain town full of natural beauty… and crazy adventure sports! We also loved having friends with kids come out to see us. (The COVID virus would soon catch up with New Zealand and lock us down for months, but we didn’t know it at the time…)
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FIORDLAND
Queenstown is the gateway to Fiordland, one of the most beautiful parks anywhere. It is so lush and otherworldly that it was a filming location for many parts of the Lord of the Rings movies. Not surprisingly with the name, the highlight was the dramatic fiords. We sailed in 2 of them, surrounded by towering mountains that plunged directly into the sea.
You get a sense of the scale of the mountains if you notice the kayakers at the bottom (below).
We visited Doubtful Sound, Milford Sound and the little town of Te Anau. Fiordland is remote and quiet, with very few people. It is half the size of Massachusetts, yet it has only 2,000 permanent residents.
Fiordland is so green because it gets a crazy amount of rain – about 23 feet a year, way more rain than the Amazon rainforest! (Although we had nice days somehow...) This means lots of waterfalls.
And lots of rainbows, including some double rainbows. We hadn’t seen many double rainbows before! Here is a neat detail about double rainbows— if you look carefully, you will see that the 2nd rainbow has the opposite color sequence: V.I.B.G.Y.O.R. (vs the R.O.Y. G. B.I.V. order you may have learned in school).
All this rain also means a super mossy dense forest.
The moss was really beautiful if you looked at it up close. Fiordland has 200 different kids of moss!
Scientists say that Fiordland’s wet climate and unusual plants make it one of the best modern day examples of what life was like 200 million years ago in Gondwanaland. It was fun to think of dinosaurs roaming around here!
Both Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound are not technically sounds. They were named sounds a long time ago, but today scientists would say they are fiords. Sounds are created with a river valley is flooded by the sea. Fiords are created when ancient glaciers melt away.
Milford Sound was created by a 6,000 foot tall glacier that slowly bulldozed to the sea, creating a huge valley. The glacier melted, and sea water rushed in. Mitre Peak in Milford Sound is the tallest mountain in the world that comes directly out of the sea floor.
Here is a look around Milford Sound today.
We also saw some fun animals. The Fiordland crested penguin is one of the rarest penguins in the world.
Fur seals like this one can eat their body weight in fish in 1 day! That would be like Hazel eating 50 pounds of hot dogs in a day.
Here, a seal jumps off a rock – almost right on top of Hazel and Ashley!
Dolphins swam right next to our boat a few times. You can even hear them squeaking to each other here (towards the end).
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ADVENTURE SPORTS
Beyond natural beauty, Queenstown’s other claim to fame is as a destination for adventure sports.
It started as the birthplace of bungee jumping in the 1980’s. A guy named AJ Hackett had heard of a tribal practice in Vanuatu where islanders would jump from great heights with vines attached to their legs to show their bravery — and to ensure a good yam harvest! This was briefly practiced by the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club (that is a cool name!), but it really took off when Mr. Hackett developed the big rubber band and the leg harness and started jumping off crazy things like the Eiffel Tower to gain publicity for his new sport. AJ Hackett set up the first commercial bungee jumping site off a bridge outside of Queenstown, and the rest is history.
Since then, people have added wacky activities like Jet Boats, the World’s Longest Swing, a Shark Submarine and so much more! With little kids, we mostly did things on the tame side, but we still had a great time.
Our favorite activity was the Jet Boat. Jet Boats can go 55 mile per hour in as little as 4 inches of water. They can also do crazy 360 degree turns, as we learned here.
We zoomed up the river (which was another beautiful Lord of the Rings filming site) to a secluded spot for lunch.
We then got into inflatable canoes and paddled back down the river. Before we left, our guides did a Maori prayer. It is interesting how much more respected and integrated the Maori are in New Zealand than Native Americans are in the USA. Many signs are in both Maori and English, and almost all places we went to were referred to by both their Maori and English names. The Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa or “Land of the long white cloud.”
Another day, we rode in a shark shaped submarine that can go 50 mph – and then jump out of the water!
We visited a museum of illusions. Here are the kids running around a magical “size changing” room!
We finished off our day at the Ice Bar at the kid friendly time of 5:00 pm. Perfect when you want the bar just to yourself (with non alcoholic drinks for the kids of course!).
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INDOOR SKYDIVING
Our surprise #1 activity in Queenstown - and on the whole trip around the world - was indoor skydiving! It is definitely Hazel’s favorite sport. Luckily for us, the indoor skydiving facility was a 5 minute walk from our AirBNB. And the instructors were awesome. We were hooked!
One really inspiring moment was when we saw a guy in a wheelchair do indoor skydiving. Imagine going from not being able to walk – to being able to fly! It was so cool to see his excitement and happiness.
One of our best homeschool days of the whole year: we did a STEM class at the indoor skydiving facility. We learned about fluid dynamics and the design of a closed loop vertical wind tunnel. We also learned that if you pour water in the tunnel at just the right low airspeed… the water will float and even go up!
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NEW ZEALAND HISTORY
For millions of years, New Zealand was a haven for birds. Mammals – like dogs, horses and people – make up most of the large animals everywhere on the planet, but not here. There were no land mammals on NZ – just 2 teeny species of bats (each about as big as your thumb).
NZ separated from Australia 85 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were still alive. NZ later drifted south and froze over, killing off all the animals. Over time, some birds flew over to these huge isolated islands, and they had babies. With no predators – no cats, snakes or foxes — the birds multiplied, and NZ became a huge country of birds!
NZ also developed the world’s largest collection of flightless birds. Birds don’t need to fly if they don’t need to avoid being eaten! When the Maori came to NZ around 1300, NZ had huge flightless birds called Moas. They could be 12 feet tall and weigh 500 pounds – about twice as much as an ostrich. The Moa were hunted to extinction by the Maori, so we only know about these huge birds through fossils. Today, we have the Weka, Takahe, and Kiwi – the national symbol of NZ.
Humans came to NZ very late. It was the last major landmass to be populated on earth (besides the frozen Arctic and Antarctic). The Aborigines made it to Australia 50,000 years ago, but the Maori only came to NZ around 700 years ago (and Europeans came much later). The Maori are descended from the great Polynesian explorers who settled the islands of the South Pacific in the Polynesian Migration. It took great courage and skill to set off in the vast uncharted Pacific Ocean in a double hulled canoe. The Polynesians spread from Indonesia to the Society Islands and later to Hawaii and New Zealand. (Amazingly, it was also Indonesian explorers who first populated far off Madagascar around 500 AD.)
Pretty much all of the mammals in NZ were brought over by humans. The Maori canoes were not that big, so they did not bring many animals, just a type of dog and a stowaway rat. The British brought pigs, cows, sheep, and more. The sheep have done particularly well. There are about 5x as many sheep as people — 26m vs 5m! Even today, NZ has basically no dangerous animals: no bears, wolves, snakes, crocodiles, poisonous spiders, etc.
Dutch explorer Able Tasman was the first European to find NZ in 1642. But the fierce Maori warriors scared him off, and New Zealand was essentially lost from a European point of view for about 130 years! Think about that. It would be like we got to Mars, and then we lost it for over 100 years.
In 1769, a British explorer named Captain Cook sailed in search of the “Great Southern Land,” a mythical huge continent that was believed to exist between Australia and South America. He didn’t find this place, but he was the first European to survey New Zealand. He also was the first European to find the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii, and more. He used NZ as a base for future voyages, and this led to permanent British settlement in NZ.
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A FEW MORE FACTS
On a map, NZ looks like it is maybe 1 inch from Australia, but they are about 2600 miles apart. That is about the same as Boston to Los Angeles.
New Zealand is big and uncrowded. It is 15x the size of Massachusetts – but with the population of greater Boston.
If this is New Zealand… where is Old Zealand? New England, New York, and New Hampshire were all named by British explorers after places in England (England itself and the towns of York and Hampshire). But where is Zealand? Zealand is a province in the Netherlands, and the Dutch Explorer Abel Tasman and his map makers named New Zealand in honor of that place.
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We loved Queenstown, and it was so much better to experience with friends. Our kids, especially, were so happy to have buddies to play with. We would hear Huey say, “Hey, guys. Look at this!” Small moments can bring so much joy.
Lindsay, Chad, Davy, and Ellery – thank you for coming all this way to have fun with us in NZ!
