The Journey: April 2016

2016-04-25
Spent most of the time today in the car as we had to drive all the way from Omarama to Motueka. We had a stop at Lake Pukaki Visitor Centre for the Mt. Cook Alpine Salmons, $30 for 5 people. People said that the salmons here are the best in the South Island so we didn't even tried to save money on this. As expected, it was really nice! For those who will come to New Zealand, I highly recommend this, it's perfect.

We also passed by Lake Tekapo on the way to Christchurch, where we had a stop at Hagley Park. It wasn't nice at all in Hagley Park, there were too much green there. Some of the maple trees weren't even red but fully green. But still, the atmosphere here were kind of warming, family and friends walking around and enjoying themselves.

We left Hagley Park after 20 minutes to a Chinese restaurant serving Sichuan dishes, it's called Ancestral Restaurant or 老地方. The dishes there are not cheap but we ordered 4 dishes which summed up to $74 for 5 of us. The dishes were big, enough for us to be full until we got home at 11pm after dropping two travel mates. We took off from Christchurch at around 4.30pm.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this mini road-trip very much and I pretty much got an idea where to go for my longer road-trip in few months time. Now what I had to do is save some more money.

Simple budget breakfast

Omarama Dunstan Downs Backpackers

We stopped at the side of highway for the view of the reflective lake along the highway.

Lake Pukaki

We bought the salmons inside of this visitor centre

Just a statue

Sweet life...

Lake Tekapo

Along Lake Tekapo

Maple Border in Christchurch

Lunch at Ancestral Restaurant.

Woke up at 6.30am for the sunrise in Lake Matheson. This time we aren't that disappointed as the view are ok, but there are seriously too many people there. The whole viewpoint deck are all occupied with tripod and DSLRs. With my D3300 and kit lens, I felt kinda inferior there haha. We went to search for the blue mushrooms growing along the track after some photos. Surprisingly we actually managed to find two of them, they are not big, but we are satisfied.

After that we continued our journey all the way to Arrowtown for the legendary autumn view. Witnessed the stunning view of Lake Hawea and Lake Wanaka, the hills here are so green and the water is so clear and blue that I couldn't believe my own eyes, it's like the view had been photoshoped. Lol. We weren't that satisfied with this Arrowtown trip. The autumn view are nice, but it's not as nice as we expected though. Some of the leaves on the trees were still green at the moment. As the Autumn Festival is ongoing in Arrowtown from 21-25 April, there were a really big crowd around the town centre. Tomorrow is ANZAC day, which is public holiday, that's why. But still, we enjoyed this trip a lot. This is the main destination of our whole road-trip honestly haha.

Our next destination was Queenstown, which is around 30 minutes drive from Arrowtown. People always told me how nice this city is. Today I finally had the chance to witness the beauty of this city by myself. It was by far the prettiest city I've ever been to. Plus it's autumn now, the maple leaves were red in colour, which made the whole street alive. People are taking pictures everywhere. There were so many Chinese here you can see them everywhere. In Queenstown, you can't save money on food. The most famous attractions here for many people are the food. The burgers, ice-cream and hot chocolate. I didn't had the chance to taste the hot chocolate but we managed to get the Fergburger and the Mrs. Ferg gelato ice-cream. Spent around $20 but it's worth it. It's a small city with a large number of population, so crowded.

At 6.45pm we started our journey to our backpackers hostel in Omarama since we were not able to book the accommodations in Lake Tekapo and Geraldine. Damn public holiday! It's $30 here but the facilities are OK, except that there are no telephone service here and we have to buy Wi-Fi from the office for $1 per 100MB. It's freaking windy here that if you didn't stand still you could be moved by the wind, Freaking exciting haha.