beautiful queenstown

We've just spent a wonderful 4 days in Queenstown, N.Z. attending Jeff's annual GMN conference. We'd been there before about 10 years ago but had forgotten just how gorgeous the scenery is.

This was the view of Lake Wakatipu we had from our hotel room! (Oh how I love the Stitch feature on my Canon Ixus. Now my panoramas actually join up!)

And this is how it looked at sunset.

The day of the actual conference, while the men spent the day indoors, the ladies had a wonderful time exploring. Many NZ artists have made the area around Queenstown their home, and we visited several studios.

We made a short stop in charming Arrowtown with its tiny miners' cottages...

and for lunch we stopped at Amisfield Winery and had what turned out to be the best meal of the trip - which is really saying something as we wined and dined at some pretty amazing restaurants. We had the "Trust the Chef" menu which included...

the best pork belly I've ever tasted

and equally delicious salmon with salsa verde. I've promised Jeff we'll come back and have a meal here next time we come over.

The next day was totally action-packed. We started off with a gondola ride and had several goes on the luge, where we pretended to be Formula 1 drivers. No photos of it but we bought the dvd of this ...

...a thrilling ride on a jet-boat on the Shotover River. Brilliant! I wish there was a way of posting the video - we are all laughing and screaming our heads off like we are on a ride at Disneyland.

Next we stopped for a delicious lunch in the autumn sunshine at Mt.Difficulty Winery and enjoyed this view...


Lunch finished at 3.30, then we visited another of the local wineries before heading back to Queenstown to enjoy some free time before meeting at 6 for dinner at Gantley's Restaurant.

Whew, now I need to diet to lose the 20 kilos I gained from 4 days of non-stop eating and drinking.

Thanks to the organisers Thora and Vicky our time in Queenstown was simply fantastic and we've vowed to return soon.