Holiday Part 4

Greetings gentle readers,

Himself and I are in beautiful Queenstown, and my my, isn't it a tourist town! Lots to tell you about...

Day 9 cont.

We drove from Te Anau to Manapuri and caught another cruise ferry to the Manapuri underground power station. The cruise was very beautiful (as was the whole fjordland region. And the whole South Island, so far!) across Lake Manapuri. It was really breezy, so we stayed inside all the way over without any nasty (pukey) side-effects.
Life on the "other" side of the lake was pretty amazing. There is one road (only) going from Lake Manapuri, into the power station, and linking up with Doubtful Sound (another ex-glacier. Much like an ex-parrot, it's still pining for the fjord!). There are no other roads. The one road does not link up to any other road. No roads. (Seeing the pattern?) The only way to get to this part of the world is by boat/ship/water vessel.
We took the tour bus into the power station. It's apparently pretty unique, because instead of damming rivers to make a hydro-electric power station, instead they've diverted water from the lake (heaps above sea-level, can't remember the exact amount), drilled massive holes so it can "drop" and use it to turn turbines, power generators, etc, at almost-sea level. The water all ends up in Doubtful Sound as it would have anyway and runs out to the sea.
The bus goes into a big tube and spirals down for about 2km to where the power-crating bits are kept. We got to see the last of the 7 generators being re-built - kind-of like rebuilding a car engine, but costing about $9 million. It was kinda cool to see the old and new turbines - these things take some punnishment!
Back to Manapuri town, and we turned up the funky tunes to drive to Queenstown. It got progressively colder and more snowy as we drove north-ish. We saw where the Kingston Flyer train started and ended and travelled around the lake to Queenstown. A few "Honey, please drive with BOTH hands on the wheel" queasy moments, but only due to the massive amounts of rain and fog. We arrived at our motel, settled in, and drove into the main town area for dinner. No-one working in any of the restaurants was an actual kiwi - lots of English, Scottish and Irish accents!
Arriving back at the motel, we found a few interesting things that needed a call to the night receptionist, being:
* The toilet would not flush (v. bad)
* The coat hooks fell off the wall when I tried to hang my coat (bad)
* The kitchen cupboard handle fell off when I opened the cupboard (bad)
* The bathroom door handle was broken (continuing to be bad - pretty annoyed by this point!)
* No reception number provided with the phone (smoke coming out of ears...)
We finally managed to contact a night receptionist (someone working at a totally different place, just taking messages! Grr!) and they sent the on-call dude around to check it out. He tried to tell us that we'd done something to the loo (turning purple and resisting the urge to go totally mental) and that no, he couldn't possibly arrange another room becuase there were nonr available in the same price range that we'd paid for. (So give us an upgrade, dick head!) We'd just have to contact Reception in the morning.
We managed to get my blood pressure back to normal and sleep the sleep of the currently-innocent-but-will-be-guilty-of-something-soon-if-that-dude-comes-back.

Day 10:
We started out early to Kingston to cath the aptry-names Kingston Flyer steam train. The rain & fog were pretty bad, as was the driving of the campervan in front of us, so the trip out of town took almost 45 mins. We arrived with about 10 minutes to spare, which really cut into the planned Geek Photo time.
The trip was quite pleasant - 30 minutes to ... the other end of the line, check out the gift shop, then 30 minutes back to Kingston. Himself talked his way into the engone for the ride back, lots of TG fun.
We came back to the motel and reamed out the reception chicky, who gave us an upgraded room. (Poor girl. She didn't have much choice).
At the moment, we're wandering around the main Queenstown mall, checking stuff out and generally having fun. Tonights is posh dinner on the Earnslaw Steam Boat, and we've booked Jet Boating for tomorrow.

Got to go, I hope we haven't received a parking fine...