A Great 48 Hours in the South Island

The South Island is known as New Zealand's more dramatic island. The North Island has a lot going for it (including the best city, ahem, Wellington and supposedly the best one-day hike on the volcanos known by Lord of the Rings fans as Mordor). But as you'll see in the pictures below (spread over four posts), the SI has some pretty great stuff.

There's no way to do it all in one two-day visit, or probably even a two-month visit. We didn't do the glaciers, the sea and bird life, or the kayaking through the beautiful beaches, to name just a few things. But we did do a lot, and we were in the key skiing area without doing any skiing. If you're ever in New Zealand for 48 hours, here's a great way to do it.

Day 1:

• Leave Wellington at 10:30. Enjoy hassle-free check in: no ID check, no metal detector(!), no nothing. Just check in at the e-ticket kiosk, and you're off!
  
• Land at noon. Check into hotel. Enjoy views (see pics below).
  
• Head out to Gibbston Valley Winery about 20 minutes out of town. Good food. Great 2003 Pinot Noir.
  
• Spend rest of day walking around Queenstown.
• Eat dinner, head to casino for blackjack. Win NZ$275.

Day 2:

• Hop on a small plane over the Alps to Milford Sound.
  
• You can take a bus, but it's just as expensive, it takes 6 hours each way, and you miss the incredible sights (see pics below). Slightly nerve-wracking, but well worth it. The flight-cruise-flight package costs NZ$350. I thought that might be too much for a 4-hour trip, but it is by far one of the best values of anything I've ever done. The flight alone was worth the price. Highly, highly recommended.

• Enjoy a 1.5 hour cruise through Milford Sound. From sea level, it's almost more awe-inspring than the view from the air. (Pics below.)
  
• The key to the whole trip was that we had amazing weather. All the locals were saying we were very lucky, because the sunshine was unrelenting in all three of Queenstown, the flight over, and the Sound itself. I guess that's very rare. Of course, the skiers haven't had good snow, but, again, we weren't skiing.
  

• Fly back after the cruise on a different route.
• Our pilot was great--she was very skillful, informative, etc. We flew Air Fiordland, which I'd definitely recommend. However, the planes did seem a little, um, Wright Bros.-era. Combine that with landing on the grass runway back at Queenstown, and it had a fairly rustic feel to it. A company called Real Journeys seemed to have newer planes (at least they had two propellers).

• Return to hotel by 2:30. Enjoy views on balcony.
• Head 15 minutes north of town to the Shotover Jetboat. It's basically a roller coaster on a river, complete with 360-degree spins at breakneck speed and near-misses with the canyon walls. A blast.
• Take gondola up to the seemingly floating mountain chalet behind Queenstown. Enjoy beer and great views of sunset (see pics below).
• Eat dinner, head back to casino. Lose about $200 of last night's winnings at first, then hang tough and fight back to even, and then on up to another NZ$155 in the black, for a grand total of $430 in winnings for two evenings. Conveniently, this is just about the amount of plane ticket.

Day 3:

• Enjoy breakfast. Remark on the serendipity of having yet another perfectly sunny, 60-degree day in the middle of winter in the snow-covered Alps.
• Head to Millbrook in Arrowtown. Play 9 holes of golf in great weather, surrounded by towering mountains. Enjoy lunch.
  
• Depart at 4:15. Enjoy drinks outdoors during the Friday nightlife in Wellington.
  

Like I said, this was a great trip. It's up there with the best I've seen anywhere else. Hopefully the pictures below will give some indication of what we saw. But, as usual, pictures can't really do it justice.

(Remember, if you click on the picture, you'll get a bigger version on its own page. Then if you click again [at least if you're using Mozilla Firefox as your browser], you'll get a bigger picture within that window.)