boing

Well...

You can't come all this way and not.
Although Nicky would beg to differ as she took this from the viewing platform.
We're in Queenstown for a couple of days so she'll have plenty of chance to change her mind.

It's not a great deal different to jumping off a 10m board at a swimming pool; the standard it-looks-a-lot-higher-than-it-is principle applies so that it just looks like you're standing over A Very High Drop, albeit safely tethered and with no risk of misjudging your rotation and slamming balls-first into a swimming pool at 10m/s in this case which is always a risk on the 10m board at a swimming pool. My left eye was a little bit bloodshot for a few minutes afterwards but I'd definitely recommend it. Pity it's so brief and such a rip-off though it's cheaper and far more pretty to dangle from an old railwayish bridge over a river than from a crane over a music festival car park. The bigger 134m version is technically better value at less money per second of fall... hmmm...

***

Last night's accommodation (Te Wanaka lodge, Wanaka) was as pleasant as it looked like it was going to be last night. Very friendly and helpful people who loaded us up with vouchers and directions to barbers and recommended routes southwards over a pleasant breakfast in a nice room with pretty crockery. Popped to Arrowtown on the way to Queenstown this afternoon; pretty enough but more time was spent wandering around the river rather than poking at the museum-based things. We'd accidentally not taken the recommended mountain pass route from Wanaka to Queenstown with the result that we'd passed the Kawarau Bridge bouncy-dangling site on the way in so we popped back to that then continued into Queenstown; a little sprawling and smoggy but with a nice combination of out-of-season quietness and probably-never-really-that-quiet liveliness and all viewed from a nice little room with views of lots of mountains and lake and (at night) the sinister apparently-floating gondola station. I'll have to see if it can be walked up to and ridden down tomorrow in order to walk off some off the pizza.