Si's Year Out! (Plus Europe! Plus Morocco!): Wanaka & Queenstown...and 'Canyon Swinging'!!!

Wanaka was the next destination which, being on the side of the huge Lake Wanaka and surrounded by snow capped mountains, had picture-postcard views everywhere we looked. After chilling out in the day we visited the quirky Cinema Paradiso, a small cinema with a huge screen and old (very comfortable) sofas for seats. The movie (Die Hard 4) had an intermission where dinner was made, so we spent the second half of the film eating dinner on the sofa in front of a huge cinema screen! It was unreal!

Queenstown was the next destination, and also the place where I'd do one of the most exciting (stupid) things ever, the canyon swing! We drove up to the huge 109m canyon and were secured to a rope that stretched over 100m to the middle of the canyon, where it was suspended. It was just like a big rope swing, except this one had 60m of freefall, accelerated you to 150kph and swung you out in a 200m arc!!! There were lots of ways you could jump and I went for 'The Chair', where you are strapped into a chair and have to rock back on the back legs (just like you were told not to at school) and fall back over the edge and into the canyon! It all seemed like a good idea until I stood at the top of the platform that jutted out over the canyon...and looked down. The guys that were running it kept playing tricks on me, saying that my harness wasn't done up properly, and when it came to the critical point and I thought I was going over they grabbed me and pulled me back and I had to do it all over again. The second time I saw the guy go to grab me and pull me back so I thought I wasn't going over...but he was just pretending and let me go anyway!!! So I went tumbling down this canyon, what a rush, and just as I thought I was gonna go splat ion the rocks, I swung out over the water...one of the best things I've done in my life!!!

Here is the video, I'm only pretending to be scared....honest!

We did some more stuff in Queenstown, we took another gondola up a big hill and luge'd down as fast as we could and went to an underwater viewing platform where we could see ducks diving, huge eels and lots of big trout. One of the best things we did on the way to Queenstown was visit PuzzleWorld, which was full of puzzles, a huge maze that we got lost in for an hour and a room of weird illusions (see pics)!