Arrowtown

I'd said to Pedro if he wanted a lift to Queenstown he could continue with me after I left Jane's, he was very pleased with this so I told him to get the bus to Cashmere Thursday morning. I wanted to visit the Moeraki boulders on the way 3.5h south of Christchurch, and wanted to avoid high tide at 3pm that day but the boulders were still accessible so it wasn't a problem.
The Moeraki boulders are quite strange, they are perfectly round large stones on the shoreline that have become exposed from the short cliff bank, one was still partially encased with softer rock. Pedro bought lunch again for gratitude for the ride. It was another 3 hours to Queenstown, I dropped Pedro at Frankton and then doubled back to Arrowtown.

Arrowstown is pretty, there were swarms of Chinese tourists. Most of the shops sold trinkets and expensive sweaters.

Arrowtown is all about gold mining which attracted lots of Chinese, these are some of their huts, the town has a nice sign posted walk about it's gold mining past.

The road from Arrowtown goes to Arthur's Point which connects to Queenstown, I went there as it was a nicer drive than the Frankton road and quieter and you get the views to Coronet peak. I stopped at Arthurs point to have a walk to the river, no one was on the walk and it smelled delicious, the walk comes out at a point in the river where there is a tunnel made by some crazed gold miners, who made a tunnel at great expense in a effort to divert the river so they could access the river bed better for gold, but most of the gold had gone anyway so it was a bit of a folly.

I enjoyed the river for a bit and watched the jet boats go up and down and then stop next to the tunnel for the operator to tell the tour what the tunnel was about. To be honest I'd rather the boats piss off as that part of the river would be a nice place to swim and play in the water as there was a shallow beach area, plus the boat companies had another river they used to race about on too, but Queenstown can't make money from people playing in the water by themselves so they have to commercialise it and squeeze every drop of money the can out of the surroundings.

It was a hot day, on the way to Te Anau I picked up Tim another hitchhiker, he was a local who had finished a day walk and only needed to go 10 mins back down the road. He lived down the road to the right in the picture overlooking the colbolt blue lake, what a place to live, lucky guy. Cuthbert was happy to give him a lift.