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Queenstown

New Zealand Travellers

Abel Tasman

Auckland

Cape Reinga

Christchurch

Dunedin

Franz Josef

Greymouth

Kaikoura

Lake Tekapo

Milford Sound

Mount Maunganui

Napier

Nelson

Paihia

Queenstown

Rotorua

Taupo

Wellington

Queenstown is a heavily commercialised tourist town and is situated close to ‘The Remarkables’ mountain range and Lake Wakatipu. The surrounding area is absolutely beautiful, with snow-capped mountains and alpine forest looming over the town. It’s a shame Queenstown has become so commercialised as this has led to it losing lots of its charm. We found the town to be too densely populated with hard-partying, poor-driving tourists. In moderation this is OK but in Queenstown, it felt like everyone you met was a tourist, like all the locals have already left.

Despite this, Queenstown should not be overlooked as the advantage of being so commercialised is the number of activities and advice available to travellers.

 

Things to do

Queenstown offers some of the greatest choice of activities on the South Island.

Activities include:

Skiing and snow-boarding on The Remarkables during winter.


Day trips to Milford Sound and the surrounding area are also quite common.
A few tours operators are:



There is a local burger shop called Fergburger which is popular among locals as having the best burgers in the world. You be the judge but they certainly are some of the most filling burgers we’ve have ever had!

 

Accommodation

We stayed at Pinewood.
We had a bit of trouble here when we tried to check into our room. We pre-booked a self-contained double room a few days earlier but when we arrived we were told no room exists and they tried to put us in a family sized studio which cost twice as much. To make matters worse, the studio we were offered hadn’t even been cleaned, the beds were still messy from the last occupants. It’s only when we told the receptionist we were leaving that she offered us a refurbished double en-suite room for the price we were originally quoted over the phone. We later saw the room we originally booked (the self-contained double room) with occupants, which means they had double booked the room then made us feel like we had made the mistake.

After all this, the room we stayed in was very clean and modern. The kitchen was big and was only shared between 6 rooms so it was very clean. The kitchen also had a large TV and chairs. There was a good view of the mountains from the balcony outside the kitchen (that's where we took the background photo from).

Pinewood is not a hostel but a collection of chalets, some have been converted into dorms while others have been converted into higher quality en-suite rooms and a few apartments.

Overall, the quality of Pinewood was very good and the community feel the place had due to the chalets was a nice change. It’s such a shame that their customer service was so bad. In the end they fixed the problem but it was only after threatening to leave.