We struggled to get going and find someone to pick us up, since there was almost no traffic going through tiny Franz Josef at 12:30 in the afternoon. After maybe 25 minutes someone finally picked us up--a nice Canadian dude by the name of Mike.
Mike was also backpacking around, but just for 3 weeks, so he enjoyed spontaneously stopping at nice viewpoints which, of course, we appreciated. Here are some of the sights we saw during our drive south:
Basically it was another stunning drive along the West Coast. Which was starting to look like the theme of our trip.
Mike dropped us off in Wanaka, a lovely town near an even lovelier lake, where we wanted to stop purely for the heck of it. We had more than a month to be in the Queenstown area, and absolutely no rush to get down there, so why not? Unfortunately it was raining the whole day, and we arrived later than expected, so instead of exploring and doing outdoorsy things we decided to splurge on seeing a movie. Turns out this was the best thing we could've done--it's the coolest movie theater I've ever been to! Here's how it looked:
We watched the movie Wild, completely relating to Cheryl Strayed's struggle with her heavy backpack, as well as her hitchhiking adventures. She in fact had it way worse, making our own worries all the more manageable.
The next morning we got going a little earlier, determined to not wait so long to find a ride. And, lo and behold, someone picked us up in a matter of minutes. It was a nice Irish paraglider who would drop us off just outside of town. He told us all about a paragliding event that was supposed to be going on, but was moved to a different location due to the weather. He modestly said he was "only" participating in the fun league, not the competitive league.
He dropped us off in a great location to find another ride. Sure enough, just a couple minutes later we were picked up by a middle-aged Kiwi mother, who was driving a far nicer car than what we were used to. She's a resident of Queenstown and gave us some tips as we drove through town, and told us how her kids often hitchhiked to get places. Once again we were stunned by how commonplace hitchhiking is. I always feel like I'm breaking some sort of rules when we hitchhike, but in fact it's completely normal here.
She dropped us off right at our hostel, and thus began our adventures in Queenstown.
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