After the excitement of Queenstown, we headed to the small, quiet and scenic town of Twizel, a perfect contrast to Queenstown.
The town was in the middle of extremely vast stretches of flat and open land. You could see the horizon almost 360 degrees around, as you could stretch far away into the distance all around you. At a distance, you could see the peaks of Mount Cook and which was one of the places to visit, from Twizel.
We had 1.5 days in Twizel, so we did Mount Cook Village on one of the days and the Lake Tekapo on the other day. Both were great trips, very scenic and full of more natural beauty, which we had got quite used to seeing in New Zealand, by this time. The interesting thing about Twizel was that the small town also had a presence of a Thai restaurant! We enjoyed our meal at Jasmine Restaurant, the Thai place there!
Finishing these trips, we headed back to Christchurch, our last stop before heading out of New Zealand.
We happened to reach Christchurch on a Sunday and had half a day at our disposal. However, other than drive around and have a meal, we could not do much. Most of the shopping places were closed, and even the restaurants were open, only selectively. We used the half day to take a deserved break from constantly being on the move, and relaxed, before our departure out of New Zealand.
Some photos from the last leg of our New Zealand vacation (although some of the water may feel like it’s been coloured using Photoshop, rest assured that unbelieving as these may seem, these ARE the awesome natural colours of the water to see!)…
As you will see from the table below, we did upwards of 2500 km, over our stay in New Zealand, not counting the trip to Milford Sound and back, from Queenstown.
One of the last lovely memories that we had, was to checkout of our Christchurch motel at around 3 am in the morning, to catch a flight. We were asked to simply walk out of the hotel, and shut the door behind us. We took out our rental car, drove out of the motel, on the empty streets of the city, went to the warehouse location for the rental car return (at that early hour, the main location was not open), from where they dropped us back to the airport. The people at the warehouse location at that early hour were professional, polite and friendly.
At that early hour of the day, everything went off smoothly and safely, and that meant so much to us, in terms of the impact that New Zealand and its people had created on us.
We had had an absolutely fantastic vacation, and we were leaving with some of the most amazing memories of our lifetime!
Random Musings 