I can't count how many times we were told by people around NZ that we'd love Queenstown- it's probably the most prominent tourist center in the south island. For many, its their favorite part of the country, for some I think its the only place they visit. Queenstown reminds us of any ski resort village in Canada, but with more Gucci stores and just thriving with tourists. The local airport brings in jetloads of fresh tourists daily, and all the young travelers flock to Queenstown to work and party, live in overcrowded super-hostels, jump out of planes, bungy, jetboat, etc.
Queenstown is in a beautiful setting on lake Wakatipu with the Remarkables mountain range as the backdrop, but this town is all about commercial tourism.
To be honest, although we loved the areas surrounding, we just aren't big fans of QT. We are in NZ for a long time and have to stretch out our funds, plus we're just not into the manufactured adventure-tainment- theres always a pricetag, and you can easily drop thousands in a couple days. We were more than happy to do our usual hikes into scenic viewpoints and explore, and of course every 30 mins we'd hear screams from the sky above, and a few seconds later 3 parachutes would open up. You can always hear the jetboats in the river valleys, and any campsite near town is always heaving with people.
We did find a campsite off the beaten path that was just beautiful, Moke Lake. Not a long way from town, but a long gravel road to get in. It was set between the hills and the lake was swimmably warm.
We did the walk up Queenstown hill for an awesome view. The Bendigo gold ruins were very cool, it looked like the wild west,very dry and dusty hills, with ruins of entire towns. There's so much in Bendigo you could spend days there if you were inerested in the history.
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