Queenstown Travel Guide
Travel guide to Queenstown, New Zealand with comprehensive information about events, shopping, and major Queenstown sporting events to help you enjoy your visit more.
Queenstown Overview
The adventure sports paradise of Queenstown is deservedly one of New Zealand's most popular destinations. The city looks out over the beautiful Lake Wakatipu, and is surrounded by the majestic beauty of the Southern Alps. Although it has been famous as a skiing destination for many years, Queenstown has recently become even more popular as the centre of a new tourist industry that capitalises on the incredible success of Peter Jackson's film trilogy, Lord of the Rings.
The area is an absolute must see on a round the world holiday, or just as a stop off on a tour around New Zealand, and a few days in the quiet mountains of this most perfect part of South Island is an ideal counterpoint to time spent in one of the southern hemisphere's livelier places like Sydney or Melbourne in Australia.
You can get cheap flights to Queenstown in New Zealand, and one of the best ways to see the area is by renting a motor home and touring extensively at your own pace, which offers a the chance to make every day of your holiday your own.
Top Queenstown Attractions
If you have even the slightest interest in the adventures of Frodo the hobbit and Gandalf, then a trip to the wilderness region of South Island is an absolute must. Fans will soon find that within a comparatively short distance of Queenstown, you can visit dozens of locations from the movies, including The Misty Mountains, Lothlorien and Isengard, which are known locally as Skippers Canyon, Paradise and Macetown.
Another great place within easy reach of Queenstown is Fjordland, where you can cruise through the breathtaking cliffs and forests that resemble those of Norway, and are sacred to the indigenous Maori people for whom the natural beauty of the area is a spiritual backdrop to their myths of creation.
Shopping in Queenstown
Queenstown is not well known for being a great destination for shoppers, as the majority of the shops in the town tend to focus on selling sports goods and skiing equipment. There are regular markets in the town where people sell their slightly used equipment rather than take it home, and these tend to provide good opportunities to save money.
Popular souvenirs of a visit to Queenstown include paintings, and local crafts - particularly those made by the Maoris, which include some great wooden statuary for the home.
Queenstown Sporting Events
Not for nothing is Queenstown known as the adventure sports capital of the world. Aside from the skiing and snow boarding - which are both first class, Queenstown offers visitors the chance to try all manner of other zany sports including bungee jumping, bridge swinging and even zorbing.
In addition to the fun activities on offer in Queenstown, other popular sports that you can try include mountain biking, rock climbing, BASE jumping, abseiling, hiking, and white water rafting, making the city one of the best outdoor action centres in the whole world.
