Not a bad sight to wake up to! This is the view from our apartment's balcony of Lake Wakatipu (which Queenstown is plonked on) and the Remarkables mountain range.

We started the final day of the year by wandering along the lake into town, and through the Queenstown Gardens.

The weather was absolutely perfect and the town's beach on the lake was filling up fast with people eager to see in the new year red and in pain - myself included.

But there was no time to work on our sunburn, and we instead headed for the gondola.

Queenstown, New Zealand :)

At the top of the gondola is a restaurant, cafes, and a myriad of souvenir shops. And there's this - the Luge, where you hoon down the side of a hill in these little carts.

Rules is rules.

Videos here and here of the fun. What they don't show is when Kristina almost ran over a two-year-old that ran out onto the track to chase his balloon, and Jared almost ran over somebody's cell phone hahaha!

Later on things were heating up in town, not least of all on the beach hehe.

By now the drinking had well and truly started, and we wandered back to the apartment for a bit more and a feed.

Boozed up and food'ed up we stumbled back into town with the usual ad-hoc stops along the way.

Unless you're a girl of course.

Town, as expected, was chaos, so we found ourselves a spot and awaited the fireworks and cheering and hugging and inappropriate groping.

Happy New Year all :)

How was your head this morning? We were all still half-drunk, so we went and hired some jet skis hahaha!

I've never been on one of these before so I needed a bit of time to figure out how they handle, but once I had that down I screwed the hell out of it. Good times!

Then it was time for another first. Kristina threw herself off a large steep hill while strapped to a complete stranger for a 10-minute paraglide back to Earth. She's not the greatest fan of heights, so when the fella at the controls started doing loops and twirls she probably shit herself a bit but when you're in the adventure capital of the world you gotta try these things.

Still in one piece. Videos here and here.

Later on we all jumped in the cars for another convoy in to the mountains, and stopped off at the gorgeous and historic Cardrona Hotel for a quick drink.

Middle of nowhere, New Zealand :)

We finished the night over in Wanaka, also plonked on an awesome lake like Queenstown and about an hour's hoon away. Shit I come from a beautiful country!

Welcome to Arrowtown, a cute historic gold mining town not far outside of Queenstown. Arrowtown sprang up in 1860 following the discovery of gold in the adjacent Arrow River. During the high point of the gold rush the population of Arrowtown rose to over 7,000.

Today the town is home to around 2,000 and retains more than 60 of its original wooden and stone buildings. Very cool wee spot to kill a couple hours.

From Arrowtown we stopped off in Cromwell, which sits at the junction of the Clutha and Kawarau Rivers. In 1862 gold was discovered here, and once the word got out there was an influx of several thousand miners to the area. As gold ran out, Cromwell became the service centre for an extensive farming and stone fruit growing area. In the early 1990s, the construction of the Clyde Dam further down the Clutha River meant the junction of the two rivers in Cromwell had to be flooded (thus creating Lake Dunstan) along with the old town centre where I've marked in red on that map.

Then it was off to the races at Omakau. By the end of the day I had made about $4 profit, and Kristina had broken even hehe.

Tonight is our last in Queenstown before we continue south tomorrow.