Gibbston Valley Canyoning

The weather today doesn’t look so good. It’s really cloudy and at first, it was not looking like this will change at anytime soon.
Shortly before 10 am I left the cottage to drive to Queenstown.
I want to explore the city today.
I was really lucky to actually find a free place to park my car that is also not costing anything and still quite close to the city center.
So it was only a short walk beside the lake to the city center.
And even the weather got nice now, not as warm as the last couple of days, but warm enough!
Queenstown has a lot to offer. Many restaurants, pubs, shops and even more tour operators.
It is a real challenge for me to stay strong here and don’t start to book tours like hell. There is so much you can do around Queenstown, some many things that I really like to do 🙈😬
I went to buy some fudges for my friends as a little thank you for letting me stay at their cottage for free. Then I was really feeling for a pie, and I found a really good one that was actually not as expensive as expected. So I could really enjoy this one.
Normally I wanted to eat one of the extremely famous Ferg Burgers, but I was just not hungry enough for one of their big burgers, but they looked really good and there are always a lot of people standing in a line, waiting to get their burger 😳

For the afternoon I had booked a Canyoning trip, that I found for a really good price online.
I was actually a little bit worried, that this one might be to easy because it sounded very easy on the website.
We got picked up in the middle of Queenstown. I got teamed up with a family from Switzerland, that now lives in Nelson and a couple from India.
After a short briefing, we left Queenstown to drive to the Gibbston Valley. It took around 35 minutes to drive here. We got our equipment from the guides and started to get changed, I was definitely ending up in the slow group as the other group was leaving at least 15 minutes before us.
When everyone was ready we walked down to a little creek for some safety instructions and a little rope training. And then we started to walk to the canyon. We followed the creek for around 10 minutes and then had to climb down in the canyon.

This canyon is totally different from the other canyons I have been into so far. It is partly very narrow, like 50cm I guess.
It was a lot of climbing this time, sadly no jumps but some really good slides that made up for this.
The water temperature is around 12 degrees we guessed, definitely not too cold so that is nice.

We were moving quite slowly through the canyon as the couple from India were very insecure and also no swimmers, so they needed an extra hand a few times to get through everything, but they were really trying and doing all stuff.
So we were a really good team! 💪🏼
After a big slide the guide, Ross is his name, took the two children and told them to lay down on their back in the water. He then pushed them with the head first under the waterfall, or the former slide, so the water was pushing them down and they came up a few seconds later again. That looked really funny and in the end, everyone was doing it, even the couple from India was doing it as well! Really cool from them, as they can’t swim!

At the end of the trip, we had to abseil down a waterfall. That was not so easy as the rocks were extremely slippy, but we all came down.
Unfortunately, the trip came to an end here. We had around 15 minutes to walk back to the bus, where we got changed into our normal clothes and then drove back to Queenstown. We were supposed to be back in Queenstown at 6 pm but we were running late and were back in Queenstown around 6.45 or so.
Together as a team, we convinced Ross to sell us the photos for a good price. Normally it’s 30$ pp but we got them all together for 30$ so we had to pay only 10$ each, the family and couple counts of coarse as one 😉
Nice!

After that, I rushed back to my car and left Queenstown as I was invited for dinner with Vicky and Jeremy.
So I stopped only fast at the Cottage to hang up my wet stuff and get changed and then followed the road to their house.
They have built themselves a really nice home and the food was sooo good and it was so nice to spend some hours with them.
I gonna miss this place! It’s like a little paradise and their dog Lilly is so lovely and always happy, just like Snoopy! ❤️Read more