We started our drive from Te Anau to Glenorchy via Queenstown. Glenorchy is a small town around 50kms from Queenstown, which became famous for LOTR locations. I never watched LOTR, but I heard that the locations are good and the drive to the place is good. So, we decided to drive till Glenorchy and stay back in Queenstown for night stay.

Though the road had been same as our Day1 till Queenstown, it felt different due to clouds. We wondered how the landscape changes between a sunny day and a cloudy day!

New Zealand has more sheep than people, which was clearly evident 🙂

We loved the fall color trees in Te Anau and wanted to do some fall photography on our road trip looking for good fall color trees. The first one we found was green :D.

We continued our hunt further for different colors.

And yes, we found our yellow tree in a small town in between, where we took our next stop 🙂

We reached our 50km drive along the Lake Wakatipu and the color of the lake changed, which made us realize that the lake was perfectly reflecting the sky color!

We drove past a spiral road on Day1, but we didn’t realize that it was a famous road called “Devil’s staircase”. Queenstown begins after the staircase road, that’s how we remember!

Last time, we took a quick exit from the Airport to Te Anau without entering the town and this was our first glimpse of Queenstown. It was a small town completely surrounded by mountains and Wakatipu Lake.

We drove past the town and continued our drive to reach Glenorchy.

Again, Wakatipu accompanied us almost till Glenorchy. While we drove on the other side of the lake earlier, this time it was on the other bank.

This side of the lake felt more scenic and special, with more mountains. We couldn’t ask for a better drive than this road.

We could spot bigger mountains with snow-tops as we reached Glenorchy.

We reached Glenorchy and then we didn’t understand what to explore there. There were several tours from there that takes to LOTR locations, but we didn’t want to take one. We googled a few points and found a park there which looked very beautiful with a cute red hut and mountains.

The mountains in the backdrop looked amazingly beautiful and every frame looked picture perfect!

After a small lunch break at Glenorchy, we decided to drive till Paradise, where the road completely ends. The drive felt completely worthy and we just loved the mountains. It reminded me of our Kashmir trip in Himalayas!

We reached a bridge after which there was only gravel road and we couldn’t go beyond that point as per our rental car (2WD) policy. The other side of the bridge is geographically closer to Milford Sound and there is a plan to build a tunnel there in the mountains, to reach Milford Sound quickly from Queenstown. We spent some time there and started our return journey back to Queenstown.

And yes, we found a red tree on our return journey. It was relatively easy to spot a yellow tree, but the red tree took some time 🙂

We reached our hotel that’s located a few mins away from the main town, took a small break and started back to the town to explore its night life. Luckily, our hotel provided us with an hourly shuttle to the town, which was more convenient for us than to search and pay for the limited parking spaces.

I expected a bigger town, but it was very small and could be easily explored on foot. Most of the houses are built on mountains and the shops/restaurants are on the ground, making it very compact. I guess they were perfectly utilizing the small space available in between mountains and lake, without disturbing them.

We reached the famous “Fergburger” joint for our dinner. Almost everyone suggested this burger place and there was a queue in front of this place. Determined to taste the burger there, we stood in the queue for around 10mins for our burgers. Yes, the burger was yummy and different from the regular burger I had from McD or other places. I think the main taste difference was due to the quality of the bread they use for the burger, it was very soft! Fergburger initially started as a bakery and then expanded as a burger joint and they should have been specialists in bread for sure 🙂

We relaxed in the evening after a long road trip and got ready for the next big adventurous day! 😉