Friday 9th February – Adrenalin Day! The Shotover Jet and Mountain Karting

A 7am alarm gave us time to drive two minutes to the Shotover jet and make coffee in the car park to prepare ourselves for ‘the World’s most exciting jet boat ride!’

The valley where we boarded the Shotover Jet

We were on the full 815am boat for 20 minutes of high velocity action.  I’m glad I’m not in the video because you look a right spanner with a GoPro strapped to your head I can tell you (we didn’t purchase their photo package!).

That's the general idea of what it's about...

 Video as we sped through the canyon:

Taking a break to catch our breath

It was great fun and didn’t feel that dangerous whilst on board, I had total faith in our pilot, Jeremy.  I was too busy focussing on trying to breathe as we were going so fast that I couldn’t inhale enough – I had to cover my mouth with my hand just to catch a breath. Jeremy took the boat so close to the rocks and tree roots in the river, but that’s the buzz, the closer the better! The best bit was when he spun us 360°.  Most of the time it meant that one side of the boat or the other got sprayed in the face with icy river water!

It was all over far too quickly.  Again, this was a bookme.com reservation. We didn’t pay the $149 per person it is normally and I think I’d be a little disappointed with how quick the ride was over for £75 when there were 14 of us on board (do the maths….!).

Back on dry land, we were in no great rush to get going and as we were still officially checked into our campsite we returned there to use the facilities and Wi-Fi until 10am.  

But a jet-powered boat ride was never going to be enough to keep us adrenalin junkies happy for one day! We continued to shy away from the bungee and all things relating to falling from heights.  On our favourite website (yes, bookme.com) we discovered a cheap alternative way to discover the ski resort of Cardrona - by Mountain Go-Kart.

The route there took us through the charming gold-rush spot of Arrowtown.   

Arrowtown High Street was very American-esque

A quick stroll around and we were back on the road, winding our way through the Crown ranges which offered us more spectacular views of Queenstown, this time without the added feeling of smugness that we had climbed up there ourselves.  Our limbs were aching as a result of yesterday’s efforts!

The winding road up into the Crown Ranges

We especially enjoyed watching the flight coming into Queenstown – I’m not sure I’ve been able to photograph an aircraft at the same height as me coming in on its approach before?!  The pilots have to fly below the height of the mountains on their approach to the landing strip:

Don't panic, planes have to fly around the mountains to reach Queenstown's airstrip, but it does look a little worrying!

Into the small town of Cardrona. Blink and you miss it, but the real draw there is the ski resort.  However, no snow was present today, the winter season doesn’t start until April, but that doesn’t mean the area lies dormant.  We thought it could be accessed by gondola, but it turned out instead that there was a 13km unmade road up to the resort!  Thankfully, we’d given ourselves enough time to navigate this to reach the carting whilst also being able to squeeze in a coffee and a bite to eat first.  

Imagine this in winter, covered in snow...

We were kitted out with overalls, helmets, goggles and the appropriately sized cart for our height.  We had brought the GoPro along for the second time today, it is really coming in handy on this trip and not just for diving for a change! We had two hours and three different karting runs to explore.  karting isn’t the only activity available at this time of year in the resort – there were plenty of other people hiking or mountain biking as well.

We started off on the practise run as we had been advised.  The karts could also be described as lightweight trikes.  They are unpowered, with separate brakes for the left and right rear wheel, instead of front and back like on a bicycle.  The brakes were super-sensitive… probably a good thing, but you had to use them sparingly or they just sent you into a skid! A successful first run gave us the confidence to go for the middle run which turned out to be our favourite.  This was a continuous series of corners back and forth on the steepest section of the mountain. 

Our favourite track... the winding middle run

There were the added pitfalls of random rocks and deep ruts in the surface to increase the thrill (we had signed wavers taking all responsibility for our soon-to-be broken bodies!). My over-confidence following the first run let me down.  I managed to crash three times, once only seconds after the last disaster.  There was so much loose debris on the track I kept going into an uncontrollable skid into the barriers.  Thank goodness I was wearing the GoPro to capture it all for posterity!

We practised a couple more times, with less crashes for me, before we tried out the third run which was a much longer, scenic route around a completely different side of the mountain, but still with some reasonably fast and twisting corners.  We preferred the thrill of the middle run though and Simon asked if he could do a run without me there to slow him down. The cheek!  We agreed to give me a head-start because chances were he would then get to do a sneaky overtake at some stage which he would enjoy and then get even more kudos for winning.  When I arrived at the bottom of the run having not been passed I knew that something must be wrong.  I had missed Simon managing to roll his kart!  Luckily, we had swapped over responsibility of the GoPro, so I am able to share this with you now.....

He got away with minimal damage to the kart, a slight graze to one hand and an overall covered in dust.  I know what you’re thinking – don’t worry, the GoPro was fine…

We must have done about ten runs in total within our two-hour limit.  It was great fun.  Comparing it to the luge that we did in Rotorua we agreed that this was riskier.  There was more room for things to go wrong even though we didn’t have the added obstacle of other people this time.

Grabbing a coffee, we headed back down the mountain, me trying to remember I was no longer in a kart so shouldn’t really have been sliding out around the corners.  We wanted to save ourselves a bit of cash by avoiding another night’s stay in pricey Queenstown, so we drove about 45 minutes further south to the small town of Kingston where we got a spot in a very quirky little campsite.  We had plenty of GoPro videos to watch that night to re-live our adventurous day.