Queenstown

Now even the most ardent coach potatoes out there will probably have heard of Queenstown. Normally the town is mentioned in a sentence with the words "Adrenaline, Junky, Mecca, Crazy, Wild" or similar. In Queenstown it is possible to:
Jetboat down tiny rivers
Mountain bike
Snowboard
River board
River raft
Helicopter flights
4x4 offroad driving
Sit in an acrobatic plane
Sky dive
Bungy (4 of them!)
Canyon swing
Flying fox
Paraglide
Drink

Queenstown has therefore been one of the places that I have always wanted to visit. Within the first evening I had checked off the "Drink" category on the list. The next morning it was time to rent some mountain bikes and head off for some gnarly single trails. There had been some snow at higher altitudes the night before, but we thought it was only a centimetre or two - nothing serious. When we asked for bikes the assistant looked a bit sceptical and by the time we reached 1000m we realised why and were rapidly re-evaluating our calculations - at least 10cm all around. We climbed up through some 4wd tracks, then a single track through lush forests to finally reach a saddle in the mountains where we got a breathtaking view of Queenstown in the mid afternoon sun, with the snow looking like icing sugar. From there on it was downhill all the way. Single trails are technical and tricky at the best of times, add some serious drop offs to the side and sprinkle a couple of centimetres slippery snow and ice into the mixture and hey presto instant pant wetting. I've never mountain biked in deep snow before and it was crazy, the bike squirms underneath you like a dog about to be thrown into a bath. I fell off just the once and tumbled down a 3m slope to emerge looking like frosty the snowman. My cycling companion must have been all England mountain biking champion because he descended off the mountain at a rate that would have made Newton question the whole gravity thing. 4 hours later we emerged back muddy, snowy and frozen through in Queenstown.