The first photo is of the Motel in which we spent a couple of nights and the view of the lake in front of the motel.
The town of Te Anau is really a small town with a few shops and restaurants to accommodate the tourists, and of course plenty of souvenir shops.
One of the things we had noticed as a significant difference between Australia and New Zealand is that in New Zealand there is hunting, actually there is quite a lot of access to big game hunting of animals that had been imported and managed going back to the early 1800’s. We noticed that in most restaurants that venison was a main feature on the menu. Not only is there wild versions of deer and other large game animals, but there is a significant amount of high fence deer ranching. Here are just a few of what we saw. 
There were plenty of sheep ranches as well.
You can see that there was quite a variety in the landscape
In case you didn’t notice the wind turbine I mentioned a couple of posts ago, here is another look at them with blue sky behind them.
The drive to Queens Town took us beside this lake. The water was so blue that it almost looks like the photos have been photo shopped. Actually it was that blue.
Here is a picture of the car that Karen and I have used while in New Zealand.
This photo shows the scenic drive that we will have getting to Queens Town. Actually we are at the southeastern corner of this huge lake and Queens Town is at the North West corner well out of sight.
These next three photos were taken from the elevator lobby of the hotel in which we are staying in Queens Town.
This big old boat is for tours out on the lake.
One of the first things we wanted to do was to walk a while so we headed to the Botanical Garden just beyond and on the other side of the bay from the down town. This was not a huge botanical garden, but it had plenty of trails and lots of really nice specimens.
We walked down to the beach to look at some nice old boats tied up at the dock.
Remember is was spring while we were there (mid October) and the flowers and flowering trees were in full bloom.
Since it is right on the lake it has a night trail all the way around the peninsula on which it was built.
At the far end of the peninsula we could look across the bay and see the hotel in which we were staying.
This view of the lake is looking back toward the direction from which we had come earlier in the day.
We sat on a bench in the sun and looked over the lake for quite a while, watching this tour boat leave, saw some people on segways, sailboats and headed on to the west side of the gardens.
More spring flowers the trail around on the west side was a bit more shady and had nice views of some to the mountains in the distance.
There were other features of the gardens like tennis courts and this lawn bowling court.
Some of the trees were really big.
There was a nice pond with a bridge that almost looks like a watercolor painting except for the old dude in the picture.
We continued to walk through the gardens and then over to the down town areas around the bay.
Queens Town is a resort community with lots of shopping, waterfront restaurants, docks for boating and open parkways. We got fish and chips and sat on a bench on the board walk near the water looking out over the bay toward the botanical gardens with the mountains in the background.
As the sun started to go down we headed back to the car past this gazebo structure and looked back the buildings down town
We got back to our room while that was still some sun light shining on the mountains across the lake.
The trees in the middle of the picture above is of the botanical garden.
We propped our feet on the window sill and watch the evening come.
In the morning we had hoped for a nice sun rise, but there was a lot of cloud cover. The pictures were interesting anyway.
We had breakfast and headed out to the airport for our flight back to Sydney. All in all our New Zealand side trip was a roaring success. It is a beautiful country.
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