More pictures of Queenstown, Milford Sound, Taieri Gorge and Mountains

Kind of scrambled my pictures, but am still in the painful learning stages of posting blog pictures.....here is just a little tidbit that I bet most of you don't know......New Zealand had it's auspicious start from the gold rush of the 1860's!! Had no idea they even had a gold rush but apparently it was second only to the Klondike and many ancestors of NZ's millionaires today got their start panning for gold!! ....... in fact, it was a European miner who made the comment that the site of what is now Queenstown, because of all the gold that flowed, was a "town fit for a queen" and the name stuck .... how cool is that for history!! The country is barely 150 years old ..... took the city bus to the tiny old mining town of Arrowtown to explore the roots of that goldrush......they still have remnants of the stone miners shacks and a whole section where the Chinese contingent lived.....yes, apparently almost 20% of the miners were from China.....they all came to make their fortune with the idea that they would move back to China, rich as rain, but nature intervened and most married local women or had their Chinese wives join them here and staying on, giving New Zealand it's cultural mix......I think it is rather of interest that Queenstown is known as the adventure capital of NZ....their ancestors were those crazy adventurous gold miners!!