Whilst in New Zealand another interesting day was spent in Arrowtown. This is an historic gold mining town on the banks of the Arrow River. We drove there from Queenstown via the Shotover Gorge. There are many preserved buildings there that had been used by European and Chinese immigrants dating from gold mining days. The Lakes District Museum is situated in Arrowtown.
We had a really enjoyable time walking around and taking photos which I will of course include in this post. While there we visited an English style pub and Phil sampled one of the beers they had on offer and quite enjoyed it. We had an enjoyable lunch and then more walking. The weather in this part of New Zealand was quite cold, it being autumn (one day it was 4ºC min, 8ºC max), so Phil found a store in Arrowtown where they sold genuine New Zealand type clothing and bought himself a pure wool jumper that had been treated with sheep's wool to keep it virtually waterproof. He wore it for many years until it finally began to fall apart and it had to go a few years back. We were supposed to treat it each year with sheep's wool but of course we never did, but had it drycleaned, which meant it would have lost its waterproofing quality anyway.
Buckingham Street is Arrowtown's main thoroughfare and where the shops are. The first photo I stole from Wikipedia but the rest are all our own snaps taken in 1983. You will see the pictures much better if you take time to enlarge them as they show so much more details.
As we wandered around we came across three lovely old churches. The first one shown here was quite magnificent:
We walked even further and after climbing a hill we were able to look down on the township itself.
We then walked further still and right out the back of the town we found this delightful area which was so peaceful and quiet. The colours were truly magnificent.
Phil and I stayed there for quite a while just letting the silence and beauty wash over us before heading back to the township and then back to our motel. This was the perfect ending of what had been quite a magical day.
