When we arrived yesterday, we had to spend some time finding accommodation as it is Easter this weekend and Queenstown is busy.
The hostel we find is called ‘Scallywags’, a few minutes drive from the town centre. It’s run by a welcoming and talkative retired male nurse called Evan. I say welcoming, but when three Taiwanese girls arrive enquiring about a room while he is showing us around, he asks us to wait a moment so that he can tell the girls that he can’t help them, when in fact that he has several rooms available. Actually, he does give them a room and I learn over the next couple of days that he has a slightly prickly sense of humour.
I asked him about a regal rug he had hanging up in the hallway which dated from the reign of whichever king it was a portrait of. He tells me he has been told that it is Edward VII, but I suggest that it is actually George VI, the father of the current queen, and he seems impressed by this. Then later, after we have both had a few glasses of wine, he returns to prickly, responding to my question about which jet boat ride to take by telling me to do my research (i.e. read the leaflets in the hostel) and then ask him a question.
The hostel is also his home, with his office being a desk in the corner of the kitchen. The living room is his living room too. It’s a very comfortable hostel, situated on a slope going up Ben Lomond, and the balcony off the living room looks over Lake Wakatipu. If you can tolerate Evan’s eccentricities, it is a very homely place to stay. Speaking to other guests, I discover that several people stay here for long periods and there are a line of postcards on display in the kitchen from people declaring their fondness for Scallywags and Evan. We only chose to stay in a hostel because of the soaking Mary and I’s tents took the night previous. One thing though, Evan doesn’t seem to believe in computers, so there’s no internet access.
Back to today and Queenstown: we had been considering doing a jet boat ride, i.e. a speed boat powered by jet engines that throws you around rivers. However, the ladies are not all that keen and eventually I sign up for a white water river boarding trip with ‘Mad Dog Adventures’ for this afternoon instead.
Killing time until it’s time to go back to the Mad Dog office, I watch a street performer who calls himself ‘Slim Pickings’. He spends a bit too much time building up his audience, but then he get going with some juggling, a trick with a flaming hat, doing a Houdini with a straight jacket and chains, and finishing off with sword swallowing. There’s an attractive goth girl who waits around to talk to him after he finishes. He is the first street performer I’ve seen to get a groupie. Funnily, he doesn’t say too much to her and seems quite shy.
Finally at lunch time, I go back to the Mad Dog office to get on the bus to the river. We get changed into wet suits at a hut they keep next to the river on the grounds of an old mine, which is now open as an attraction where participants go panning for gold. This seems quite boring compared to what else is available to do in and around Queenstown.
Surfing down grade 2 to 3 rapids on a body board is quite fun, but can be tiring as it is something of an effort to keep going or staying on the board when the water speeds up. It’s more fun to get on a board tied to the back of a jet ski which then throws you around the river until it is the next persons turn, at which point the jet ski does an about face, ejecting you off the board so that you go skidding down the river. After this, it can be quite fun to jump from a ten metre cliff into the cold rapid water, although this is not so much fun if you hold your hands to slow you down on impact with the water, only for your hands to make a sound like slapping a snare drum. It’s actually quite painful, as the blackness in the palm of my hands testified. This didn’t stop me going down a slide on the rocky slopes with my body board which then propelled me across the river. And it didn’t stop me climbing up onto a platform to get on a swing that threw me back into the water, though this was probably a bit of a mistake too, as the swing flipped me over and I hit the surface with the back of my head with a thud. This isn’t quite as funny as the girl who let go of the swing at the lowest point, leaving her sliding and tumbling across the surface with her limbs flailing. I bet you’re not allowed to do this kind of thing in Australia.
On the bus back into town, one of the guys who nervously did a lower cliff dive than mine reveals that he has vertigo, which would explain his nerves somewhat. He is a doctor, probably in his mid forties, and he defines vertigo as the tendency to imagine yourself jumping off when you are crossing a tall bridge. It’s not just me then. However, he then explains that he took up sky diving to try to cure his vertigo. After seventy odd dives, it hasn’t worked. So Far. Given how nervous he was at diving from the cliff earlier, I can’t imagine what he’s like when he’s about to jump out of a plane.
When I get back to the hostel, I have a long chat with Steven, who is my roommate in the male dorm (Evan is quite old fashioned like that) at Scallywags. We have both discovered that on Good Friday, Easter and Christmas, the liquor stores are shut and pubs can only serve alcohol with food. Oddly though, it being Good Friday today, it seems the churches are also closed, or at least Steven couldn’t find one that was open when he went out this morning to catch a service.
After an hour or so chatting to Steven, Evan comes into the dorm unannounced and declares that there is not enough air in the room and opens the windows wider, making the room somewhat brisk. He joins our conversation which has now moved onto the increasingly rules based culture of western and Australasian societies. When I complain about the closing of the pubs today, Evan protests that it is a Christian society and what do I need the alcohol for anyway? A Christian society where the churches don’t open on Good Friday....
At 8:30 in the evening Steven suggests it is time for dinner, so I take the opportunity to leave Evan to it and invite Steven to join the ladies and me for a pizza in town. Many places are closed, but we find a ‘gourmet pizza’ place that is also a bar. As we are waiting for food, we are allowed to order drinks. Though all the tables are full, there seem to be even more people at the bar ‘waiting for a table’. Because of the holiday and the fact that there are so few places open, in the spirit of Christianity the restaurant has put a 20% surcharge on all the prices on the menu. As I have found in Australia, ‘gourmet pizza’ means that that they don’t know how to make a decent margarita pizza. The base is wholemeal dough, and there is not enough tomato sauce on it. It’s only worth a five or six. I had been expecting pizza in Oz and NZ to be the best of my journey so far, but I have been disappointed so far.
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