I was a little bored and a lot awake at the wrong end of the day, so I decided to go to Fiji as a bit of a distraction. It's a tough old life, eh.
Sitting around the comfy television room, comfier still for the fact the TV wasn't switched on, in the friendly YHA hostel in Christchurch at 5 O'clock one morning, and having just that very hour countered an unfortunate nocturnal habit thanks to a tactical dose of sleep and red wine the night before, I was ambushed by a squeaky Austrian friend of mine called Lisa. She's my current co-traveler and she is very squeaky indeed, although it's actually somewhat charming even if passing dogs do stampede into the windows.
I had not even thought about going anywhere else yet and was stuck in a morose spiral of thought concerning my funds, or rather the enormous gaping vacuum in the universe where money belonging to me had no right not being, and so was perhaps of a suggestible nature, which Lisa ruthlessly exploited to her own purposes, bless her. I was also reflecting on the habit people back in England have of telling me how dashed hot the summer is, often as I returned from a New Zealand winter snowstorm, and the thought of a tropical island seemed appealing somehow. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there was something about the way I only felt 60 percent of my body 40 percent of the time that was becoming a little tiresome.
And so I became a woolly-haired (and -minded) little lamby stooge, and happily so. In the space of 3 minutes spent listening to Lisa's plan for the Fijian islands and her lament that she would be traveling alone, I elected to do my social duty and keep the poor wee lass company during her trip, also to sit around on beaches in 33-degree sunshine. A day or two later I heard myself also agreeing to board a bus for 9 hours and go down to Queenstown with her, to while away the week before setting off into the tropical Pacific in the world capital of extreme sport. It is such a tough life I lead, I tell you.
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I'm here now, I made it and I do believe I'll be coming back when the Fiji trip is all over - there is just so much to do you see, even for those like me who are too cowardly to bungy jump or do a canyon swing. If you have not heard of it before then a canyon swing is a device designed by the forces of darkness to scare you into the icy clutches of an early death, or at least into the icy clutches of new underwear and a strong deodorant. It is a truly massive reinvention of the regular playground swing with the novel new dimension of sharp pointy rocks below and all around you, and a 300-metre arc of motion/terror as you whistle witless, jettisoning weight through your bladder, into a heartless ravine.
There is, as you may have guessed, no squishy pink tarmac.
It will propel you, if you have abandoned all sense and agreed to do one, at a very terminal velocity straight off the edge of a cliff while attached to a glorified bit of string, which is, it almost goes without saying, tied to a point on a bridge some 75 metres away by sadistic cackling demons in the shape of the swing staff and your friends. I do not believe I will be having a go just yet.
I've done a couple more sedate things; a cruise on Milford Sound, hangliding from Coronet peak, jet-boating; and have plenty left to devour but less than one day left here on this visit, which is probably for the best considering the price of all this stuff. A canyon swing is $150, not that I'll be doing one until I manufacturer some stronger intestines, hangliding cost me $180, the Milford Sound trip was $109 although they did thoughtfully throw in another 9 hours of coach travel free of charge - hooray - and if I recall correctly a half-hour or so on a jet boat raided my wallet for $89.
And that is the cheaper stuff; a skydive from 15,000 feet will remove $400 of your lovingly forged folding stuff, and a trip in the stunt plane, the thing I really want to do for the sake of not having to do any dieting for a month 
is going to be about $300 or thereabouts. Technically it is a lot more dangerous and even more `extreme` (as the kids say these days) than canyon swinging or bungy jumping, but has a key ingredient to make sure that I can do it; once I'm strapped in it is completely out of my control. I cannot escape or chicken out even if I wanted to. This is the kind of terror I have a chance of knowing.
As far as boredom goes you'll have to go somewhere else to find it, at least for the first few months of your stay, as Queenstown is home to more activities, adventures and sports than anywhere else on Earth. Among the ways to pass your days, and this is just a tiny list of the things a weak little brain like mine can retain, are such things as, of course, bungy jumping, skydiving, canyon swinging, hangliding and jet-boating, but bear in mind that every one of these can be done in about a half-dozen different places with, for example, different heights and locations to bungy jump, different companies with varying river routes to jet-boat along, and with skydiving there is a neat little cliche regarding the possibilities that pretty much says it all.
Also there are all the Winter sports too numerous to list but they can all be done here, from snowmobiling to ice skating, and apart from the daily adventure tourism activities there are also the possibilities from a handful of golf courses, an international cricket venue, lake cruises aboard a steamcruiser, the gondola and luge - both misleadingly named for we of an English persuasion, trekking, hiking, bird watching, fishing, Segway trails and tours, a visit to a Maori Haka ceremony, horse trekking, the ubiquitous visit to Milford Sound, hot air ballooning, helicopter rides, wildlife safaris and also various festivals, goldmining tours, vineyard visits, race meetings, sheep shearing stations and sightseeing tours taking in the raw natural beatuty of the valleys and mountains for scores of miles around.
And the adventure tourism stuff includes, among much else, parasailing, white water rafting, river surfing, mountain biking, abseiling, quad biking, motorcross, 4X4 rally-style jollies, clay target shooting, an adrenaline-crazed stint in a stuntplane, your own flying lessons (loops and barrel rolls optional), kayaking, rock climbing, proper mountaineering, ice climbing on your friendly local glacier, sailing, heli-skiing and vertical drinking. Pack your action pants and don't dare ever tell anyone you are bored.
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As a town, this place called Queenstown is set in just about the most beautiful sort of setting you can imagine, on a par with any tropical paradise or mighty rainforest. Ringing the town in all directions are magnificent mountains, a huge lake borders one side of the and the signs of settled humanity, also known as buildings, streets and discarded McDonalds wrappers pepper the ground at the foot of a chunk of rock too small to call itself a mountain but really far too tall and dramatic to be known as a hill. The central part of the place is all for the tourists, dozens of souvenir shops, dozens more sports retail outlets and food and drink in a hundred flavours, yet this is clustered in a very limited area itself right in the very middle of the already small commercial centre.
Off this by a street or two are the drinking strips, three of them, full of bars and pubs for those hard-earned boozing sessions after a day on the slopes, dangling from a bridge, or flying in some fashion or other through the atmosphere, and on mostly one side the arms of suburbia stretch modestly about the gentler ground around the base of the mounthillthing providing all the real people (those that exist in terms of queenstown for longer than 30 days at a time) with places to hang their hats.
Nightlife is key for most people who come here on those brief visits, and most people who come here are young and more `extreme` than I, also they seem to be a bit younger and the novelty of drinking until you can't walk or of talking absolute bullshit with people you wouldn't like when sober inside dark, noisy rooms seems not to have worn off for them yet.
I'm all in favour of the former stage, although I am getting tired of even this to be honest, and the latter I am still a fan of at the right time with the right place, but I have had it up to the eyeballs - right up to the tips of my fucking hair, in fact - with the people and things that occur in pubs and nightclubs. Call me a farty old bastard, but I do not want to listen to any more dribbling macho nonsense from drunken egomaniacs as long as I live, nor do I wish to be involved with any massed whoops and cheers and "wahay!"s from small armies of holidaying townies.
The second most important part of the Queenstown experience are the various snow-based, gravity-fuelled activities done with various planks of wood. Yes, I lack a certain romance of the soul with this and also any real hope of a sense of balance, which explains why I can't tell you anything about snowboarding and skiiing except that other people are able to do it and seem to enjoy it, which is both admirable and great and not just because it leaves me with more space to myself elsewhere during the daytime. There is a snowfield in at least two directions out of here and certainly one on Coronet Peak directly behind the launching spot for the hangliding company, just ten minutes away by road.
On the deeply impressive mountain range directly in front of the lake and subsequently right out the window facing the stony beach immediately outside our hostel here, there seems to be a vast snowfield a dozen or so miles away that must yield some amazing excitement and plank-based entertainment, if that's your thing. These mountains are called the Remarkables, and fittingly so.
Most peaks and ranges around here are worth an eyeball, and these are more grand, glorious and majestic than most of these. They are also the backdrop for a few key scenes and locations from the Lord of the Rings movies, notably one side of them which we saw on the way to our jetboating shindig is where the Helm's Deep sequence was filmed, with the fortifications, elves, kings, dwarves and ten thousand or so orcs were digitally dropped in front of it near a huge valley at the front of thing, where two peaks run to the same level of ground across the front of one another.
There are a few places I've seen from the movies now, none of which I had to go looking for and at least two of which being places I deeply longed to see for myself, so I'm quite the lucky boy really. One of these was the pass used for Helm's Deep, and the other was the Fords of Isen where Liv Tyler (known at the time as Arwen for narrative/contractual reasons) summoned some elvy-witchy hocuspocus, and summoned forth the lustral magicks of the Numenorean ancients and wrought a mighty reckoning thus rending the forces of evil in twain 'neath a very cavalcade of waters and ensmashened the fell Nazgul 'twixt water and stone. Also smiting and beards.
The place where this happened in the movie (the Fellowship o.t.r.) is called Skipper's canyon back on Normal Earth, and I can smugly say that I have travelled both up and down the river right where the scene was filmed wherein the equine-tinted flood came crashing downriver to beat up those nasty nazgul, ooh, if only their Mother's could see them they'd get such a hiding.
And in the gap between that paragraph and this I managed to go to the top of a mountain, because I'm just that damn good. I did use their gondola (cablecar, again) I must admit, but I also managed a little shopping and some parasailing research, which counts for something. The views from the mountain-top are, well, just damned spectacular as you might expect. More to come in the eventual and ensuing photo posts.
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Living in these hostel dormitories is of course a pretty unusual way to go about it all, life and the living of it I mean, in part because nothing is ever really your own. Sadly this seems to extend to your food as well, because people have a nasty habit of stealing it if it looks nice and/or they are feeling especially cheap.
Really I wouldn't mind much but last night I spent 3 hours making a double portion of toad in the hole, made to a recipe by Jamie "Pukka" Oliver including an onion gravy that took the whole of that time to reduce and infuse with good rum, among much else. The half I sealed against spillages and marauders and labelled and stashed in the back of a fridge last night was gone this morning, and honestly that is just fucking low; when just about everyone in the hostel is eating pasta with sauce or fried chicken and rice every day, and then some bugger sees something a little, dare I say it, superior to all that and steals it when you turn your back and go out for the night, it is time to either move on or take action.
Good job I laced it with strong laxatives before I went out. At least I wish I did. Next time there's gonna be a garnish of laxatives and bleach on whatever extra I put away.
Another little thing that happens is the instinct to make large meals anyway, even if you are traveling alone or just haven't met people to share it with. I think this may stem from both a misguided optimism that you will also want to eat tomorrow morning what looked so good to your drink-adled brain tonight (a rare occurrence, except in the presence of cold pizza) and also a survival instinct evolved over many millenia to reduce collective effort, and feed your whole family or tribe in as few sittings as possible. This could explain why I force food down my throat by the shovel-load as if I was competing with a dozen starving relatives. Or I could just be a big greedy pig, one of the two.
And althoguh the subect of late night noise has already been brought up, here we are again except this time with the snoring situation which is, of course, an obvious fact of life that needs dealing with in a dormitory. This time because I have to note an item of sheer mindless stupidity that almost had me laughing like a hyena one night, when someone who could not sleep started actually telling a snoring person to stop being one and let them get on and get some rest.
If there are only two things that it is certain of in the entire universe when someone nearby is snoring, they are that 1] the subject is alive and 2] the subject is asleep and cannot process your futile mewings. It cannot be taken on board due to the inescapable fact that the person is not of the conscious world and is likely to be very much asleep in a deep and meaningful way, thereby being beyond the sounds of mortal man to the degree of anything much quieter than a gunshot, and it's just time to suck it up and deal with it, and get some earplugs from the reception desk first thing in the morning like everyone else. People complain after several nights of this too and that is just retarded: Fool Me Once, Shame On You; Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me.
I've been unable to sleep before on my opening night in a new place, because of a hearty nasal workout from people who apparently insufflate warm tarmac for a giggle, or by rigorous activity from a room-mate and their new best friend(s) although most memorably by snoring that sounded like a pig being buggered in a sawmill, and so if I'm without the earplugs and can't even get some then, well, it's just time to resign ymyself to reading in the common room or cruising the interweb until dawn or something, like I am doing right now, in fact. Meh.
And never for a minute go thinking you have never been that person yourself
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Of all the activities here besides the mindlessly reckless and the inane (so bungy jumping, canyon swinging and wine tours need not apply) I would say that the one most prized by us all, even me, would be the skydive.
Many more that are in my line of things; hangliding, parasailing, being twisted to the point of madness in a stunt plane; seem to suggest that my natural element is the air. Would that it were so, because I think I'd look bloody smart with a gigantic pair of wings and/or a Gulfstream private jet all to myself.
Strangely I'm also becoming drawn to water, which is very much against all previous evidence and inclination. I don't even know the name for it but the thing with the speedboat and the powerboat and the parachute, where you are towed along behind the boat hundreds of metres in the air attached to a parachute, well that appeals to me a lot, maybe because you are up there on your own rather than being strapped to an expert (skydiving, parasailing, hangliding) or bunched up with a load of other folk (rafting, jet-boating) and thereby have the chance to alone with your fear 
Also perhaps this aquatic leaning comes about because I've let myself be persuaded to learn SCUBA diving in Fiji, get myself a PADI certificate and everything and go mooching among the reefs with fish and rays and sea snakes, like a proper tourist to the South Pacific ought to do.
Honestly, I can just tell I'm getting all your sympathy this morning 
Anyway before I leave Queenstown, as I'm scheduled to do this afternoon at about three, I hope to be doing another little thing I've been waiting for for a long time: I'm gonna go shooting, only targets though, unfortunately.
I just couldn't find any drunk townies to stand against the wall 
