Christchurch / Queenstown

It was a long two days leading up to and leaving for my New Zealand trip. The night before involved Dave B haggling up a bouncer, as well as paying ludicrous amounts of money for cab rides (thanks, World Youth Day organizers!). Not having gotten much sleep that night, I groggily stuffed all my things into my snowboard bag and managed to get to the airport pretty early, though it was soon after the pope's speech at Randwick Racecourse so there were lots of people at the airport lining up to leave the country (and you could tell that they were there for World Youth Day because of their bags with the horrendous bright orange and yellow colour scheme. Anyway, we spent a lot of time lounging around in the airport waiting for our flight (which was slightly late).

After what was the shortest I have ever been on (and which had the best airline meal ever), we arrived in Christchurch late on Sunday night and managed to steal some sleep at the Base Backpackers hostel in the middle of town before heading back to the airport once more to fly to Queenstown. I was still half asleep during the flight but managed to catch the great landing, which was where the plane went through a narrow mountain range and put on the brakes really hard to land it in the short amount of runway.

Our first day in Queenstown was spent sorting out rentals for Dave and Luke, and buying our lift tickets. We finished a bit early, had a famous Fergburger, then went off to do our own separate adventure tourism activity. Luke did a bungy jump and Dave did a canyon swing, while I chose to do something a little less voluntary and went on the Shotover Jet - a high speed speedboat tour of the Shotover Canyon. I had a grin on my face the whole way through, partly because it was a hell of a lot of fun, and partly because the wind blowing on my face kind of forced it. My face only defrosted at around the time I made it back to town.

The long white cloud

Either we chose a bad time to come to Queenstown, or it's always really cloud here, because our first two days on the snow involved very poor visibility. The first day, at Coronet Peak, had fog at the top of the mountain and ice at the bottom. We eventually found the groomed runs after the fog cleared slightly, but even then it wasn't that exciting repeating that over and over again. After biting the ice a few times, Dave decided he needed to buy a helmet. Almost concurrently, I lost my gloves, and I had been meaning to buy a new pair anyway (my previous pair were horribly torn up) so Dave and I went shopping later that afternoon. Ironically enough, Dave managed to somehow injure his wrist the next day.

We were disappointed with Coronet Peak so we decided to check out The Remarkables for our second day, and for a moment, we thought we may have had a chance to get some decent runs in. Unfortunately, the sun disappeared above the clouds, which quickly came in a few hours after lifts opened. Flat light made runs very not-fun-at-all, and after Dave injured his wrist, we checked out the snow tubing - going down a short run with massive rubber doughnuts. That was enjoyable enough, but didn't provide enough entertainment, so Luke and I checked out the beginner terrain park while Dave nursed his injury.

(I would like to note that more things have happened since, but is being bogged down by slow and expensive Internet. I will attempt to update once more when we get back to Christchurch.)