“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
I was just looking for a quote from A Tale of Two Cities to look clever. My travels took me through Queenstown and Wanaka, a pair of cities whose activities and attributes garnered their own chapter in my indispensible Lonely Planet Guide. Beautiful and lakeside, they sit in the midlands of the South Island—not really in the Fiordlands, nor the Southlands, nor the Otago or Canterbury Plains. Somehow, they have carved a niche as a couple of the must-see locations of NZ.
Queenstown sits at the elbow of Lake Wakatipu, in the shadows of the Richardson Mountains. It bills itself as the adrenaline capital of the world. This is where bungee jumping was invented. And canyon swinging. You can also skydiving, white water rafting, white water surfing (boogie boarding, let’s not kid ourselves), canyoning, jet boating, hang gliding, paragliding, skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking or off-roading on ATVs. The town packs itself with 22 year olds from all over the world, kids just looking to get drunk 5 nights a week while they work a crappy minimum wage job and sleep in a tiny, drafty house they share with half a dozen others. They do this until their Holiday Working Visa runs out (12 months) and they move on. This cycle repeats itself like sea turtles returning to nest on the beach where they were born. Something otherworldly is attracting white kids with dreadlocks to this place. And yet, the streets are always packed with the 50+ crowd. Despite the pandemonium after 10pm, the daylight hours are owned by Asian, UK and Australian adults (for lack of a better word) as they stroll the numerous upscale shops, sign up for lake cruises and kayak tours, ride the gondola to the viewing station, depart for wine tours and generally enjoy a peaceful lake ringed by towering mountains. I don’t understand why it works but how is blatantly obvious.
Having one foot in each world (not broke but no longer able to party like a 22 year old), I wore my cleanest hooded sweatshirt and made no bones about leaving the bars 3 hours before they closed. As for my adrenaline fix, I chose whitewater rafting. The downside is that any activity where you are guaranteed to get soaked is also an activity where you are sans pictures so I’m going to do my wordy best to describe the highlights of the day. On the bus ride from the rafting headquarters to the launch point we had to travel the old gold mining road. Queenstown was originally founded in the late 1800s during the 1870s gold rush. There is no easy way to access this part of the country because there are criss-crossing mountain ranges in every direction and rivers were often impossible to navigable due to wildly varying water levels and dramatic changes in width. Miners were forced to pack in equipment with horses and mules from hundreds of miles away. Once in the gold mining valleys, they built most of the equipment they needed—meaning their existence was sparse and most likely miserable. The roads were no exception. Our gravel access road was known as the most dangerous road in NZ and prominently featured numerous signs forbidding almost every type of transportation you could think of and yet somehow we 24 or so rafters were allowed to ride in a painted up bus that looked like it was straight from the 1940s. The narrow dirt and gravel road was supposedly two-way but we were not far from scraping one side of the bus on the mountain walls while the other side flirted with the precipitous drop. The bus driver—a 20-something with an overgrown mop of dyed black hair and a couple of gaping ornamental piercings mauling his ears was silent and focused. Our other river guide was a gregarious American ginger who looked like Alexi Lalas. He would alternate safety instructions with jokes that would crack himself up, filling the bus with his booming, staccato stoner laugh. He mocked the terrified English girl who was white knuckling the seat back through a particularly harrowing section and opened the bus door and hung out when we went through a straight section so narrow that I couldn’t see the road or the cliff below us, only the river a hundred feet below. It was the most exciting bus ride since the movie Speed. Once safely down to the river banks we split into groups of 6 and loaded into rafts. Being solo, I got lumped in with 2 UK couples and an Irish guy who were completely incompetent and mostly terrified of the moderate rapids. They were mostly incapable of following the instructions of our guide. I was situated at the front of the raft on one side and my fellow pace-setter was a hulking English fellow who had no sense of rhythm and would put every ounce of energy into every stroke, using his entire body to rock forward and wrench back, except he would cock the paddle early and pull no water. He did manage to spend the hour and a half soaking his girlfriend with every errant stroke. She was not happy being splashed by 40 degree glacial runoff. Our guide spent the first 45 minutes trying to correct his form before just giving up and telling me to paddle at half power. We did manage to find some fun rapids—and survive—but it was a little more tame than I was hoping for. The scenery was spectacular, however. It felt like the whole ride was built at DisneyLand. The icy, milky blue water of the Shotover River has been carving a narrow channel into the valley for eons. The valley walls were made of mica shist sandwiched layers buckled and cleaved into impossible patterns. Sandbars and river banks were covered in striated shist and jade cobble. Littering the valley and the waterway were old rusted mining equipment, dumped or left behind when active mining ceased more than half a century ago. It’s strange that some place so authentic could remind me of some place so fake, but I guess that’s the power of Disney.
I spent 3 nights in Queenstown, partying for 2. On my last night, I got to have dinner with some friends. Natalie Rizzo is a friend from Los Angeles. One of her younger sisters, Michela, is doing a semester abroad at the University of Otago. I stayed with her a few weeks back in Dunedin. The rest of the Rizzo clan decided to make the trip out to NZ to visit Michela and they made it to Queenstown the night before I left. They graciously invited me to dinner. It was great to catch up with a friend and have some normal, non-traveler conversations. Thanks again to the Rizzos.
The next morning I bounced for Wanaka. As high energy as Queenstown is, Wanaka is zen-like in its calmness. About half of the adrenaline activities are also offered in Wanaka, but that is more an overflow from Queenstown than anything else. Wanaka is hiking country and gateway to the glaciers. Bars don’t bustle at night, 22 year olds don’t prowl the streets looking for jobs and the average age in my hostel jumped by at least 15 years. I managed my biggest hike to date: Mt Roy. Two of the kids in my hostel room were also interested in the hike so I drove the three of us 15 minutes outside of town to the trail head. 10 minutes into the hike, Corina—a young German girl who’s idea of hiking gear was a scarf, tight jeans and worn out Adidas trainers—realized that it was going to be more than she could handle and turned around. Richard—a 22 year old English lad who was traveling around NZ on a bicycle—and I were left to conquer the mountain on our own. It was quite a task as the trail never deviated from the steady upward switch-backs leading to the peak. It was a hard 3 hour hike to the top and another 2 hours back to the bottom. My thighs, calves, and feet ached from the strenuous hike. This was the first hike that I’ve done where there was no reprieve. Normally, the trail will have sections of uphill and downhill even if the outbound progress is uphill. Not so for Mt Roy. This path was for the singular purpose of getting to the top of a mountain. In my nerdy engineering ways, I took the opportunity to play with the metric system. As I have mentioned to many, my biggest concern about getting back into engineering is re-learning all of my intuition in metric. A lifetime of pounds, feet and inches has to be augmented with kilograms, meters and centimeters. Obviously, those are easy to convert in my head but compound units like pressure (pounds per square inch) have to become newtons per centimeter squared and even more complicated units that are engineering specific and descriptive as the property of a shape like 2nd Moment of Inertia is described in inches to the fourth power (in^4). How I am going to translate that into millimeters to the fourth power (mm^4), I don’t know. So what to do on a steadily upward hike other than enjoy the views and calculate the walking distance based on elevation differences and slope. Yes, I know I’m a dork, but these are the games I play when your hiking companion likes house music and thinks competitive cycling is a sport.
We walked roughly 10 kilometers each direction.
