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New Zealand: the Better Britons of the South - Queenstown, part...


Queenstown, part 1 aka River Porn 2006-01-10
 
Unapologetically the opposite of Invercargill, Queenstown screams to be noticed in the sleepy south of New Zealand's South Island.  The most obvious difference was the most impossible to ignore: there were people everywhere.  Lulled to a small town stupor in Invercargill, Queenstown woke me up with a start.  Touted as the "Adventure Capital of the World," Queenstown's downtown area consisted almost entirely of information centers and adventure shops advertising high-adrenaline activities.  Skydive!  Bungy Jump!  Jet Boat!  Paraglide!  Luge!  Canyon Swing!  River Raft! -- no time to stop and breathe.  Queenstown would be a great place to visit if one has stacks of money lying around, but to the backpacker who has to budget, Queenstown is just plain frustrating.  You can't get away from the adrenaline-activities, but you can't pay for them either.

The most fun I had in Queenstown was actually away from the town itself.  Together with Jenny, Kim, and Joe, the "Kiwi hostel boy," I hiked to the Ben Lomond summit, 1747 meters (5,731 feet) straight up.  The steady climb from downtown Queenstown to the Ben Lomond saddle took about 3 hours, and then we looked up.  The summit was straight up.  Ever watch that show on Nickelodeon called "Global Guts," the one in which the finalists have to climb up this hissing "agro-crag" at the end?  Sprinkle in some vegetation, some rocks, and some out-of-shape hikers, and now you know what the Ben Lomond Summit aka Agro-Crag was like.  The last hour up that summit was absolute torture.  I cursed every beer I drank and every plate of Thai food I ate last semester, cursed myself for never exercising, cursed Jenny's friend who recommended the hike to us, and otherwise just concentrated on breathing.  But it was so worth it.  The view from the summit was AMAZING -- a 360 degree view of the the lakes and the mountains and the glaciers of the South Island Alps.  Queenstown was so small, a blip next to the snaking outline of Lake Wakatipu, dwarfed by the Remarkables.  We had made it.

Naturally, we stayed up on that summit much longer than called for, and only started to scurry down when we realized the descending sun most likely spelled darkness (what a concept!).  Going down was, unsurprisingly, much quicker than the way up, except at the end.  Deciding that going right back down the trail we came up would be repetitive and tiresome, we decided to take the trail that winded next to the river into Queenstown.  We never actually found it.  We ended up rolling down a hillside and then "following" the river out, first walking on its banks, then walking in the river, then walking in the water up to our shins, then thighs, then knees . . . until Joe and Jenny, the front-walkers, suddenly stopped.  Joking, I called out, "Hey guys, what is it, a waterfall or something?"  They turned around and just nodded.  We couldn't turn back -- it was getting really dark by this point -- but in front of us lay a 13 foot waterfall framed by wet, sheer rock faces.  We had to get down.  Joe, the most chivalrous of us all, volunteered a plan -- he'd get down, then we'd climb down him.  Light fading quickly, it was our only option.  Somehow Joe got down the waterfall -- I still don't know how he managed it -- and we started to climb down him.  Standing in the chest-deep, ice-cold water with a waterfall pummeling his face as 3 girls climbed [slid] down him, Joe didn't complain once as he got trampled.

Starving, drenched, and laughing like crazy, we finally made it back to our hostel.
 
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