The Lord of the Drinks: The Fellowship of the Ski

"I want to see mountains again, mountains Gandalf!"

That seemed like a fitting introduction for my first post about a country that knows full well that its greatest export is Lord of the Rings. And, well, skiing I guess. But having just walked around Queenstown for an hour and seeing all the tourist merchandise I think it may actually be easier to find the One Ring in this country than hire snow equipment.

So, seeing as I've finally scratched my proverbial itchy feet for the first time since my backflip misadventures in Canada, I figured I might as well mark my escape from the Island with a bit of a blog resurrection. I mean, it doesn't look like we're tearing up the town again tonight (as regrettable as that is), so I might as well be vaguely productive and detail some of the shenanigans I've gotten up to with The Fellas and Roslyn. 

By the way, her name is now The Scorpion. But that's another story.

Pictured above: Roslyn at Winnies.

When you think about it, a rocking adventures is kind of like a really delicious cake. You need a few crucial ingredients like say, chocolate... ummm.... eggs… uhh… flour? Yeah, look, I'll be honest, I haven't got that much of an idea of what goes into a cake and I can't be bothered googling it, but my point still holds true. To go into the finer details and render my convoluted simile completely pointless; an adventures needs a long ass journey, a wacky bunch of people, and of course the 3 litres of duty free alcohol we all purchased the second we got off the plane which (little known fact) is actually mandatory on entry into the country.

Crazy New Zealanders eh?

The first of what I can only assume will be many sheep jokes.

On the note of how nutty this place is, being an Aussie in New Zealand is kind of like what I imagine being an American in Canada would be like. You have this almost big brother-like air of superiority, they're eager to please and super friendly - but at the end of the day you can't get past the fact that everything we do is just .... how to put this... better than them. I mean sure, they got some things right. Their one and two dollar coins are actually appropriately sized, they have an ergonomic thumb groove for extra grip on their cartons of milk and the name Rotorua isn't that much sillier than Wooloomooloo when you really think about it. But that doesn't make it not stupid by any means. Also their pronunciation of the number six makes me giggle like a schoolboy, but hey, that might just be me.

By far the most frustrating thing about this place was experienced on the drive from Christchurch to Queenstown. See, we were all acting under the impression that driving from the central city to the main ski-fields would be like driving from Sydney to Jindabyne - fairly cruisy, just get a general idea of where you're going, follow the signs, eat when you're hungry and fill the tank up when it needs filling up. No dramas, easy going and you'll have more than enough time for a few beers and a Fergburger when you rock up in town.

This will be the greatest thing your mouth ever experiences. Yep, even better than that.

But in NZ, not so much. After the three hour delay of getting on the road because the dudes from the rental company were late after getting carried away in the local pasture (I assume), we were struck by the fact that when it comes to sign placement New Zealand is as stingy as Monty Burns. If a road was even labelled at all, there was no fore-warning, and it seems you're expected to slam on the brakes at 100km an hour on icy roads then Grand Theft Auto your way around the turn if you don't want to hang a u-turn or end up hideously lost like we almost did more than a few times.

In fairness, I suppose we could have brought a more appropriate map.

Other issues that came into play - in Australia you can drive anywhere along the coast between Brisbane and Melbourne and you'll never be more than 30 minutes away from a petrol station. So when we came across a petrol station fairly early on and thought, "eh, we'll stop at the next one" you would think that's a completely justified response. But after a few rocking singalongs and amended wrong turns we found ourselves in the place that civilisation forgot. Deep in an icy ravine, rocky cliffs either side, no signs of humanity and pursued by Smeagol and the Nazgul; Sam, Troy and I started to question why our hastily printed page of Google directions would lead our convoy 200km down the road that Tenacious D fought the Devil on. I'd keep going with the miss-matched pop-culture references, but I feel I've got my point across that this was one long ass scary road with prospective axe murderers and warg-riders hiding in every shadow. 

Not to mention this bugger.

Anyway, at this point the fuel light came on. Now we've all had our games of chicken with a fuel light in the past. But at 12:30 am in murder country it was slightly less than ideal. There's nothing quite as nasty as being on a road in the middle of nowhere, running out of fuel, at midnight in a strange country, and you don't even know for sure that you're going the right way. Needless to say, the next half hour or so was a little nerve racking to say the least, with the usually carefree Sam getting more stressed than force over area.

Nothing better than a forced engineering joke.

Anyway, after all of that ado, I ran out of motivation to keep writing. There's dinner ready to be eaten yo. Long story short, after trekking through our midnight murder desert we stumbled across an oasis in the form of a 24 hour self service petrol station where we filled up and there was much rejoicing. At about this point I received 4 messages from my mum at once asking if I was alive, if we had crashed, if the car had run out of battery and a full list of instructions on how to get to the hostel. 

Thanks mum.

Anyway, next time I shall inform all three of you reading up to this point as to the origin of our fabled snow nicknames, the vomit pixies who haunt the streets of Queenstown in the early hours of the morning to the hitch hiker competition taking the group by storm.