It’s been such a long time since I wrote, but we’ve been here in Queenstown all this time and hey, better late than never. It’s going to be difficult covering the last few months without it becoming boring to read… I’ll give it a go. Skip to the end for Queenstown highlights.
I’m sat on the porch outside our room. It’s 9 am and the sun is already high in the sky and I’m warm in just shorts and t-shirt. Our room has the most stunning view of the lake and the mountains. After a few months, you would think it would lose its novelty, but it hasn’t. I’ve finally got a day off work today and we’re leaving Queenstown in two weeks. We’re leaving New Zealand in just over a month. There’s been a change of plan and no, it’s not because Mari is pregnant.
After quite a long drive, we arrive in Queenstown from Dunedin, and we both instantly loved the place. We were never 100% sure that the place would live up to the expectations, but it certainly did. The town has a very young, funky dynamic to it. Nice restaurants, bars and clubs dominate the ground level, broken up only by ski, skate and mountain bike shops, heaven. They’ve tried very hard to keep the architecture in keeping with a Swiss alpine ski resort. You can spot parachutes over the huge lake and your eye is always drawn up the mountain to the gondola cable car.
We arrive at Scallywags. It was as I said the last double bed in the town for the Christmas/New Year period. The owner, Evan, starts yelling at us from a balcony high up the hill and we knew that there was going to be at least some truth to the “Maniac owner” reviews we’d seen on tripadvisor. The hostel was empty apart from a German couple that were working for Evan. The view from the hostel was stunning. 10 minutes walk into town, the hostel kept a social, laid-back atmosphere even as the place started filling up over the next few days. We would explore the town night and day, but usually end up back at the hostel playing a card game called macow and drinking heavily until the early hours. We became good friends with a bloke from London (Jon) and two Dutch girls (Lucinda & Marieline).
We loved Queenstown and it was easily our favourite place in New Zealand, but my savings had rapidly evaporated. The exchange rate was worse than I was expecting and things were expensive in this area. We would have to start working soon, no question. Mari and I both had the feeling that we didn’t want to stop moving, even if it was in a place as awesome as Queenstown. Jon would soon be off to Bali and Lucinda off to Laos. In countries like that the remnants of your budget could go so much further. Inspired, Mari and I threw some ideas around: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bali, and Kuala Lumper etc etc. Me being the kid I am started to get really excited but there would be some very substantial obstacles in our way.
Rewind to June 2012 when we booked our flights, the departure date of 31st of October 2012 was fine, but the return date of 30th of October 2013 didn’t exist in the system yet. We were told to pick the latest available date for the return journey and then we could simply change our flights for £100 each. No problem. The latest date available was 31st of March 2013.
Our plan was to bring the AUK – HKG flight forward to early January and get a cheap flight from HKG to Bangkok and explore SE Asia, before returning to HKG and flying back to London. Researching the countries, it seemed we needed a smorgasbord of injections to visit these countries without contracting something nasty. Getting them here was going to be very expensive and spread out over at least 4-6 weeks. Inconvenient, but doable.
The next hurdle was going to be the flights. Relaying our intentions to Cathay Pacific, they advised us that our desired flights were in peak season. Most of the seats were already sold out, but they could do something similar to what we wanted, but we would be looking at £500-£600 per person to move the dates. That was just slightly more expensive than just buying a whole new ticket. A bit disheartened we concluded that we would stick to our original plan and stay in Queenstown until October 2013. We will do SE Asia another time with more planning and much less luggage.
We needed jobs and some cheaper, long-term accommodation. We managed to get both surprisingly easily.
Mari got the first job she applied for waitressing in a restaurant called Hamills. After trying and failing to get a job mucking about with mountain bikes all day, I got a job at a car rental place valeting cars and driving people around. We both did pretty well I think. They’re not your typical backpacker jobs. At least I managed to avoid going back into kitchens and/or working until 3, 4 am.
After looking at some rather grotty and expensive share houses, we moved into a place called the lake house. It’s specifically for people like us. We have our own private bedroom and bathroom, but it’s cheap and there’s only a two week commitments and no bills to worry about.
Now that we got ourselves sorted, we phone the airline again to move our flights to October and guess what. £500 per person to move the flights to October. This really got us reviewing our plans. Was it worth it? We’ve seen pretty much everything we wanted to in New Zealand. And yes, I desperately want to live among the mountains and do a snowboard season (I even bought my own board in Dunedin), but we’re not going back to Bournemouth when we’re done. We’re moving to Norway. The place we’re moving to has two or three ski fields within a 20 minute drive.
Leaving in March would not only save us a grand, but it would also mean that we would avoid two cold, snowy winters back to back which was a by-product of our original plan. Earning Norwegian currency, we could afford that trip to SE Asia quicker and not have to have a short onslaught period of injections.
Whilst it sounds a little defeatist, we’re happy with our plans to cut our New Zealand trip down from 12 months to 6. It’s really not that big a place you know.
So that brings us up to date. We’re leaving Queenstown in two weeks and If I can get the van sold for a good price and in good time, we’ll spend week in Sydney and perhaps spend a little more time in Auckland, Taupo and the do the things we missed in the Cormandel peninsular last year. We’ll fly straight to London at the end of March. We’ll spend a short period of time with my family up North before getting on another plane to Norway. The sooner we can start earning Norwegian currency, the better.
