“Oh,” said I, feeling a bit smart, “what are you pissed off with now?”
“My wife,” he said. “She's near death.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I'm about ready to kill her.”
I think every twenty-something dude should spend some time with an honest-to-God old man. It's good for you – there's always something to be learned. I'm friggin' loving this. “Ryan,” Graeme said the other day, “I know you don't believe me now, but there will come a day, when you're in your sixties, when you'll stop and say, 'Shit . . . that stupid old fart actually knew what he was talking about all along!'”
Loving this. I've learned a lot during my short stay in Arrowtown, even more than what was said out loud.
After a stint at the pub the other night, one of Graeme's drinking buddies, Alan, mentions that he had the next day off from work. One pint later, he goes on to say that he's got a free pass for the Skyline Gondola in nearby Queenstown, climbing nearly 800 m up Ben Lomond, just on the cusp of the city and looking out over the Adventure Capital of New Zealand, past Lake Wakatipu as far as the Remarkables. Pretty soon, I'm invited along.
The next morning, with a warning of rain showers for the afternoon, the two of us set out driving through the valley and into the small city. Tiki tour is the Kiwi term – a trip rife with detours and exploration, rather than just a simple A to B trek. The lineup for the gondola was a testament to its immense popularity, even into the autumn season.
Up we shot, in a glass enclosure like a ski-lift, through the trees, past mountain bike trails, a luge track, and a bungy jump platform. Have I ever mentioned that it took a Kiwi to come up with the idea of jumping from some absurd height with only an elastic attached to your ankle? It should come as no surprise, at any rate – the people Down Under have a real knack for testing their limits and finding adventure wherever they can, which effectively turns New Zealand into a giant playground. People come to Queenstown, in general, for two reasons. They come to participate in extreme sports in the day, and drink their faces off by night. That's a generalization, but I don't think it's that far off the mark – I haven't seen the nightlife (yet), but I can already attest to the former.
The worst part, though, is that everything is so expensive in Queenstown. It's a tourist town, and businessess completely understand what that means. Here, more than anywhere else in New Zealand, you need to sit down and decide what you actually want to do – unless you're rich, you simply can't afford to do everything, so there's no sense in trying. That made the timing of my brief visit a bit delicate – have you ever heard of those people who do their taxes and get a return that's hilariously higher than they expected? Well, let's just say I went to Queenstown feeling like some great-uncle I'd never met before had died and willed me a fortune, and I could just blow this mad money however I felt like it. I could easily have spent it in Queenstown in a single afternoon, but instead did something a bit responsible and more than a little bit bittersweet – I started seriously looking at the flights back home. Money can't buy happiness, but TurboTax is going to get me home in less than 100 days.
This is all part of a
nagging thought process that's been welling up inside of me since an
unassuming night in Kaikoura: I love home and the people back there,
but once this experience is over, it's over,
and I'm not sure I'm ready to think about leaving it behind just yet.
It's been easy to say that I don't know when I'm going home, but now
I'm at the point where I need
to set a definite return date, which suddenly hedges in the remainder
of this adventure and makes me think about the next few months as the
dwindling time I've got left.
Mortality
will kill you if you let it. That's far from my intention.
The
rest of the impromptu tiki tour brought us through the main town,
along the waterfront, where a guy with a mullet was up on a unicycle,
juggling fire, a machete, and a wrench. Like you would in Queenstown.
We
left the city before the rain started (I'll be back here in a few
days – don't worry, there's plenty more to talk about when the time
comes to do it properly), driving to the other side of Frankton Arm
up to Kelvin Heights. It was the right kind of sunny, autumn Sunday
for driving through the countryside, with a cinematic flair to boot:
we passed the private, enclosed Deer Park Heights, which made up the
countryside that the refugees from Rohan took to get to Helm's Deep,
as well as Sam Neill's house, the guy who played Alan Grant in Jurassic
Park.
After a day off on Sunday, there were plenty of leaves to rake up today. Which brings us back to the beginning. Rather than kill his wife, Graeme and I went to his buddy Ian's house this afternoon, a stone ranch just outside of Arrowtown. Again, it took a pint or two after tea to coax him into it, but he sits on a hefty farm and offered to bring me along for the inoculation and tagging of a bunch of deer tomorrow. Not only that, he's travelling up to Glenorchy on Wednesday, and will bring myself and Graeme along for the drive (it's not just a scenic drive along the lake – the Wizard's Vale from Lord of the Rings was shot up here, although Isengard was just a digital creation, before you get too excited).
And after that . . . well, I did something a little bit stupid tonight. I went to the pub (Jaysus, this town is a bad influence on me), sat around a table with a bunch of old codgers, and told them that I'm bungy jumping this week.
As soon as you say something like that, you damn well better follow through. Especially now that I've committed it to writing – don't worry, there'll be pictures as proof. I said I did something a bit responsible with my tax return, not that I was a complete prude.
When I
was back in Newfoundland, 134 m didn't seem particularly high. The Nevis Bungy might be the highest jump in Australasia, but it never
seemed that daunting before. But now, as I check the weather forecast
for the next few days and actually get ready to fill in my credit
card number and click the submit payment button, 8.5 seconds of
freefall sounds like a long, long time
to be plummeting down to earth.
Even
now I'm pretty jittery. But I think it's a good fear, the kind of
fear that you look back on for a long time afterwards and be proud
that you stood up on that ledge and overcame it. And yes – this is
an obvious metaphor for the trip to New Zealand in the first place.
I'm pretty stoked I jumped when I had the chance.
When
new people are trying to get a feel for you, one of the main
questions I've found that they ask, after they've determined where
you're from and what you're planning to do in life, is what your
parents do for a living. It's getting into the midnight hours of
April 29 here in New Zealand, which means that as of this time
tomorrow, after more than 30 years, Dad is going to be a retired
conservation officer. I'm
missing out on that party, but if you happen to see him (which pretty
much guarantees that you're up at the cabin with him, the dog, and
probably Captain Morgan), be sure to congratulate him.
And maybe share a drink or two. I'll be doing the same soon enough – because once that bungy cord brings me back to solid earth, I promise I'll do what I've been putting off for weeks now and book that one-way ticket, from one island to another.
Cheers,
rb
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