If It's Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing to Excess

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It is frustrating, and some may say ‘annoying’ that our up-to-date entries are less than current; so… Let’s skip one and get a little more current!

For the past 9 weeks or so we’ve been staying in a small village (in NZ it’s a town) for one reason and one reason only - SNOWBOARDING. The title says everything, as with our stay in Bright and the Paragliding we’re sticking with our ‘tried and tested’ method for adopting new hobbies.

We’ve never snowboarded before but thought buying two sets of second hand boarding equipment and a couple of season passes to a ski field would be a damned good idea. It was! We’d never been near a snowboard (or a real ski slope for that matter) before we went into a Nelson shop and bought our toys, and to be honest after the first week - and what felt like another broken rib - I wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t until we found ourselves in the heaviest (and I think earliest) snow for 20 years that things started to look up.

We stayed in Fairlie, Mackenzie, at the Top Ten camp site (at a very reasonable negotiated rate - thanks to the owners Ash and Anita - website: www.fairlietop10.co.nz ), which was only 35 kms from the Dobson ski field. We started on the slopes before the season, and the slope had officially opened but the owner, Peter who was getting everything ready was excellent and said we were welcome to use the learner/intermediate slopes if we were happy walking up. The downside at this point was that the snow was VERY hard and the slope ungroomed, but with our experience we didn’t realise the difference.

We’d met up with a couple of paragliding friends, Simon and Jen, who had had similar urges to stop and play in the snow, initially only for a couple of weeks but after cancelling and re-arranging stuff they stopped and boarded with us for over a month. Every day all four of us would drive there and walk up the learner slope so we could ‘scrape’ sideways down the ice, and maybe fall a few times trying to turn - but the novelty kept us coming back. I started to have some doubts when I fell and landed my ribs on my arm (same as in Spain).

After this first week I was close to selling the board and buying a set of ski’s. Gill seemed to take to it better, and being closer to the ground she didn’t seem to hurt herself as much when she fell (although she did fall on her arse and couldn’t sit properly for ages). So by the end of the first week we were all ‘pleading’ for snow - and did it come (yes is the answer). We went to bed one rainy night, and awoke to cracking tree branches and the van roof 3 inches lower than the night before.

The Mackenzie/Canterbury border where we stayed was hit the hardest, depths varying around a meter. In our ‘wisdom’ Gill and I had opted to stay in a more secluded spot at the back of the camp site, which left the van stranded for 5 days (and for over two days there was no power to Fairlie).

And the point - when we finally got back up the mountain, after the roads had been cleared, the ski field was a different place. I’d decided to hire skis to try for the day - which went OK, but at lunch time Gill came over with a huge smile on her face telling me I had to try the board on the slope with the deep powder snow. I did, laughed out loud the whole way down, and never looked back (Stuart - you should’ve told me how much fun it was!).

Since then we’ve had about 5 new falls of deep snow and each time we’ve been at a better level to enjoy new aspects of boarding - be it black runs, the natural half pipe, the jumps (I’ll be honest - we’re not good), and the simple joy of new, deep, fresh untouched powder! After chatting to the owner of the ski field we also seem to have the new record for the amount of days boarded in a season - about 37, the previous being 30, and all on a $450 (about £150) season pass.

Dobson Ski Field was described in an info booklet as NZ skiings best kept secret. For the price you’ve got to agree. It has a Triple chair lift, a ‘T’ bar, a button chair lift and a rope tow. We never had to queue for a lift. And as it’s 25% learner, 50% intermediate and 25% advanced - it was a great place to learn and progress. http://www.dobson.co.nz/.

I wasn’t going to say much, the pics were going to be the point but never mind. On the next entry we’ll fill in the gaps before and after boarding, and possibly point to where we will be ending up as we are, sadly, approaching the conclusion of our 20 months away.

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