Day 4 Methven:

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I woke up this morning with no hangover!! I was completely surprised, I thought for sure I would be out. After breakfast Yella, Lee and myself headed downtown to Big Al's. Big Al's is a ski shop and they were having a sale on ski equipment. Big Al was there with his suit and clip on tie which he clearly did not even attempt to put on correctly. It was almost sideways and you could see it was a clip on. It was strange that the sales people all wore suits even in a run down ski shop. There was a skinny young salesman there that was probably wearing his fathers suit because it was a few sizes too big for him. I was looking for a jacket and I found a Billabong that would probably suit my needs. It was $150 and I didn't really want to spend that much so I put it back. After a while a salesman came up to me and said he would sell it for $100. At that price I thought it was worth a buy. In U.S. dollars that is only about $73 and it was a nice jacket, especially if I end up skiing next winter. The zipper, like everything else in this country, is backwards. After Big Al's we headed back to the hostel. Yella and I decided we would go hike to a waterfall that was being advertised, and to do some sight seeing. We headed to Rakakai Gorge which had an amazing overlook of the area. After that we headed on a lone road that goes between two mountains. We drove about an hour out and it was incredible. We only saw one other car out there. We had to cross a couple fords and the road was all gravel. I didn't stop to take too many pictures while with Yella because I thought he would kill me if I stopped as much as I wanted to. After our sight seeing we headed towards the falls. When we got there the owner came out and told us about a $10 charge per person. Yella tried to talk him down to $10 for the both of us, but he wasn't budging. Yella threatened to leave if we had to pay that much, and I thought he was bluffing. He wasn't, we left and didn't hike the falls, I was pretty disappointed but I didn't want to talk him into spending money he'd didn't want to. Instead we headed to a different waterfall which was pretty amazing. I got some good pictures using a slow shutter speed. Even without my tripod they came out clear, I was surprised. After we headed back to the hostel. We passed a few towns that were on the map, there were literally 3 or 4 houses in each of these named towns. The population must of been 5-10. I think it would be funny to have a sheep to people index for every town in New Zealand. In some of them I'm sure its 1000 to 1. They also seem to farm deer here. The deer pens have really high fences. I feel pretty bad for them, deer were meant to run, not be kept on only a couple acres.

When we arrived Lee's family was all there trying to fix a few things before the big ski season. There was another man and his son with them. Later I found out that that man's wife had charged up 24,000 on a credit card and Lee said "He was going to kill her so my parents told him he better come to the hostel with us." I laughed thinking it was a joke, but I think he was dead serious. After chatting it up a bit with his parents I headed back out for the sunset on the mountains, hoping to get some good pictures. I was unsuccessful, I left too late. On the way back I grabbed a "burrito" from a take away place. It was basically pita bread with some steak, chili sauce, lettuce, tomato and sour cream. It wasn't wrapped like a gyro. It was still pretty good though. The night ended with me passing out in bed around 8pm, jet lag still had me. I did not end up going jet boating while in Methven as planned, Yella said it would be better in Queenstown. Apparently everything is better in Queenstown.

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