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So I just had a little peek at TravelBlog for the first in many months, and noticed I have at some point inexplicably been awarded membership of the “TravelBlog Hall of Fame”. I did not know that this was a thing, but it would seem that it is a thing, and I am in it.
http://www.travelblog.org/Topics/34398-1.html
Apparently only 20 of the 300,000 or so bloggers on the site earn this each year, so I’m utterly baffled as to how I’ve found myself on the list. But thanks!! This is awesome and confusing in equal measure.
I suppose I should use this as motivation to finish uploading my Africa journal before I lose it all by accidentally tipping gin and tonic on my laptop again.
But I just got back from a little trip to New Zealand which I kind of wrote about as I went along (I always keep a diary of my travels, though I don’t always inflict it on the general public), so I thought might as well start there.
Everybody has been telling me that the best thing to do while I’m in Australia is New Zealand. I’ve been working at a hospital
Autumn Tree
Only 3 hours away from Sydney, but an entirely different season.on the coast outside of Sydney for 3 months now, and when I asked the other British doctors (for there are many of us) what exploring I should do in my limited time down under, New Zealand was pretty much the unanimous number one recommendation. Even some of the Aussies have reluctantly conceded this. New Zealand is not to be missed.
I didn’t take much convincing (I rarely do), so when I managed to wangle 16 days off from my Emergency Department rota, the biggest chunk of leave I’m going to get during my time out here, I decided to dedicate it to exploring South Island.
Unfortunately this happened to be in May. Borderline winter. But I figured I could handle it. I’ve spent 8 years living in Yorkshire, how bad can it really be? My plan was to fly into Queenstown and out of Christchurch, but nothing much else was definite.
I loved Queenstown before I’d made it off the plane. Even the airport is in a beautiful spot. I can think of few other places that have a stunningly located airport. It's like New Zealand has so much incredible scenery they can afford to plonk
an ugly great concrete runway on a spot that in many countries would be in a national park.
No worries, mate! We've got heaps of this stuff. Sweet as. I’d booked a car hire package that was in all seriousness called "El Cheapo", super budget older cars with over 200,000 kms for people who don't care what the thing they’re driving looks like. The car was exactly how you would envision it to be based on this description. I was randomly assigned a manual transmission (you don't get the luxury of choice with El Cheapo), so the car hire guy asked me if I was sure I could drive manual.
Now Roxy, my current Australian car, is an automatic. I am firmly of the opinion that automatic cars are for pussies, but when I first moved to Aus I had exactly two days to obtain a car before starting my commute to work. I just bought the least shitty car I could for the money I had, from the least criminal looking dealer. Australians love automatics. They're unavoidable, really. A car salesman cheerfully assured a friend of mine that automatics are better because it leaves one
hand free to hold a beer. So I bought Roxy, mainly because she has a roof rack which makes me look like I surf.
So I'd been driving an automatic for all of three months. But I confidently reassured the car hire guy that I can dive ANY kind of car, in fact I recently drove a 4 wheel drive pickup truck across Africa, and that had TWO separate gearsticks and a diff lock. He looked suitably impressed.
So after making this bold claim I pulled out of the carpark, immediately switched on the windscreen wipers while attempting to indicate left and then stalled in the middle of a roundabout, directly in the path of several buses. The buses were full of gapyear backpackers, all of whom pointed and laughed at me, along with the entire assembled staff of the car hire company. It then took me 30 seconds to restart the car, during which time I drew a complete mental blank and start essentially stamping on pedals at random. This whole sequence of events took place to an aggressive drum and bass soundtrack, blasting at full volume out of the open car windows from a
PianoMan
This guy was playing his beautiful antique piano on the shore of the lake as the sun was setting. Too perfect.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAOyXxf0ezI radio station it took me three days to figure out how to switch off.
Luckily after this little blip I quickly settled into driving a proper car again, and me and Ruby (the name I settled on for my little red hire car) got along just fine.
Half an hour later I was sat on the shore of the Queenstown lake, watching the setting sun add subtle pastel tints to the snow on the mountains, defending the massive carton of steamed mussels I had just purchased from a hoard of peckish ducks. Gotta love any country in which fresh shellfish is a legitimate takeaway food.
Despite assuring myself I am now of a more refined breed of backpacker, roughly three hours after arriving in the country I still ended up playing drinking games with some girls who work at the hostel, which somehow escalated to dancing on tables in a totally contemptible bar. This was fun up to a point, but by about 1am I couldn't handle any more shit music, and when a 19 year old who looked like he’d wandered out of an episode of The Inbetweeners tried to chat me up,
my "fuck this" threshold was reached and I had to leave. I'm sure there are some good bars in Queenstown, but that night I did not find them.
In the morning I got up and took my guidebook and my hangover off for a walk around the lake. Queenstown offered almost limitless possibilities for me to injure myself in exciting and unusual ways, and I needed to choose which of these I most wanted to avail myself of. I definitely wanted to skydive. Definitely. Bungee jumping I had recently done in Zambia, so that was out. Rock climbing and horse riding were both appealing. Downhill mountain biking was a definite. I'd done some proper
downhill biking once before in Bolivia , years ago, and had been super keen to try it again ever since. Bolivia was slightly different in that we'd been dropped off at the top of a massive mountain and spent two days with a guide trying to get down it. Queenstown has a bike park with a much smaller mountain and a gondola to whisk you up to the top as many times as you like. Just like snowboarding! Obviously a brilliant idea. So that afternoon I hired a really nice
full suspension mountain bike for the day and hopped on the gondola.
By the time I got to the top I was starting to have second thoughts. It all looked rather steep. There were no other tourists here, just extremely tough looking Kiwis with body armour, GoPros strapped to their helmets and visible scars. It was so high my ears had popped on the way up. And I didn’t actually know what I was doing. I thought back to the
Bolivia trip . Back then we’d had guides with us, and it hadn’t exactly been incident free. Come to think of it, we all came flying off the bikes multiple times every day. One guy even knocked himself out. Back then I was a med student and obviously invincible, so this was not concerning. Now I'm an Emergency Medicine doctor with more experience of traumatic brain injury, I'm slightly more risk averse.
I figured I had to get down somehow, so I picked the only green coloured track on the map, assuming green is universal for “least deadly”, and went for it. About 30 seconds later I slammed the brakes on abruptly so I could stop and contemplate weather
Paraglider
The view from the top of the gondola. some kind of terrible disaster had caused vast chucks of the path to disintegrate, or weather it was actually supposed to be like that. I realised I’d somehow accidentally veered the wrong way onto a run called the “Femur Fragmenter” or something equally horrifying, and had to suffer the indignity of dragging my bike back up. After this little false start, things improved. The green track was 7km, winding around the side of the mountain through shady woodland, with some seriously steep bits but nothing that made me stop and swear. I caught snatched glimpses of incredible views in between keeping my eyes fixed in mild horror at the ground falling away in front of me.
The second and third times around I was much more confident and faster. The fourth time I got cocky, tried one of the 'intermediate' tracks and totally bottled it.
On the gondola on the way back up, I got chatting to one of the GoPro wearing Kiwis. He told me I was lucky because the bike lift was due to close for winter tomorrow. It was a beautiful warm day so it was hard to see the logic in this, but
I was pleased I hadn’t missed it. We then had the following conversation…
Me: “As far as sports where you chuck yourself downhill at great speed go, this is at least as much fun as skiing, and probably easier to pick up for a beginner. Why don't more people do this?”
Buff Kiwi Biker: “It can be really dangerous. We’ve had a very bad season for injuries.”
Me: “But skiing is dangerous too… though maybe that’s because more fuckwits ski?”
Buff Kiwi Biker: “I think so. This isn’t something tourists can just do without any previous experience.”
There was then an awkward 7 second pause, after which he added.
"I mean not you obviously... you'll probably be fine".
When I reached the bottom for the 4th time I had partially lost control of my lower limbs, and was congratulating myself on having opted for an afternoon pass instead of a whole day. I had a little rest and amused some random bystanders by attempting to drink from a water fountain with my helmet still on, accidentally headbutting a brick wall. Suddenly I realised the gondola was about to close, so I
QueenstownLake
The water was perfectly clear, and frrrreeeeezing. tried to sneak on for one more go. Gondola man was just shutting the gate ahead of me but I talked him into letting me through, explaining that soon I will be moving to London, where the only adventurous cycling I'll get to do will involve dodging being crushed by an articulated lorry during rush hour. He relented and let a final few people sneak on. I realised this meant I'd be the last person down (due to my comparative slowness), and since it was the last day of the season, if I came off and impaled myself on a tree branch, my frozen remains wouldn't be found until spring.
Spurred on by this cheery thought, I set off a little more slowly. So I'm not sure how it happened, but as the bike skidded out from under me and I sailed gracefully head first into a bush, the following thoughts went through my head -
1) Don't fall with your arms outstretched you'll break your scaphoid! 2) What!? That's better than landing on your face you idiot just put them out PUT THEM OUT. 3) I wonder if the random travel insurance policy I purchased on my phone 3 minutes before the plane departed will cover helicopter evacuation?
When I landed I sat perfectly still for five seconds waiting for some part of me to start hurting or bleeding, then quickly realised I was completely uninjured and a helicopter probably wouldn't be necessary.
Shortly after that, while examining my iPhone to check whether it had shattered into a million tiny pieces, I realised the battery was flat from taking photos anyway.
So I made it back down without further incident and sustained no injuries, just general soreness of my bum, knees, thumbs and boobs, in roughly that order of severity. I didn’t bring a sports bra to New Zealand with me, which was an error because it is a very bouncy country. And I had already booked to go horse riding the next day, which wasn’t going to help with any of the above.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Mussels
I love, love, love this photo.