Birthday Week - Part One
NEW ZEALAND | Saturday, 24 April 2010 | Views [447]
Birthday Week: Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday (22/03/10 - 24/03/10)
Queenstown (Southern Laughter)
I decided to give myself a week to celebrate my 23rd birthday this year because it was special in a few ways. Firstly, it was my first birthday in New Zealand (and I don’t know how many more I’ll get to have here), and also because all the way up to now I’d been a student and I felt that this would be my first birthday in the real, grown up world. Yep, I was making a big deal out of nothing, but I was looking for an excuse to treat myself to cool stuff like skydiving!
The Monday of the birthday week was fairly unexciting (if that’s a word), spent mainly on the 9-hour bus journey down to Queenstown from Christchurch. Somehow it took 9 hours down although it only took 8 when we were travelling in the other direction, this wasn’t the best start to the week needless to say.
We decided to do something active on the Tuesday to make up for the sedentary day beforehand; we hiked up the track to where the gondola (cable car to the rest of us) arrives on the top of Queenstown hill. Since this was my first bout of exercise in quite some time, I was breathing fairly heavily from early on (I’m not proud of myself). But the hard work paid off when we got to the top – we broke through the alpine forest and we were greeted with a beautifully clear view of Queenstown, Lake Wakitipu, the Queenstown and Frankton arms which poke inwards into the lake which is so long that you can only see the sides of it, it stretches out over kilometres in both directions.
Needless to say, we took piles of photos and wondered why we never got to see this part of Queenstown (Base Hostel took most of the blame for putting us in a lazy frame of mind, and sapping any energy to do anything with the lack of sleep we got!). This was to add to the photos we took as we were doing the hike (I also used the photo breaks as general catch-my-breath breaks, ingenius), any time we reached a clearing to our right we snapped the lake and mountain views, of which we now have so many pictures!
Since we didn’t really plan the hike, we bought some slightly overpriced sandwiches in the Skyline cafe and sat outside, partly to let the reality sink in – we were really in this beautiful place, it wasn’t a poster we were looking at, the breeze that wrapped around us was real, the sunshine sweeping across the mountains and lake were real, and Queenstown was real! Sounds stupid, but I honestly couldn’t get my head around these facts, that after all of the hard work I was finally looking at the Remarkable Mountain Range in New Zealand, I suppose I never thought I’d follow through with the plans (best decision I’ve ever made).
We were freezing after sitting still in our sweaty clothes (even though girls glow, not sweat), so we decided to jog back down the track for a while to warm up again. Once again, we hadn’t planned for this and I ended up running down with my hands full of stuff because I hadn’t brought a bag and didn’t think I’d need one, and Elaine had brought her handbag (we were quite the sight to be honest!). The downhill run was fun and by the time we got to the bottom, I was roasted and wrecked all over again, feeling great thanks to the endorphins buzzing around inside though.
Strangely enough, when I woke up on Wednesday morning, my legs were aching and not ready for doing much, regardless of the fact that I suggested to Elaine that it’d be good if we do this daily to improve on our fitness! We also had a fairly restless night’s sleep thanks to one of the nice English girls we’d met who had gone out on Tuesday night. She ended up ditching her friend and travelling companion when she had found an eligible young bachelor to accompany her back to the hostel. Elaine was sleeping in the back room part of our eight-bed dorm, where the girl had also set up camp. Things became very uncomfortable for Elaine when she woke to hear a strange man asking where his bed was when the girl said “And this is my bed..”. Things got worse when Elaine got up to go to the bathroom and was met by a lanky young guy in his boxer shorts, asking her to turn off the lights! The downhill spiral continued when, after they had pretended to be asleep for a few minutes, the slobbery kissing began (which I could even hear as Elaine woke me to ask what to do in this situation – my solution was to sleep anywhere but in there). Elaine ended up having a minor showdown with the pair which involved the girl saying nothing and the guy insisting that his intentions were good – “That’s not my style, honestly”!
After all the drama (and a lie-in), Wednesday was spent in and out of the TV room in Southern Laughter, watching DVDs such as Lord of the Rings (I think every backpacker in New Zealand has watched at least one on their travels, judging by the hostels’ DVD lists), and generally chilling to recover from the day (and night) before.
So far, the Birthday Weekof 2010 had started slowly but got more exciting with each day! I didn’t know if I could handle much more with my impending old age looming on the horizon...
