roganjosh

There are lots of extreme activites you can get up to in Queenstown - Bungee jumping, skydiving,  white water rafting, that kind of thing - but I think you have to go a long way to beat taking snowboarding lessons in weather so bad that all the slopes except for the nursery one are closed and the wind is so strong that gusts of it will actually stop you from sliding down a hill. Slightly worse than that was the horizontal hail that would whip across the slope and hit you like shotgun pellets, leaving us knocked over on the floor and cowering with hands over faces. That said the sliding around part of the day was huge fun, even when I occasionally stuck the wrong edge into the snow and stacked it. gnarly dude!

So what else have I been up to? Well I spent a night in Golden Bay to visit a friend of my sister’s who moved out here a couple of years back after marrying a kiwi. It was nice to spend some time with a family for a while instead of random backpackers! After that I jumped back on the stray bus for a stop in Barrytown - a real middle of nowhere place where I did some carving, and then on to Franz Josef where I walked on a glacier and came second in a pool competition! I did win a t-shirt and a $15 bar tab though, so I guess losers can win too.

Going to see if I can go hang-gliding over here at some point, which might come at the expense of me doing a bungee jump - There’s only so many daft things you can fit into a day!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 11:59 pm and is filed under travelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.