Tuesday May 24th
For those of you that have not as yet had the good fortune to have ventured over to New Zealand its easy to replicate the experience back home, simply print out the most beautifully scenic image that you can find on the internet, cut it to fit the dimensions of your windscreen and then just put your foot down.
Obviously there is a pretty major floor to this plan after a few seconds of driving but for that short interval you can at least experience some semblance of the tranquillity that lies in store, right up until you mow down the very first pedestrian that is.
Seriously though, it is exactly like driving into a different postcard every 100 meters or so, its so bad that my finger is hurting from taking so many photographs and Pauline has had constant motion sickness from my rather erratic habit of preforming 360s in the middle of a single carriage way in order to get the perfect spot!
The roads are absolutely astounding, perfectly suited to the grace and finesse of a sleek Italian sports car, winding and traversing around mountain after mountain, which is a bit of a pity as our motor home couldn’t be less like a sports car if it tried, so for us every corner is either a near miss or a lucky escape, its akin to driving a tonka truck on a scaletrix track.
We got a bit of a result though when we arrived at Christchurch, we had originally booked a 4 birth motor home but when we arrived they had upgraded us to a 6 birth, I swear that for that first night we were so unaccustomed to the room that we suffered from agoraphobia.
But once we got used to the space we realised that this is quite possibly the worst vehicle to have in New Zealand, the first tell tale sign was when it took us over an hour to find a parking space at the supermarket, it would have been a lot longer too if I hadn’t forcibly made an old age pensioner reverse his car out of the space I had ear marked.
Its a pretty formidable sight having a giant motor home reversing rapidly into your 50 year old vintage car and he didn’t look best happy, but youth conquered on this occasion!
We were also blown away by the fact that our shiny new vehicle was equipped with a TV and DVD player, which would have been fantastic had it not been for a gang of mountain parrots chewing off the aerial on our first night meaning that we could only receive a single badly scrambled channel, and only then we had to be parked on top of their transmitter.
Another downside to this is the fact that we now only have access to a single crackly radio station which spends the 90% of its time as static but then randomly shouts the odd word crystal clear, just as you are careering around a 90 degree turn, causing you to momenterily lose focus.
Still not to be defeated we decided to treat ourselves to Billy Connelly's New Zealand tour on DVD which was coincidently when we discovered that the DVD player doesn’t work either, still, luckily we had retained all of those wonderful card games that we had played over and over and over and over again in Australia.
Originally we had intended to follow the Billy Connelly tour in reverse order so the DVD would have been mighty useful, but take it from me, for an old guy my god does he move fast, we are already 3 days behind his schedule and we have only been here for 6.
Although the lack of electrical entertainment is a pain, it has afforded me the opportunity to write a complaint email into the car rental company and I have been having an email war with someone called Mr Smart for days, it has been an endless source of amusement to be totally patronising at every opportunity.
One of the other wonderful things about this new motor home is that you can put something in one cupboard and by the end of a journey they would have miraculously reappeared in another cupboard thanks to the incessant vibration felt throughout the back of the vehicle.
Not content with being unable to witness this spooky phenomenon actually happening Pauline took it upon herself to experiment a little further with this and decided to leave one of the cupboard doors open when we set of earlier today.
The culmination of which was a huge bang, followed several seconds later by a large fizzing sound as the entire contents of a neon orange cordial bottle proceeded to cover Pauline, Tyler, the broken TV, the broken DVD player and the remaining contents of our motor home with very thick, disgustingly sticky gloop, transforming us instantly into a travelling Tango advert.
We are now like the worlds shitest ice cream van, manned by little dayglo orange people and repleat with a jingle that consists of static and the occasion random word, and with absolutely no ice cream whatsoever.
Ohh yeah I guess I should also mention a little bit about New Zealand in this here blog, well lets see, so far we have taken an incredible helicopter ride over the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers, they set us down on top so that we could wander about and sort of imagine what it would be like to have crashed there, as if to emphasise this they even let Tyler fly it for a bit.
Then today we reached Queenstown which is a very very picturesque town (as is pretty much everywhere we have been so far) but definitely the most touristy place we have been so far.
We looked at the local what’s on guide to see what we could sign ourselves up for and the special event for today was the topless bikini contest which seems to be a bit of a contradiction in terms and to be honest I don’t think I have the figure for that any more :-) Incidentally though Tyler was up for going and tried to persuade Pauline to have a quiet night in!
So instead we decided to plum for the Luge which totally rocked, it was in a location that was very possibly a former bond villains lair, but with every possible type of cool thrill ride stuck precariously on top of a mountain instead of just having sharks and laser guns.
For example you could throw yourself of on a para sail or a bungy jump or on the luge or on a mountain bike or you could fly above it on a helicopter or do a sky dive etc etc etc, it was like a giant testosterone filled mountain of death.
So as usual we fitted in perfectly well as we bounded up to the entrance surrounded by adrenalin junkies and potential suicide victims.
Still it was well worth it, the luge track was great fun and we got several goes at hurtling ourselves down the slick cascading runs with only a thin layer of plastic seperating our butts from the very hard looking tarmac beneath.
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