Queenstown to Auckland

Time seems to be moving at a much slower pace than it was a few weeks ago. I can’t say I haven’t felt this before though as it was exactly this lingering feeling I had in Sydney almost a year ago. It’s slightly different though because now I am preparing for my inevitable departure home while back then I was looking forward to future travel plans. It is time though. My travels, I feel, have served their purpose and it is time to rejoin a life which was momentarily interrupted. I look forward to seeing familiar faces and places, visiting family and friends, seeing more of my own country, and feeling, in a word, home.
I’ll give an update on what I’ve been up to the past couple months and, if nothing else, remind myself a long time from now what I did (which I think is probably the real service of my blog). The winter season officially ended on October 6. The last day was supposed to be on the 3rd and then they changed it to the 11th and finally settled on the 6th. I made the analogy several times towards the end that it was like summer camp as a kid; everything was ending and we were all parting ways. There was a string of going away parties towards the end and with the ever changing end of season date there never seemed to an official end for us. I missed the end of season ball thrown by NZSki because I opted to host a lingerie show instead (I made the right decision based on everyone else’s description of the ball). I threw together a plan to drive up to Auckland and after a hurried final week of goodbyes and one-last-party get-togethers I packed my bag, picked up my car, said my own goodbyes to my flatmates and Lida, my dear roomy for the past several months who I’m sure I’ll see again, and hit the road north with my last minute travel partner Cherie, a nurse at Coronet who responded to my last minute call for anyone needing a ride north.
I left Queenstown on October 11 and headed north with my travel companion. I had put an ad in the Lakes Weekly Bulletin asking it anyone going north wanted a ride. Thankfully Cherie responded one day before I left and so I wasn’t left with the burden of paying for all the petrol by myself. We started out on Monday around noon and drove for about 4 hours through picturesque New Zealand countryside until we got to Methven, the home town of Mt. Hutt (NZSki’s third mountain) and the first place I had considered working way back when. Upon arriving I could not have been happier with my decision to work in Queenstown; Methven was a ghost town. Apparently it had been put this way due to the earthquake that hit Christchurch just over a month before which caused severe damage to the city which lay just to the north-east of Methven. There were two pubs in the center of town, the Brown Pub and the Blue Pub, and all around these two establishments lay empty streets with baron sidewalks guarded by darkened store windows. Granted we arrived there at dusk but still, there was nothing going on. So we procured a couple rooms at the local YHA and decided to check out the town’s social scene. We didn’t find it.
The next day we got up early and made the drive to Mt. Hutt to do what would be my last day of the season on a snowboard. The drive up was more hazardous than I imagined as we had heard stories all season long at Coronet of people driving off the road and plummeting to their ultimate demise some hundreds of feet below. In fact there was only one person this happened to and his car was still down there due to the impracticality of hauling it out during the winter. We had a great day on the slopes however and got to meet several of our company cousins there in the F&B Department as well as a few friends I randomly ran into who were up there for the day from Queenstown. We joined our distant co-workers for a drink later in town and eventually we made our way back to the Blue Pub, once again, where, it turned out, the social scene finally showed up if only by quite random and surprising circumstances. As Cherie and I were talking I glanced around to see one, then two, then three, then four of my now ex-bosses from Coronet. There, in a considerably altered state of consciousness and far from their home mountain, were the men and woman who ran the Coronet Peak; Hamish, the ski area manager, Speedy, the assistant ski area manager, Jenn who was my boss in F&B, and of course, James Coddington, the Codfather, the CEO of it all. It was fun to have a few drinks with them completely outside of work and the season. I got to have a heart to heart with Jenn who asked me to come back for next season but I told her that probably wasn’t in the play book. Cherie and I eventually said our goodbyes, left the Blue Pub, procured our rooms once again at the YHA, and woke up to find ourselves driving for the next seventeen hours to Wellington (I did however get to stop in Greymouth where I took the Monteith’s Brewery Tour…..I’ve had better).
After getting into Picton to find out the ferry to the north island was full, and after getting caught trying to take a cheeky shower at a local hostel, and after waiting standby for the ferry on the off chance we got on, and after watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on the ferry we finally did got on, we arrived in Wellington at 1:30am to meet my friend Lauren, a Tennessean I’d worked with back at Coronet, who’s amazingly nice apartment we got to crash at for what was left of the night.
The next day Lauren showed us a bit of Wellington where I bought a book at a second hand shop (and I do mean second hand, maybe even third hand) on 18th century English history and a CD of classical marches. We went to a museum on Maori history, had a bite to eat and hit the road just as the sun was setting. We found ourselves driving for the first time after dark which, due to the hurried lifestyle of little sleep over the past few days, required a continual exchange of driving duties. We made it to Ohakune by 9ish and Cherie had a friend who lived there and worked as the doctor up at Mt. Raupehu (my second choice of ski field to work at for the season and I was once again thankful that I had chosen Queenstown). The next day we laid low as the weather was not the best for a day on the mountain and I planned the rest of my trip to Auckland with a stop in the Tongariro National Park in order to hike the active volcano. The next day Cherie and I parted ways as she was staying in Ohakune for a few days while I needed to get to Auckland. I set out for the national park and after a few passes found it and set out on the hike. It took a roundtrip time of 4 hours to go up and come down but it was unbelievably worth it. The hike was exhausting, the climb seemed never ending, but the views were spectacular. I deviated from the trail towards the top and climbed a summit of mangled rocks. I made it to the top and could hardly believe the site of my surroundings. There, right beside me, was Mt. Doom. Even after a season working on a mountain this was by far one of the best views I’d had.
Once done with the side trip I found myself driving a long road north, eventually arriving in Auckland late in the afternoon. As I approached the city I could see the Sky City Tower appear behind the other buildings. The tower is the sort of land mark for the city of Auckland and it closely resembles the towers of Seattle and Toronto. The idea I had of what the city would look like was more of something resembling a large town with a few buildings. I had even asked a friend if Auckland had highways to which he replied, “They’re called motorways.” (Also, on a side note, sidewalks are called footpaths). But Auckland is indeed a proper city with all the amenities you’d think a city should have. It slightly reminded me of Sydney but on a slightly smaller scale.
And so, I reached one of the lasts major stops of my travels. I had given myself 6 weeks to find a job, find an apartment (which it turned out was not a feasible thing to do), and save some money before beginning the journey home via Fiji and Hawaii. After being here a few days I was reminded very much of my time in Melbourne and Sydney as I was practically doing to the exact same thing again: starting over. Thankfully a few friends from Coronet had come up here as well so I at least had a few mates around when I needed them. However, everything else was new and I had to find my way around the city with a map, learn where the grocery stores were (I still can’t find them), and learn how to maneuver the local job website. It’s been a familiar feeling to start from scratch in each place over the past year and so it was nothing new for me, it was actually getting slightly old. Since I got here 2 weeks ago, I have indeed found a job at a fine dining restaurant called Clooney and come to the realization that I’d rather stay in a hostel for another month than tell my would-be flatmates that I had to leave only 4 weeks after getting there and hope they give me my bond back. I am biding my time though and counting down the weeks. I am looking forward to seeing Boston again and all my friends and family. And of course I can’t wait to see the look on Dad’s face when I show up unannounced just in time for Christmas. It’s been a good trip and I do think that the reason I came away has been justified. I have a plan for the next two years and when I get back the only thing I’ll have to do is implement it. Shouldn’t be too hard right? This will be one of the last blogs I’ll write while out here and so I feel it necessary to remind myself 50 years from now what a young me was doing with his life. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned while traveling it is this: even if home is where you make it and no matter where I live in the world, I have family and friends that make home worth coming back to.