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Sunday night we managed to have a quiet night in and an early night. We woke on Monday to find both ski fields closed, and having discovered there is literally nothing to do in the area when the weather's bad, went to visit Taihape, the world's gumboot capital, and had a good pose with the massive corrugated iron gumboot (after some excellent exploitation of McDonalds free internet once again). We picked up a kebab and headed back to the hostel lounge, planning to enjoy the warm fire and then have another early night. We got chatting to a group that had met each other in Taupo that day and arrived together - Carol, who was from South America, a med student from London, and Simon, a sport climber from Chamonix. I had a hilarious sport vs. trad debate with Simon (everyone else looked confused, Simon looked horrified 'you do ze seconding?' [mimes trying to yank gear out of an imaginary rock whilst dangling on one finger] 'You should be learning on ze top rope and zen climb properly!') and then we watched an interesting French film with some excellent freerunning. A brief mention of going to the pub was made, and then the night took a turn for the random...
After a bit of faffing about washing dishes, finding shoes (everyone) and hats (Simon), we found ourselves (after midnight) in the Crater Bar in Ohakune, where there were mainly staff sitting at the bar eating popcorn. It seemed like a good idea at the time to start off with shots (Jaegermeister for Caroline and I, tequila for everyone else) and in no time at all, we had the music and the smoke machine at full pelt and were dancing away. The occupants of the dancefloor;
- Caroline
- Me
- Carol
- Aforementioned French sport climber
- Aforementioned med student
- Tina, the cook
- Tegan Shush Lava Beer the first, Tina's 5 week old puppy
- Justin, the crazy dreadlocked barman (who'd literally tried to peel my ID apart to figure out how it was fake on Saturday night - funny at the time considering I was 22-and-a-day)
- Mitch from Auckland, the bar's events organiser
- Paul, his mate
- The bar manager, an ex snowboard instructor who's name I can't remember
When I say dancing, I mean pulling the banquette seating away from the walls and belly sliding/roly polying/bouncing along them in turn, followed by jumping off/leapfrogging the backs. Everyone took a turn as DJ, leading to a pretty random lineup and the girls being twirled around the room until dizzy by Simon and Justin, while the blokes made some pretty horrifying attempts at breakdancing! Things eventually wound down at about 4.30, and we were in bed by 5am... Not quite the early night planned!
The morning after, we realised we had lost our game of Closure Roulette once again - Turoa ski field was open! We managed to get a shuttle bus up the mountain at about midday - and boy was I glad I hadn't tried to take Freddy up - the roads were pretty gnarly! It turned out the ski slopes were gnarly as well - icy, full of retards who decided to stop and have a chat in the middle of the beginner slopes (which are nowhere near as wide as Continental ones) and lift supervisors who thought it was more important to wander around randomly chatting than to help people onto the carpet lift or clear the snow which was building up! I narrowly escaped a nasty incident on the carpet lift (a girl's skis stuck in the massive wall of snow either side of the conveyor belt after the wind blew her over; the banks were too high for other skiers to escape the system, so us boarders were hastily unclipping our bindings and trying to release people from said skis) - it seems the carpet lift is fairly new and no one seems to know how to keep it safe! This was followed by a retarded fall in which I felt the vibrations up from my tailbone to my neck - so Caroline and I decided to go for a cup of tea and then worry about manning up later. Unsurprisingly, by the time we emerged, the mountain had been closed (the bus driver later thought they'd never opened the area in such bad conditions before - I guess they're getting desperate to get some money in with the season starting so late). We promptly jumped on the next shuttle down - and waited for an hour for the mountain road to reopen - the road had got so bad that cars were sliding into each other all over the shop apparently! There was a big round of applause for the bus driver when he calmly and safely got us down the mountain in whiteout conditions - it had taken about an hour to travel 16k's!
The forecast is looking a lot better for this weekend, so today we decided to get Waitomo caves and the Otorohanga Kiwi house. But the weather was against us; even 2 hours from the storms on the ski fields, the caves are flooded ('about as flooded as they can be' said a guide)- so no black water rafting, abseiling, climbing, tubing or waterfall jumps! No mountaineering either - conditions are even worse higher up from the ski fields apparently! However, we had a very interesting time at the Kiwi bird house - watching the Kiwi cuddle up to the keeper for a stroke before grabbing her trousers with her beak and trying to kick her to shreds as she neared the burrow was fascinating - Kiwi birds are very territorial apparently! There were lots of other native birds to look at too, like the Pukeko and the crazy duck that chased Caroline out of its enclosure! We visited the Waitomo Discovery Centre, a kind of cave museum, which I enjoyed - especially the glow worm video (not a worm apparently, it's a fly larvae) and the cave challenge - wriggling through a tiny hole in one of the stands made to look like a cave! Otorohanga markets itself as the Kiwiana town - there are a series of displays of Kiwi culture, including Sir Edmund Hillary, Pavolva, No. 8 wire, sheepdogs, the Haka and Kiwi slang - so Caroline and I spent an amusing hour or so looking to those. Not a bad day out considering it was nothing like what we had planned to do for the day!
We're booked in for a walk in one of the dry caves first thing tomorrow morning, and then will probably head back to Ruapehu to see how conditions are going on the slopes - I'm still living in hope for a bluebird day and the chance to get up some mountains! Also, the nightlife is promising to be excellent, with hostels fully booked for the weekend (our hostel had no beds on Saturday night, but the owners have kindly offered for us to sleep in one of the lounges)!
Too much snow for snowsports, too much wind for walking, too much water for rafting, too much rain for anything else outdoors, tailbone about to fall off, stinking cold - and I'm still absolutely loving New Zealand! Sweet as!
- comments
Anne Poo about the skiing but that pics looks awesome! I'm suprised u're not on the floor doing a head spin ! : P xx
Paul Hahaha this night was ridiculous :)