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I'm going to group the west coast together as I was moving to different places most days and this computer is so slow that I can't bothered making new entries for each place. From Christchurch I took a small bus which drove us directly over to the other side of the island to meet up with the 50 seater main bus, which then took me down to Queenstown over the course of a few days. As with most traveling, you primarily run into British people, and the bus was almost entirely full of them except for a couple of Yanks, one of which was almost always stoned, and a Kiwi travel agent who was having an all expenses paid trip around so that she could recommend the trip, though was too scared to do most of the extreme activities her country had to offer. During the days I tended to chat with whoever was about, but I'd made drinking buddies of a group of Devonian lads on their pre-uni gap year. As the same group stayed together on the bus for about a week everyone mingled well, even if a couple of groups stayed fairly impenetrable to outside contact.
The bus would stop fairly regularly for little side trips to look at waterfalls, lakes, cliffs etc. They were all beautiful, and at first I was as eager as anything to get out there and see them. New Zealand is the most ridiculously pretty country. But after a while everyone got pretty fatigued with them. It's hard to get excited at a hike to your fifth lake of the day when you're hung over and haven't eaten. Still, I was only going to be their once, and took the opportunities when they came.
Our first port of call along the west coast was cunningly titled Westport. No prizes for guessing where the name originated from. It is a nowheresville, a barren place devoid of culture or excitement. I know all this and I barely left the hostel. The character of the town was confirmed when Ginny, our driver turned up in the morning complaining that the bus' windscreen wipers had been stolen in the night. Most everyone spent the night in the hostel, where the TV room had an extensive array of videos (hadn't used them in a long time) to while away the eve.
The next day was spent driving to the legendary 'Poo Pub' (I have no idea why it is so named) at Lake Mancheupa. The pub, which is in the middle of nowhere, is attached to a small hostel - just big enough, weirdly, to house the fifty odd people dumped on it's doorstep everyday by the Kiwi bus. Quite the business arrangement, and something that was repeated a lot throughout the trip around New Zealand. The place is run by Les, an eccentric and impressively bearded octogenarian, and every night there is a fancy dress party. Every night a picture of the group is taken and put on the pub's wall, which was pictures dating back to the mid nineties. Our theme was create your own super hero, and we were given a hour of so in a town to buy supplies. Lacking motivation or creativity I re-hashed the Duff Man outfit I'd once worn to become Beer Boy, or something similar. The night was predictably drunken and fairly fun, though I can't think of any particularly amusing anecdotes off the top of my head.
There was an early start the next day, but thankfully only a short drive to Franz Josef, a small town that exists entirely to provide tours up the glacier the town is named for. We were to stay there for two nights so as to have a full day out on the glacier. I past the day we arrived there catching up on my travel blog an all too rare occurrence, and watching films in the TV room, risking having my eardrums burst as some of the girls screamed through a horror film, which aptly involved mountain climbing. Earlier on the bus Ginny had handed out sheets so we could pre book the more popular activities in Queenstown, including the canyon swing, the bridge bungy jump (43m), the ledge bungy (40m) or the Nevis bungy (134m, the third biggest fixed jump in the world). Being a poor traveler type I knew I could only do one. After much deliberation I was talked into doing the Nevis. I signed my name and the Fear started.
The next day we arose early to start our assault on the glacier. There was a half hour hike through rainforest (yes, Franz Josef is one of the few glaciers to be found in a rainforest!) and along a rocky river bank up to the glacier terminus. We split into groups depending on how fast we were wanting to travel. I naturally, being a rough and tumble type of guy, put myself in the lead group, who had to shoot off up the glacier and carve out a route for the following teams. Well, we didn't carve the route out, the guide did. The ice axes we were given were so blunt as to only be useful as walking sticks - for the most part they were more of a hindrance when scrambling up and down, but having it made me feel like a proper mountaineer. Apparently some idiot had managed to put his own axe through his leg some while ago. Crampons on, we tore up the slope. The pace was tough, but thrill of partly fulfilling my secret and never-acted-upon dream of being a proper mountaineer kept towards the front of the group. That and the numerous packs of sweets is stuffed my pockets with. It was six hours of squeezing down ravines, climbing up and down steep ice slopes and jumping over deep crevices. It really is a good idea not to look down when shuffling past a 50 foot deep black hole. The experience was brilliant, if knackering. By the end I was soaked with rain from the outside, sweat from the inside and badly in need of a beer.
The next day we stayed in Wanaka, a sleepy little town that Shania Twain calls home. There was nothing to do there, but luckily the hostel had TVs in the rooms and showed DVDs all night. No-one did anything here, and a quiet night was recommended by Ginny before the rigours of Queenstown, and adventure capital of the world and a place of wanton drinking. And Nevis.
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