Here are some links to more photos that I’ve added to my Facebook account. They are pictures from my last days in Queenstown, as well the days I spent in Dunedin after leaving Queenstown, including my tour of the Cadbury Factory and the Speight’s Brewery. Fun times all around. Very little beats free beer and chocolate. Well, okay, quite a few things do but I find happiness in setting the bar low. Sue me. And enjoy the pics.
Queenstown 4
Dunedin 1
Dunedin 2
For the last seven months I’ve had the incomparable experiece of living in one of the most beautiful towns on earth, set in the cradle of the mountains, working a job that I enjoyed, and experiencing it all alongside people from all over the globe (although 90% of them were English). I left the United States all those months ago hoping for a worthwhile experience, a good job, an experiences that would make me a stronger better person. And once again by some equally incomparable grace I was given this and more.
Queenstown is behind me now. I left my adopted hometown four days ago, stepping onto a bus bound for Dunedin. It was an emotionally rough final 24 hours in Queenstown, the depression kindly diminished by the sentiment heaped upon me by the friends I’ve made here. Some of them bought me drinks. Some of them made me dinner. And some of them dropped me sixty metres off a ledge.
Let me back up.
It started about a month ago, the preparations for my exit. I handed in my notice of resignation at work and the countdown began. In point of fact I had always planned on leaving even sooner, the beginning or middle of May. I stayed longer for primarily two reasons: 1) Two of the other duty managers decided to take holiday time on the same weeks, and I wasn’t about to leave the remaining two in the lurch by skipping selfishly out at that time but mostly because of 2) Indiana Jones. I was also not about to leave a good job as a cinema manager/projectionist before being present for the return of my childhood hero. It was a decision I didn’t regret. Maybe it wasn’t as great as the other three, but I still got to thread up an Indiana Jones movie (and I was the first to do so by threading up the test screening) and that’s something to look back on fondly. If only I had sense enough to leave after Indy but before the Sex and the City movie. That nonsense managed to turn the cinema upside down and vaccuum clear nearly all testosterone in sight. The poor bastards who limped in to see the movie with their partners wore such defeated expressions it felt like a gender under siege. And the sight of Cynthia Nixon’s naked front bits did absolutely nothing to ease the horrid imbalance. It was not the ideal way to end my tenure, but I have enough good memories from my time working there that the fact that my final screenings were riddled with liver-spotted pseudo-sexiness won’t wilt them too much. And Sal was good enough to make sure that the last movie I actually threaded up wasn’t SATC, but the vastly superior Iron Man. And I can certainly live with that.
On the home front on the eve of my departure I was able to enjoy a dinner of freshly-felled venison steaks thanks to my flatmate Nick and his .308. The beverages for my last meal in Queenstown were kindly provided by Ant and Jules, who supplied me with a nice selection of Christchurch microbrews which I delightedly polished off over the course of the evening. I finished the evening by heading into town to meet up first with Sal then Ant and Jules for drinks and good conversation, thinking to myself the entire time how fortunate I’ve been in the people department of Queenstown life.
The final day saw me packing up all my worldly belongings (as far as New Zealand is concerned anyways) back into my pack, throwing the remainder into my big blue duffel bag, and saying my farewells to the place I called home for seven months. That is… not until after finally giving in to Nick’s regular suggestions that I let him shout me a go on the Shotover Canyon Swing. For those that can’t quite decipher what this entails from its rather self-explanatory name, they take you out onto a cantilever platform about 80 meters above the Shotover River, strap you into a harness connected to a large long cable (NOT a bungie cord) and then they drop you. Literally. Sometimes they even push you. Sometimes they strap you into a lawn chair and politely kick you over the edge. Sometimes they just let you hang onto a bar until you can’t anymore and you just drop. You drop 60 meters in free fall to be exact before hitting the edge of the swing’s arc, then the tension on the cable takes over and you slow to a stop (unless you’re a big fattie, in which case you swing like a pendulum because of your own Big Mac enhanced kinetic energy). And you are, of course, cursing the gleeful sadists who dropped you in the first place. Having never actually fallen 60 meters in my life before, I can tell you it’s really only frightening for about a half second, which is about as long as it takes you to travel that distance. Then you realize you did not, as expected, dash your brainpan to bits on the jagged rocks below but instead feel utterly exhilarated and grateful to be alive, hanging meters in space in the middle of the Shotover River canyon. I honestly never really thought Nick would be successful in getting me to actually do the Canyon Swing. He got me to do it twice.
It’s tough to think about all the “lasts.” The last Fergburger, the last Connectabus ride (which was oddly on time), the last walk along my lake, the last time leaving my nice if overrefrigerated flat on Frankton Road. I know I’ll be back. It’s a simple matter of genetics now. Queenstown is in my blood. I tried not to think about all the last as I sat on that bus on my way out of town, watching Cecil and Walter and the Remarks slowly drift away from me and ultimately out of view. I tried to think of the words of the wise Egg Shen: “China is in the heart, Jack. Wherever I go, she’s with me.” That’s how I feel about Queenstown. Despite the tourists, the cost of living, and all the hard work that went into living there, it was an amazing and unforgettable experience and it’s a part of me now. And it will continue to exist in my heart wherever the next journeys take me, and it will come with me all the way back home.
Just posted some photographs from a trip I took today out to Doubtful Sound, second longest of the fiords in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park, three times longer than Milford Sound. The trip also included a short detour down into the belly of the Manapouri Underground Power Station. It was a pretty spectacular day, and a great start to my final week in Queenstown. Hope you enjoy the photos!
Photographs from my journey across New Zealand and my Return.