Day three in Queenstown already.
I'm typing this on Jim's laptop, sitting on his sofa. He is at work. Tip of the day is: don't buy laptops that are so expensive that you're scared to take them out of the house.
Back to what's going on. An easy flight to Queenstown brought me quickly into their tiny airport. Loads of money has been spent doing it up so that visitors can start buying expensive sports/adventure equipment before the even pick up their luggage. Which was excellent in that the luggage collection conveyor belts were at the end of the Airport building where anyone could get to, unlike in England where they are part of the super-secure assault course you have to tackle to try to get into the real world. In fact, that's where Jim came and found me!
Jim said 'Hi brother' to me from behind me, and it was totally unlike we hadn't seen each other for 14 months - a bit of smalltalk about what had and what hadn't been going on in London and then those months were an irrelevance. Jim had hitched to the airport, and we got a bus to Queenstown proper to go back to his place.
He has quite a cool place, just up a short but nasty hill from the very centre of the town. I dumped my stuff on his floor and then what happened is pretty blurry. He went to work for a few hours and I thought about having a shower but collapsed on his bed before I could get even that far.
Then we went out and played pool. 5-0 victory.
The next day we ski'd pretty early. Got some cheap ski rental but the ski pass is about £45 for the day and another five for the long bus ride up to The Remarkables. The skiing started badly with really poor visibility but the sun came out and everything was soon great. In the evening, I passed out again by the fire before we went out for some fairly serious boozing. Queenstown is very much set up for this, and we went to a few fairly cool places. We missed the band but the evening was fun and I met a few 'locals'. That being people who have been here more than a couple of months as far as I can tell. The majority of the people here are definitely British or Irish.
Having felt pretty much fixed on Thursday, Friday morning saw we wake with a very mild hangover but a triple dose of jetlag. Jim shot off to work early, and I managed to get up at 11:45. I heated up some chilli from the night before and watched a horrific documentary about a passenger jet crashing into a mountain. I tried to light a fire - the wood fire is the home's only heat source and makes zero difference to Jim's bedroom located on the floor below. I failed however, by which point the house had mysteriously warmed up and I couldn't be bothered to try again. I spent some time writing this blog but by about four I succumbed to the inevitable and went straight back to bed.
I was woken at around 8 - Dad and Lesley had shown up. The sleep really helped but I still felt quite a bit like a monger. We went out and it took a while to find a place with room for us to sit and eat. We had a smallish but good feed and a few beers - I was on the diet coke mostly though because it's not good when you can't tell whether you're slightly drunk or monumentally tired. We had fun discussing their trip so far and looking at a few of their photos. We had a final pint in a nice Irish pub which had a guy playing guitar well but singing songs hideously.
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