Rugged, unforgiving and with no explaining necessary, unique in its man made nature, yet precious for its unpredictable dangers, remarkable in its simplicity, the craggy mountain under snow looks at me, across the lake, adding some smoke, sitting here on this porch, to the clouds that tower over it.
Two Irish lads that simultaneously signed up for the green card lottery in the U.S. and applied for landed immigration in Canada, destination: Whistler, BC. Two Japanese kids with Rosignol THC boards and appropriate leaf stickers to accompany those boards, who loved my Suspect sticker with the Yoda character puffing. A British guy and a German fraulein, cute, very much into each other, teaching each other how to curse in their languages.
A kid from French Alps, who got right and left rental boots of different sizes. A British dude of Pakistani descent who travels around the world, and just started snowboarding: still at the point where instructors tell him to put more of his weight on the front foot. And bend those knees. Fucking tourists.
Rainy days in winter feel miserable anywhere in the world. It is too cold to get wet and enjoy it. Unless you are sheep. So, I decided to take a miserable walk down the miserable town center of Queenstown on a miserable rainy day in August.
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There are things to get used to in Queenstown. What side of the road do you look at first, for starters. Then, that there is never really winter. It is like Bay Area, U.S. or Trieste, Italy. But with Suisse sized Alps right behind it. Very steep place. 4wd country. And there is no other place you can find illegally working Suisse citizens.
Gas so expensive it is hard to believe New Zealanders didn’t develop their weapons of mass destruction and nuked a couple of countries. Instead they are getting their cheap electricity from clean hydro power. And driving Subarus and those preferred vehicles of warlords worldwide: Toyota Landcruisers. American SUV-s are fairly rare. So, the heat and everything else in the place is running on electricity. Queenstown is where Auckland’s elite escape from the city’s summer heat. Hamptons? In winter it is pretty dead. With Yen-paying Japanese kids packing the hotels and motels. With European kids packing the cheaper hostels. With the proverbial snowboard tribe trying to get the best value out of private rentals. It works more kind of like you are in some tourist place on Croatian coast, not like the US. Opatija? With Triglav behind? You get ripped seriously if you go through an agency (you end up paying nearly 5 rents in advance). But you can completely just respond to some wild flyer in a restaurant. Ok, not only the cars drive on the wrong side of the road, but the gondola is built on the wrong mountain! It serves The Ledge bungy site (and a restaurant). Bungy is the second national sport over here (rugby is still #1). I guess ‘hugdy’ is next. During the winter most of the private rentals would be vaccant if there is not for the snowboard tribe - and hotels and restaurants would not have any staff left. Half of the Queenstown population are Aussies and Poms, or whinging Poms as my landlord calls them. So, there are some options. But the landlord won’t be happy if you trash the place that they rent to some high paying family from Auckland in summer. Word Poms, as a name for British people here, is derived from POHM (Prisoner Of Her Majesty). POHM-s were the first British settlers in New Zealand. And everyone coming from the U.K. is still considered a Pohm, only ‘h’ got lost in New Zealand spelling. Now I understand my landlord’s Dave's "whinging poms" term - here there are two young lads from London - Charles and Giles - they simply can't stop complaining how this place sucks. I couldn't get them to say a single nice word about the entire New Zealand. Queenstown is way to ugly and provincial for them and ski resorts are beyond primitive. Where are the lifts? Charles is comparing this recently settled town to Serre Chevaliere, a place in South France where he rode in winter, developed as early as two thousand years ago by Romans. (Of course, by now the French built a gondola to take your ass out of your condo to the top of the mountain.) The bus ride is an ordeal that they didn't take up often. So, they are here since June and they packed so far about 15 days on snow, about as much as I hope to have by the end of my 20 day stay. They sleep till noon, play video games till six and then go out and drink cheap alcohol at one of that dingy and, to them, quite disagreeable tiny cafes around Queenstown. Gee, what a waste of air fare that was. |
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This, indeed, is a small country. There are only three TV channels. And there are less people living here than on Manhattan. And, if you visit the Airtime Magic museum at the Auckland International Airport, you will see a bit of Kiwi ingenuity: the 1947 New Zealand jukebox, which ‘mechanism’ consists of a hole in the glass front, through which customers put a hand, grabbed a record and put it on the turntable, dropped a coin and it played.
Infrastructure everywhere in New Zealand is developed to support that thinking. Remarkables could not possibly handle the amount of customers Killington receives. But there is never that many people in Queenstown anyway. And most of New Jersey drivers couldn’t possibly handle the road to Remarkables. Resorts here are unique. There is the 'resort village' like in Europe, so everything is at walking distance, and despite Queenstown population is about 1/4 of Rutland it has an airport, more shops and caffes and clubs and stuff than Killington, and handles 1 million people a year. This however is where similarity with Europe ends. Snowsports are pretty new here, and instead of 60 people carrying gondolas, there are 40 people carrying buses that drive you over improbably steep, winding, unpaved, unguarded, likely to be illegal as public roads in the liability obsessed US, from the village to the mountain.
Neighboring Arrowtown is part Europe, part Wild West. You can get Apfel Strudel on one side of the road and a gold nugget on the other. Australian nuggets are rugged and have a little more red in them than the smooth, flat New Zealand ones. There is no security at the store. Two grandmotherly ladies are offering the goods. I guess, armed robberies must be rare. And the gateway road is a bitch. Plus, remember, you are on the island a three our jet ride from any other country. But you can still rent the equipment and go gold-panning yourself. Huge nugget at display was taken out of the river just last year.
There are couple of companies running buses, and they are competing. So, there is cramming people into the bus and rallying up and down the mountain road. Which is like in Bosnia. Ok, Bosnia is in Europe, too. But a different kind of Europe. There is one high speed quad on one mountain here (Coronet Peak). There is a gondola , but as I said, it takes you to the wrong hill, bungy-jumping. The rest of the lifts are old chairlifts, plates, rope-tows and T-bars.
Thinking back about the global warming, it is impossible not to be a hypocrite. Snowboarding, besides being a refuge for the world’s cool post-punk anti-elite, is dependent on highly developed industrial society: lifts need power, snowmaking needs power, helicopters need gas, cats need gas, buses need gas, snowboard gear is made from the latest hi-tech materials, etc.
Whatever the reasons, there are people from all corners of the world that decided to put up with some physical discomforts and to abandon the ‘normalcy’ of status-driven lifestyle, and sip their latte in this tourist netherworld with no tourists around, with the distant sound of steamboat Earnslaw’s horn, that sounds like a big beached whale, cruising out to lake Wakatipu.
Because, essentially, this is what we are all looking for: feeling alive. Sometimes inflicting pain or risking life is the only way to regain that feeling. The aseptic, sterile atmosphere of the everyday civilized life took that feeling away from our existence, making our lives more efficient, longer lasting, more productive at the price of being mostly flavorless.
But miraculously I felt just fine on a snowboard. It was overcast and I didn’t see whether I was going downhill or uphill any more, so I got stuck in the flats, though. And the next day I made it to Coronet Peak and it was sunny and there was powder in the back gullies and far right from the top of the Greengates chair.
Curiously, maybe even out of professional curiosity, he was really interested whether I have covered my needs in New Zealand, which I already did. First things, first. Marijuana completes a snowboarder. More or less. There are dudes and mates that don’t smoke, but they are rare.
In a city of 12000 this could be unusual, but in Queenstown it is not surprising: I met somebody who speaks my native language. Sanja is from Switzerland, from a mixed marriage between a Serb father and a Croat mother coming from small villages in vicinity of Vukovar, the most destroyed city in the war against Croatia in 1992. She snowboards and works in housekeeping in one of the hotels here.
But that reminded me, that while this may seem like a fairy tale life at the end of the world - hey, this is the Middle-earth from the Lord of the Rings, isn’t it? - it is not entirely immune from the plagues of the rest of the world - like those pesky computer viruses.
Sometimes I would like to know them so I can tell them that I understand where they are coming from and that if they just listen to me for a minute, they will realize that they do not need to make viruses to prove their unique personalities. There are other ways. And they are more fun.
They do have snowmaking (fat guns, again, like in Europe), but it is largely unnecessary. Their grooming consists of a cat driving up the hill once. Parks have kickers that are too large for the length of the tabletops as a general rule, so Ryan has to speed check if he doesn't want to land on the second tabletop in the row. There is plethora of rails and piles of Japanese high school kids who spend their days sliding over them while fooling their parents at home in about 3 times more expensive Japan that they are learning English at one of those numerous little language schools scattered around the outskirts of Queenstown.
There are some pretty advanced things, though: Coronet Peak has night skiing from the top; Remarkables have a rather large magic carpet on their beginner hill (as large as the entire fixed grip tow on Rams Head kids learning area); Remarkables have also some interesting designs in their beginner area 'kind of a park' - a little wooden bridge you can go over, a tunnel, and a snow-spiral; all elements in the park are graded, just like I saw in France, as beginner, intermediate and advanced (there is probably less lawyers in New Zealand...).
Ski and snowboard school reminds me of Killington. Even lifties do. It is kind of the same kind of crowd drawn to that positions as it is at Killington. Same attitudes. Good weed, too. And the students kind of look just the same. Particularly because nzski.com uses the same Rosignol rental boards that ASC does. Coronet Peak has a ski-instructor from Zagreb, Croatia (Daniel), who works there for the fifth season. And since the world is actually so small. My snowboarder friend from Zagreb is coming to New Zealand later this summer/winter and staying at his place.
It is blessing to hike with Tony, because a) he is in unbelievable shape and always goes first boot-kicking, b) he knows exactly where on the top of the ridge will be a huge rock that we can use to strap in shielded from the 50mph winds, c) he has a transceiver, shovel, first aid kit, and all the necessary avalanche paraphernalia, d) he knows on which side of the narrow chute is a 300 foot cliff that needs to be avoided, which is kind of important when you are not only out of bounds but also out of visual range from anybody at the resort (also, because there is so much more better riding out of bounds than in-bounds, everybody writes down where his group went and leaves that in the 'intentions book' with ski patrol, just in case the helicopter rescue becomes necessary, unless of course you want to be excavated from the glacier five thousand years from now).
But there are already patches of blue showing up on the West of my place. Sunshine coming through. Birds chirping. The curtain lifting slightly to reveal the mountain, now covered with white fluffy stuff almost to the very bottom. Then dropping back again, hiding its treasure. Tomorrow will be my last full day here. It is going to be a good day for riding, too. Homeward bound. Choosing the cliffs we will drop. Maybe I won’t need the ski shuttle to take me down the mountain, who knows. Enjoying myself being a child that I never was.
Which I did couple of times on my subsequent runs. I got stuck on the top of the cliff, and I had to hike out, because I was too shittypanty to drop. And I went the wrong way at first, so I had to retrace my tracks. Such a waste of time. Then I avalanched down steep slope, so that people on the traverse below covered their heads thinking I’d ram them. And I got stuck on the top of the cliff yet again. Nobody dropped that one. And there was a boot-kick handy right behind me. This was the case of following wrong people’s tracks.
Why would I want to sit in a plane tomorrow on a blue-bird powder day, particularly following the day in which I felt pretty shitty? I don’t want to be cranky the entire 24 hours of my trip. Weird - now is 12:30 am, Wednesday, August 28, in Queenstown, NZ. And in roughly 36 hours it will be 12:30 am, Thursday, August 28 for me, but in New York, USA.
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