Friday, Feb. 3 2012
Yesterday was such an amazing day! We went canyoning deep in the heart of the Queenstown wilderness. We had to wear some extremely heavy gear including a wetsuit, booties, helmet and a buoyancy aid (aka, a life jacket.) The gear when wet added around an extra 30 pounds to us. Each of our helmets had a name on them so our guides would know what to call us. I was called “FOX” for the day. Seemed pretty fitting to me. Ha!
On our journey to this adventure we had a 15 minute drive to the location. Our group was paired with a group of four young Australian guys, James, Stewey, Cam, and Chris, as well as one Welsch man around his sixties named Dave. Oh how funny the car ride was. First of all, we learned pretty quick that New Zealand drivers have no fear. Actually, they not only have no fear while driving, they seriously have no fear at all. Our driver, also our guide, was explaining our he has bungy jumped off of a parasailing thing into the water in the bay at Queenstown. He was kind of ridiculous. Along with the insanity of driving, where I was convinced we were in for one heck of a scary time, we started fighting with the Australians in the van. They started calling us Yanks, and we got into some pretty heated discussions about how to pronounce various common phrases. James was the most vocal of the group, and he even brought Dave into the chaos. However, Dave claimed to be Welsch and had nothing to do with our chaos.
For those of you that may not know, canyoning is an adventure sport which includes hiking, repelling into canyons and off of waterfalls, ziplining, cliff jumping, rock climbing, sliding and swimming through rocky ravines and a few other dangerous bits. For those of you that know me well, this sounds like a culmination of my greatest fears: heights, water, and the unknown.
I tried my best to conquer all of my fears; however, there were a few things that I just could not overcome. I was unable to make myself jump off two of the cliffs, but I got to repel down them instead. A pretty fair trade off I’d have to say. Mom and Dad, you should be proud of me. I escaped without a single injury!
The day was well spent and we were also well spent by the evening. But the Australians had invited us to go on the Kiwi Crawl, a bar crawl put on nightly for the local travelers. We met them at the World Bar where we began our night with a teapot. Something everyone should try at some point in New Zealand. It was such a different night life experience because the music here is an assortment of old school rap and music I remember dancing to my the 9th grade dance. Last night we even busted it out to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song. Let me tell you, the Australian guys knew every single word. Priceless. We went to six different places including the Minus 5 Ice Bar (Minus 5 degrees Celcius that is), where we were given a parka to wear and Uggs if we wanted them. Everything was made of ice, including the cups. To be honest, it wasn’t even that cold.
We discovered that the Australian guys like to take lots of pictures and videos. I’m sure there are close to 500 just from last night. No joke. But it was such a great night and time to meet the locals. The guys said if we were ever in the Melbourne, Australia area we’d always have friends to call now. We’re actually having dinner with them tonight as well.
We spent the rest of the evening running around Queenstown and hitting up the beach where a citation for public urination was almost given out to a crazy local. So funny. Needless to say after such a long and exhausting day and night, we crashed in our room and didn’t get up until 11 the next day!
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