Eat my snow

Christchurch, Methven & Mt Hutt, South Island, New Zealand

After taking a truly spectacular drive up to Christchurch from Wanaka, we decided to spend the weekend in the city and head up to Mount Hutt the following week when it was a bit quieter. There are few things more embarrassing than having a four year old child whizzing past you on the slopes, and staying away until a school day would minimise the risk. The tourist info place in Christchurch city centre would only offer overpriced, cramped and shabby hostel rooms, so we found ourselves another snappy motel room with a voucher we had cut out of a newspaper weeks earlier. We booked our flights out of the country and extended the car hire for another few days, then set off around the city to do the usual "New Zealand's World Famous..." spotting. Cara treated herself to a haircut and I treated myself to a slap up lunch at the local kebab shop. If I was going to face the "So, what do you think about my new hair?" question, I wanted something lining my stomach when the time came. The next day was spent driving around Banks Peninsula, east of the city, which is where the locals store their hills. We saw plenty more of the great scenery which kiwis seem to leave lying around all over the place, and almost drove into a lost cow on a hilltop. We offered her a lift home, but she preferred the walk and carried on in the opposite direction, looking for more blind corners to hide behind.

Monday morning we drove up to Methven, which is the nearest town to the Mt Hutt slopes, and organised our lift passes and gear hire for the following morning. Methven seemed to be exclusively populated by skiers and people catering to the needs of skiers, with not much else going on. I can only imagine that in summer, the residents pack the whole town up into a big box and drive it over to the east coast, where it spends the warmer months as a quaint, Edwardian seaside village.

After acquiring ourselves yet another spacious, comfortable, multi-roomed motel cabin for the same price as a trendy hostel broom cupboard, we took a drive down to Ashburton, the nearest town of any size (population : 15,000, large by south island standards), as we wanted to find a supermarket where we could buy a big bag of live green lipped mussels for dinner. We had a big cooking pot in our kitchen and it would have been a shame not to use it. After arriving in town, Cara stuck her head into a few stores to ask the locals where we could buy a big bag of live green lipped mussels. They all just stared at her like she was a loony (of course, she is a loony, but for different reasons). Why on earth would we want a big bag of live green lipped mussels, they asked? Who buys live mussels? Who sells live mussels, for that matter? No, they couldn't help us, and if it was all the same to us, would we mind getting our scruffy backsides out of their town and taking our strange foreign ways with us. Live mussels, indeed. Whoever heard of such nonsense? Two hundred metres further down the road we found the local supermarket, and inside was a big tank brimming with green lipped mussels. I can only assume the locals we encountered ate only straw, and shunned such needless extravagances as supermarkets. We filled a big bag with the tasty molluscs and paid the grand total of two pounds for them. Back at the room l cooked us up a grand dinner of moules mariniere avec frites. Actually, it was mussels and oven chips, but why split hairs? If you ever visit New Zealand, I strongly recommend trying the mussels. Each one is the size of a poodle, and cooked up in a puddle of wine and cream, they taste great. And cheaper than chips, literally.

Bright and breezy the next morning, it was back on with the thermal long johns and off we drove up the mountain to the Mt. Hutt ski slopes. The weather was perfect, with nary a cloud in the sky, and the last thirteen kilometres of the drive took us up a narrow, icy road which clings to the side of the mountain by it's fingertips. It is always an invigorating experience to stare at a sheer, five hundred metre drop as your car loses traction on an icy, hairpin corner.
The two days skiing were fantastic, and if I say so myself, my snowboarding skills are now exceptional. Professional snowboarders would approach me on the lifts and ask me what my secrets are. Of course, being a kung fu snowboard grandmaster, I would just humbly say it was down to plenty of practice and the odd spot of meditation. Unlike the last time I went snowboarding, no bones were broken and I could even get down the mountain without hurting anybody else. I would at this point like to extend a big thank you to the pink-suited skier who so considerately skied across the front of my snowboard one afternoon, whacking me across the thigh with their ski-pole in the process and allowing me to enjoy the curious sensation of skidding fifty metres down the slope on my face. And you were even too modest to look back or acknowledge your generosity in any way. I can only hope that you contract some form of untreatable fungal infection on your genitals, causing you to scratch feverishly in social situations and ostracising you from friends and family. Prick! And just to add insult to injury, as we exited the ski lift for the final time on our last day, Cara turned to me and said "You've done really well. You haven't had any really bad falls this time, have you?". Great, I thought, that was something that could have been said when we had made it down to the bottom. Sure enough, half way down the piste, probably as I was thinking about not falling over, I fell over. A great big, flailing limbs, snow up the nostrils and down the pants kind of fall that makes you look like a ragdoll in a tumble dryer. As I spun through the air for the third time, everything moving in slow motion, I thought to myself at least this will look impressive to anybody watching, but after I finally stopped and managed to extricate my head from the snow and my feet from up my arse and under my left armpit, I looked around and not another soul was in sight. It would seem my luck was taking a turn for the worse. Other than that, a grand time was had by all.

It was finally our last night in New Zealand, and I was going to treat myself to an enormous bag of fish 'n' chips from town. Cara, being the kind of weirdo that can say no to fried food, was having some pasta, which is apparently little curly things that you boil in a pan. Very exotic! I put on my woolly hat and my goofy grin and grabbed the car keys. The car was parked in the driveway, and as I was reversing onto the road there was a very loud crashing noise, which came at the exact same instant as the car stopped dead in its tracks. I looked in both wing mirrors, but couldn't see anything. I moved the car forward a bit, opened the door and had a look at what might have caused my little problem. There was nothing to be seen. Oh, hang on a minute, that was not quite true. There did seem to be something poking out of the top of my car. How curious. I should, at this point, fill you in on a few details about our car. The vehicle we had been renting for the previous seven weeks was a Toyota Rav4 four wheel drive, or "puddle jumper" as the locals liked to call it. Another thing that New Zealand is "World Famous" for is car crime, specifically things being stolen from parked vehicles at some of the more remote tourist attractions. With this in mind, we had chosen a Rav4 with blacked out rear windows, so nobody could see what we had in the back of the car when we were off doing the sights. The down side of this choice, other than making me look like a pimp in a hippo's bladder jacket, was that we couldn't see a damn thing out of the rear window at night. And the damned thing I couldn't see out of the rear window on this particular night, was a very large, very solid, concrete lamppost, which, thanks to the rear door of my Rav4, was now leaning out over the road at what some might call a jaunty angle. I walked to the back of the car to assess the damage, and it did not look good. The spare wheel was bolted onto the rear door, and the lamppost had used this to completely stove in the rear door, which now wouldn't open. I threw my hands up in the air and shouted all my favourite obscenities at the clouds. The clouds let me know what they thought of the whole sorry episode by starting to rain on me. There was nothing else to do except call into Liquorland on the way home from the chip shop. Seven weeks of driving through blizzards and hanging off the edges of cliffs, and I finally get scuppered when a lamppost jumps in front of the car.

The next morning we drove back to Christchurch to drop off the car. At the rental place, I hand over the keys and tell the chap in charge what happened.
"Oh well, never mind eh?" he said after giving the car a quick inspection.
"Is that it?" I asked
"These things happen" he said, grinning. "We'll soon get that hammered out, anyway"
To say I was relieved would be an understatement. Fortunately, when we first hired the car, we took out the insurance excess waiver, which dropped our financial liability in case of an accident from $2500 to $100. I just wasn't sure it would cover us in the event of reversing into a concrete lamppost. After going through the usual formalities, he even gave us a lift to the airport. What a thoroughly pleasant chap. In fact, pretty much everybody we met in New Zealand was friendly and chatty. I can honestly say that I only met four unfriendly people during our entire visit here, and they were all on the ski slopes. I guess some stuck up tossers just resent sharing their pistes with hairy goatboys like me. So, a big thumbs up to the people of New Zealand. Great scenery, great people, a million different things to do (even if some of them do require an unhealthy degree of exertion) and great food and wine. All they need to do is sort out that frozen chip debacle and I think they'll have it sorted.

Mik