Queenstown: Bohemian Raspberry

The Queenstown New Year celebrations themselves were interesting. The wife was spoken to by a colleague who reported that the town was “mental at New Year”. Evidently said colleague had never been to any large city square at the last stroke of midnight and had probably only ever spent it with 12 other humans.

The harbour area was comparatively busier with two stages (of sorts), a single burger van with a bored looking purveyor and a modest firework display that lit up the harbour and scared the beaks off the local duck population.

The first stage featured a DJ set playing some poorly chosen dance music as some select locals jigged along like the old guy out of Deliverance when the duelling banjo music starts playing.

The second stage was an eye opener and was populated by a series of covers bands, including a delightful group of three ladies who were butchering some 90s tracks while dressed like an unholy cross between some Geordie slappers and the women from the "Sheila’s Wheels" adverts.

As they “performed” their unique renderings of the songs, they wiggled their bodies (one of them was a bit rotund so had little choice in the matter really) and played up to the dumbfounded crowd of slack jawed yokels.

Looking off to my left I spotted an Eastern European gentleman I had seen earlier that day asking for directions. He was filming the entire thing on his camcoder, with a huge smile on his face so it was obviously the best form of entertainment he had seen since they banned dancing bears in his homeland of Kazakhstan.

The only down point was the wine tour we went on earlier that day. Though it was pleasant and the driver was very nice and informative, the wines weren’t that fantastic and the mood was ruined by the know alls behind us.

I don’t mind the Bohemian types who like to drink wine and talk about art and literature, having met many of them in some of the circles I have moved in. Ok, you wouldn’t trust a lot of them to wire a plug or remember to feed your cat, but they generally mean well for a bunch of harmless loafers.

What these seemed to be, however, is arrogant mature students who have graduated from the school of life with a double first in bullshit and f*cktardary and the world could do with a lot less of them.

Everyone else on the trip seemed ok, from the cool looking French pair and the camera happy Americans to the ubiquitous Brits and the weird German couple (he looked like the bastard offspring of Arsene Wenger and Pam St Clement and she couldn’t go more than a few steps without lighting up a cancer stick), but these guys were a pain in the arse. So much so that it prompted the missus to declare quite loudly that she was glad she had left her encyclopaedia behind as it evidently was now redundant. When she gets riled, I know things are bad.

Starting the journey with a sort of one-upmanship foreplay of interesting facts the know alls pointed out that the mountain range known as The Remarkables are so called because they are the only range in the world that run truly North-South. Utter bollocks as The Rockies have the same aspect and the naming is rumoured to be down to the fact that they looked so spectacular to the original settlers. Score one for Wikipedia there.

When we passed a church they pointed out that all Churches must point to the east as it’s some kind of religious law. Though I don’t know much about churches, I think it is mainly the Anglicans that do this and have been in churches that certainly don’t follow this convention. Having visited St Peter’s Magic Castle (for the Vatican City is like a Catholic Disneyland, full of imaginary characters where the devout go to escape from reality and they hire people who like to spend far too much time with children) I am fairly sure that the chancel is on the west rather than the east.

Which reminds me, if churches are built to face east because Jesus is meant to return from there, then east of Queenstown is a place called Cromwell. In which case, Christianity is in serious trouble as the Messiah is going to be either a sheep or an inbred mutant.

As the journey progressed and more tastings were had, they couldn’t seem to hold their drink and the gibberish just got worse, with them sometimes forgetting what fact they were meant to be mis-representing. One of them even reported putting one of the winery people straight as apparently a painting done by her grandmother hung in the winery and the winery people simply were not aware of this fact. Boo f*cking hoo.

Toward the end of the trip we stopped at "The Winehouse" which is near the mentalist magnet AJ Hackett bungy over the Kawarau River. As we did so, the most annoying of the know alls (the one with the little known painter grandmother) spoke up to her comrades…

“Oh, we’re not going to look at the bungy are we? Oh dear.”

Rolling their eyes at the tackiness of it all, the gruesome threesome trudged off the bus looking ashamed to be there.

However, once off they were the last ones getting on as they were still watching the maniacs hurl themselves off the bridge, probably exchanging true facts like “the ancient Greeks invented the ipod first” and “Noah’s Ark almost certainly had room for two of every species of dinosaur”.

Thereby proving that they weren’t just know-all jizzbats after all, they were in fact hypocritical know-all jizzbats.

While back in the safety of Auckland airport, I was standing next to three Americans at the carousel. I don’t know what it is about Americans, but they seem to behave strangely in places of transit. I was in Venice some years back and a fairly young American family were there as we were getting the train to Lake Garda. As the woman and child headed off to conduct some important business, the bloke on his own started to go a bit mental in the middle of the crowded station.

His shortish, portly frame resplendent in his pink polo shirt, yellow shorts, white socks and trainers, he popped one arm of his sunglasses in his mouth and began practising his golf swing with an imaginary club and looking into the distance as his imaginary ball sailed down the fairway. He did this for about five minutes.

As I stared at him incredulously, I caught the eye of one of the many locals who were also jaw agape at the antics and we both shook our heads at each other in a brief moment of European unity.

Anyway, at the carousel there were two blokes in their 30s and a woman in her 50s or 60s. As one left to use the bathroom, the older lady moved in and started giving the other one a back massage remarking that “Gee, your back muscles are really big”.

As my brain struggled to take in the relationship I figured either that…

A) It was a gay couple on holiday with the mum of one of them, in which case she shouldn’t be massaging either of them.

B) The bloke who had gone for a slash was her son and this was his mate who she was secretly nailing. In which case, eeeew.

C) It was her son. And they are from Appalachia and had travelled to Auckland instead of Invercargill where this sort of thing is a regular occurrence.

This is just the sort of lapse in judgement that lobs in a frag grenade during a hostage rescue.