Queenstown

WOW.

So we're going bungy jumping tomorrow. I might pee my pants. Jon insisted that we challenge ourselves. Aahhhh! I'm pretty sure that I would never have done this on my own, so really, I'm grateful... but seriously??? You have to book it a day in advance, so they make you sleep on the idea for a whole night before you actually have to jump. That's incredibly insensitive. Honestly, isn't there a way to just do it while you're feeling brave? Forcing you to actually think about how you are willingly jumping off of a bridge is a bit mean, don't you think?

Anyways, that was today's fiasco. And that spurred a fiasco about money, since Jon said he was going to pay me back. (I have the only credit card, and you wouldn't believe how many things cannot be paid for by EFTPOS, or ATM card, as we like to call it. When Jon and I opened a bank account, we got an EFTPOS card, which, as we learned later, does not work for most transactions here. Money is such a strange thing... ) Anyways, in the process we managed to get the bungy company to let us use their internet for free. So here I am, blogging away!

Ok, where did I leave off in the New Zealand diaries...

Oh right, Franz Josef, the glacier town. So that place was cool, except that it was raining that day. But we just stayed inside and watched a movie that day. (Speaking of which, has anyone seen the movie "blow"? It's about this one guy who started dealing drugs, and how he got huge and eventually went to jail. It has Johnny Depp in it, but they weren't really focusing on showing off his body, so the movie could have been much better. )

So that night Jon made delicious dinner, and we chilled. The next day we took the short hike to the very bottom of the Franz Josef glacier. That is one majestic river of ice, I tell you. You feel very small when the bottom of a glacier dwarfs you. Jon went and saw the other glacier, the Fox Glacier. Then, on a whim, we decided to spend the night at this campground at a place called Gillespies Beach. We thought this was going to be awesome. It was not what we expected. We thought the drive there would be short, and it turned out to be a narrow winding road of gravel that took forever to get through. We thought we would be alone, but a lot of people ended up sleeping there that night. We thought we'd do a quick 3.5 hour hike, and ended up trudging through the mud and swamps for 5 hours. We thought the hike was to see a colony of seals... there were no seals. We thought we'd have a nice calm night sleeping, but we got eaten alive by verocious sandflies. The like huan flesh a lot. Jon and I have bites on every little bit of exposed flesh. Hands, necks, ankles and even that line of skin between my t-shirt and my pants got attacked. But we did make a cool fire on the beach, and then we met a German guy, whose name is Robin, who offered us some weed and then proceeded to talk the whole night about how epic the whole bonfire by the ocean thing was. Hehe. He also busted out his miniature Hookah, which we enjoyed by the fire.

That morning we got the heck out of sandfly country. They clearly wanted us there way too much. We proceeded to drive a really long distance that day. We ended up in a town called Wanaka. We liked Wanaka a lot, because it was the first real town we had seen since Nelson. We slept in a Holiday Park, and took lots of showers and revelled in the availability of the kitchen and electricity, as well as the lack of flies. Wanaka was having a spring festival they call "Wanakafest." Creative. Anyways, they had little contests for the kids, like : Best trained dog, best dressed dog and owner, best fetcher. And there was a huge bike race. All the local teenage boys were showing off their skills. They had also gotten some snow for the little kids to play in (from somewhere...),a nd there was supposedly a circus, but we never saw it. In any case, this was the place to be, so we were hving a good time watching the festivities. Then, after having to stop the urge to buy all the delicious food and all the half-off ski clothes, we finally had to get out of this haven for people who have money. That's how we ended up in Queenstown, extreme sports capital of the world. We are probably going to walk around town tonight, sleep at a campground tonight, and then do all the expensive stuff, like jumping off of bridges, tomorrow...

We will let you know how that goes!!

Jalissa