The Iron Maiden concert last Sunday was really awesome, as you can probably expect from a group that has had 30 years to get their act together. Bruce did escape to backstage between songs "to change into a new outfit" -- extra oxygen and/or other stimulants may or may not have been involved. Fantastic gig, nonetheless, I can only hope that I'm half as active at their age myself.
Fine, got that off my shoulders.
And now we can proceed to the burst of righteous anger that some people have come to expect from me for some reason.
So, I was on a road trip to Queenstown for a few nights. The drive from Christchurch to Otago region takes about 6 hours and is filled with increasingly majestic mountains and the ever-humble and ever-numerous sheep. A drive from, say, Oulu to Helsinki is a long and dreadfully boring one, but on this little trip you won't really notice the time passing in nearly the same way, as you *will* keep your face pasted at the window beside you, sucking in the sights, for most of the time.
Around 11pm on Friday, about an hour and a half from Queenstown, we stopped the car to the side of the road for a moment and I saw the most incredible thing: The Milky Way. Whenever I visit my parents during the winter, I take it into me to always go outside during the night time to see the stars, as the light pollution in the city reduces my star gazing to a glance at a moon -- whenever it happens to be full. But I am willing to bet my eternal beauty on the hunch that even the street lights down in Brussels pitch in on obscuring my view up in Finland.
Not in New Zealand, not down in the southern parts of the South Island, not on that stretch of mountain road. No. There weren't many buildings around us for tens of kilometers to any direction, to the west lied mountains and thousands of kilometers of sea before Australia; to the east lied mountains and tens of thousands of kilometers of sea before the American continents. That, and we were at least 1km up in the mountains, with less air to get in the way.
It was magnificent. Truly magnificent. I know, just how large our galaxy is, but this was the first time that I could actually count stars by the thousands, millions, it felt like!
I wanted to stay there all night.
I wish I can gaze upon it again as soon as possible.
Right.
It took us 1.5 hours to reach Queenstown from that magical moment, and during that time we almost ran over a rabbit, a cat and two possums. (the rural roads in this country are literally paved by roadkill, sometimes you can't go 10 meters without coming up on a fresh(ish) street pizza. These people like to drive fast.)
Queenstown is a small, charming little town tucked away in between a swarm of ~2km peaks and a lake. Very pretty.
Think of the girl-next-door, the pretty one.
A nice lass, smart, good-natured, well-behaved. Does well in school, everyone expects worlds of her, when they notice her at all.
A lot of suppressed anger and frustration in her, from the society-inflicted illusion that she is missing out on... something. The stuff of idiotic teenage years that she on one weak moment decides to vent and ends up in bad company (yea).
A month later she has to get into porno industry to support her drug habit.
As she naturally has huge ... tracks of land ... she doesn't need to bother with too many upgrades to please her chosen audience, and as her reputation grows, so do the crowds, the piles of money, her greed and her arrogance.
Queenstown is the bleached anus of that girl, torn flaccid by the continuos triple penetrations.
It's a town of little more than 10.000 people, annually visited by more than 1.2 million tourists! It's a beautiful little town-turned-adventure-themed-amusement-park, and no matter how much money there is involved, it's bloody ridiculous! There's almost no one actually living in the core of the town, they've all escaped the suddenly-orbital real estate prices and rent levels. And the hordes and hordes of adrenalin-seeking party animals, whom no legion of Uruk-Hai could ever hope to match in disturbance they cause. The center of the town is just a collection of hostels, bars, clubs and expensive shops (the general price level is much higher than elsewhere in the country, and most of the tourist activities start their pricing from around 80 euros a shot and scale quite high indeed towards the more hardcore end of the spectrum), and the locals live higher up in the mountains, almost like trying to escape from a stampeding mass of demon-sheep, or way out in neighboring villages.
Oh well, it's their mess, not mine. Here's some more pics from the road:
Lake somethingsomething, half-way between Christchurch and Queenstown. If the air was a bit clearer, you might catch a climpse of the tallest mountain in NZ, Mount Cook(3754m) behind the lake. (very strange color, the water, by the way)
Off-roading in the surroundings of Queenstown.
Statue of the founder of Queenstown. The ever-present sheep are starting to creep me out.
10am on Saturday morning. As everyone is still sleeping off their hangovers, it's a perfect time for a quiet walk about the town.
Oh yea, almost forgot. Guess what I did? ;)
A bungy jump from 134 meters, from a pod suspended between two mountains, with a river raging through the canyon in between, way, way down. I've done it now!
And I'm never, ever doing it again! O_O
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