Am in the midst of a week long overseas break.
Well, we’re in Queenstown, but we did have to fly over some seawater to get here. This is the view from where I’m writing.
We’ve been taking advantage of the lovely weather since we arrived on Friday. On Saturday we went to the beautiful historic village of Arrowtown, where we got accidentally lured into a steep 3 k uphill walk to a rather unimpressive lookout. The worst part is that I didn’t turn on my Strava, so I don’t even have a record of it, apart from the downhill leg which really doesn’t look very impressive.
My French friend very kindly gave me kudos for it (the Strava equivalent of a like) but considering he hikes, runs, bikes, and swims vast distances every day, I will take that with a grain of salt.
Yesterday we did a four wheel drive trip to Macetown, an old gold mining town. We tried to do it in my old Mitsubishi Outlander a few years ago but bailed out very quickly, which in retrospect was an excellent decision. The road was horrific.
Our driver told us rather nonchalantly that someone died on the road just last year. An inexperienced young male driver accidentally went off a cliff. He was thrown clear but his young female passenger died. Apparently their mulched up vehicle was visible from the road for months afterwards.
I have come to the conclusion that 4 W drive people are weird, and I will avoid them where possible in future. Our driver was quite short but she may well have been a six footer at the start of her career, before all the traumatic spinal compression fractures. Similarly, I’m sure I had a concussion by the end of the day. And after all that, all they had at Macetown was two reconstructed buildings – the teacher’s cottage and the general store – and the old water driven quartz crushing battery.
The amazing thing was that in normal preCOVID times, the company would send out several Land Rovers in a convoy twice a day, every day to cope with demand for these tours. Apparently this year business is down by a whopping 97%. This is just a mind blowing number, and goes to show how many businesses are doing it hard this year.
How lucky I am to be employed by the government in an essential business. OK, I didn’t feel lucky back in March, when I thought the germs were knocking on our door and death was coming for me, but at this moment I do. Able to take a holiday and not worry about where my next dollar is going to come from. I’m not going to get complacent – who knows what the next months or years are going to bring? – there may well be some very tough decisions that need to be made about our border in the future. But I’ll be grateful for what I have now.
The weird thing is that Queenstown doesn’t seem that quiet. There are plenty of people out and about, in the shops and restaurants. I guess I’ve just never been here when it’s been really busy with overseas tourists.