19th -> 20th August (Wanaka)

So after the excitement in Nomads Queenstown I booked a bus to Lake Wanaka and sat watching some morning TV. Superbad was on (awesome film) so me and two girls sat and laughed at it and got chatting. Turned out they worked there and were getting the same bus to Wanaka as I was to promote a boozy night back in Queenstown. Bonus... bit of entertainment. We got the bus, arrived, settled into Base backpackers (eurgh) and went out flier distributing and chatting away to people. It was pretty easy to get people interested seeing as the fliers were advertising free food and booze all night to anyone staying at Nomads... you know what backpackers are like. Besides that, Wanaka had very little to offer. There was a cute little cinema that showed one movie a day, a very beautiful late to sit and look at and two or three bars. It is known as a rest point for people snowboarding at Cardrona but I had done a weeks boarding and at $130 a day, I wasn't that keen on any more. So, after one day's entertainment promoting, I bit the girls farewell and sat by the lake chatting with some NZ army guys for the best part of a day. They were travelling NZ for 'training' where they had to 'endure' kayaking, rafting, caving, snow trekking, survival training in snow and skiing... in case they had to go fight in Siberia or something. Pretty nice if you ask me. The nightlife was pretty thin, but a karaoke bar provided some entertainment for the night I was there... especially as some guys had been drinking since around 2pm and were getting a free drink for every time they went up to sing, which was quite frequent.

Here, in Wanaka, I tried my first hitch in NZ. No good. An hour later I realised NZ was going to be hard to get around cheaply, so I booked myself on a bus to Frans Joseph, for $42 (ouch!!). It's a cost I hadn't really calculated in. But at least it stopped at a salmon farm on the way so I could get a smoked salmon sandwich with wholegrain bread, slices of salmon drooping out of every edge, (they might as well have given me the whole fish) for cheap as chips.