As Sarah said in a video I took shortly after our afternoon arrival in Queenstown, "We are finally on vacation! Out of the city and into nature!"
We arrived in Queenstown this afternoon and after checking into our hostel, Base Queenstown: Discovery, we walked along the water and immediately fell in love with New Zealand. It was an absolutely beautiful view of clear blue glacier water with green mountains coming right out of it, with a bright blue sky. We sat down on the pebble beach and listened to the water roll in on our feet. Quite cold water! Actually, as we soon learned, the average temperature of the top 3 meters of water during the peak of summer is about 10 degrees Celsius. FYI for you Fahrenheit peeps, thats about 50 degrees! brrrr
We had a late lunch at a pub and then decided to book an evening cruise on their steamship the TSS Earnslaw.
With an 8pm departure, we would be returning around 10, right during the sunset (which was actually 10:06PM that night). Queenstown is pretty far south, so it was amazing to have 17 hours of sunlight each day for exploring.
The cruise was pretty fun, we took lots of pictures of us enjoying beers on the bow. Halfway through we stopped on the far end of Lake Wakapitu to meet up with an earlier group to witness sheep shearing. Quite a comedy show I must say. The shearer had a lot of interesting things to say, but I find that I really only remember the jokes he made in preparation of his spectacle...
Before the sheep goes on stage, his name is Wooly, and afterwards, his name is Sean, implying the Irish were the first ones to name the process. But if it had been the Scottish, the sheep's name would become Jimmy.
No, I don't actually get the joke, but I laughed along with the crowd :-)
We returned to the steamship (which uses like 2 tons of coal an hour) and to our surprise, there was a sing-a-long on the ride home! The piano player just went straight through the TSS Earnslaw song books and so Sarah and I decided to sing along to the ones we knew. There were a few very enthusiastic participants, especially during "She'll be comin round the mountain".
Sarah decided that for one of the songs, we would switch out the lyrics with the Georgia fight song, of course as a well trained Bulldog friend I knew the words....video to be posted soon!
Sadly, this was the peak of our first day in Queenstown, and the next 10 hours went straight downhill!
To preface the most absurd story ever, this was my first time in a hostel. Now, I had expressed my hesitations with Sarah months before, but as a well travelled gal, she reassured me that I had nothing to worry about and she had often stayed in hostel dorms. So, i trusted my dear friend of 13 years and took a chance.
Well, we were in an 8-bed all girls dorm called the Sanctuary. There were three girls from Korea who kept to themselves, and three others who travelled together from NY and London. They seemed fine enough, but what's a first impression worth these days?! We went to bed around 11 because we were being picked up at 7am for our bus trip to Milford Sound. They stumbled in one at a time between 12am and 2:30am, and the last one had a BOY at the door! (gasp!) He did not come in, which was a blessing he never realized, because within 5 minutes this drunk Brit was vomiting all over the place. I ripped off my eye mask and through the darkness saw she was puking into this huge trash can. I had to hold back the tears as I thought "I have to wake up in 4 hours, there is no way I can stay in this vomit infused, stuffy room!!"
She passed out quickly and I woke Sarah up (who I realized is the most sound sleeper ever!) and said "WE GOTTA GET THIS TRASH CAN OUTTA HERE!!!" so as I held back dry heaves, she rolled the 30lb trash can out into the hallway. We had a 5 minute pow-wow and came to the unanimous conclusion that it was absolutely imperative that we find new beds ASAP. So, we stumbled downstairs barefoot and in our pajamas (without contacts) and begged the clerk to find us 2 new beds- ANY other beds.
We realized at this point that Base Queenstown is the PARTY hostel. 2:45am and kids are stumbling in the door, bars are still blasting music and its basically a co-ed dorm on a saturday night. Anyways, we found a new room, went upstairs into the dark room which needed to be fumigated, unlocked our suitcases, prayed that we grabbed all of our belongings, went across the room to another Sanctuary and just jumped on empty beds. We discussed the next morning at our 6:30 am wake up call that neither of us really fell back asleep. It took a couple days for me to get the mental image to go away, and both of us admitted counting sheep in those new beds to get our minds off of the smell, which we convinced ourselves was somehow on our hands!
In conclusion:
1) Trust your good friend, she is usually correct
2) When the guide book says explicitly "Queenstown has a great nightlife", believe it. seriously.
3) Determine the colloquial definition of "Sanctuary" determined by the locals before you decide its a great place to rest your head at night
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