Today when listening to the live from the mountain snow report, we were told to “come on up it’s a beautiful day, all the lifts are open and its going to be a cracker”. With all the Australians at present in New Zealand skiing, the choice of the word ‘cracker’ was practically poignant
Driving up to the ski field during the morning rush was the usual signs of cars, buses and vans snaking up the mountain. However today there was an equal amount of cars returning down the mountain. A continue stream of cars leaving the mountain at 9.45am raised my suspicions.
The lower mountain was clear and calm with a little light patchy cloud lingering. As we progressed further the cloud got thicker to a point that visibility was a total white out. When we finally arrived at the ski field car park the maximum visibility was about fifteen metres at best. Definitely not a cracker of a day.
All the major New Zealand ski fields issue an early morning snow report. This is usually faxed or emailed to all the major hotels, local cafes and even the petrol stations receive and post in their widows the current and predicted mountain conditions.
To be fair these reports are done very early in the morning and like a weather forecast, they are to some degree a prediction. However when I compared the government mountain forecast with that of the ski field the two beared little resemblance. The ski reports are nothing more than advertising brochures for the ski fields. They put a positive spin on even the worst of weather days. But there’s more, the telephone radio reports are even more farcical and can not be relied on.
The best tip to getting a real idea as to the conditions is to go to the web cam page of the ski field and see for yourself. The only problem is if you want an early start, the web cams on most fields only start to update from 9 or 9.30 am.
A common pastime for many Australians is to go gold fossicking. Increasingly however, Australian gold fields have been picked clean by the weekend prospector.
With the rivers low before the spring snow thaw, I took the opportunity to brave the cold and scout a few new areas.
In what I would call a very remote Otago river valley I stumbled upon two Australian visitors who were prospecting with the latest Minelab metal detector. A long conversation revealed that it is becoming common among the Australian gold detecting community to holiday in New Zealand with their metal detectors. The theory is that most New Zealand amateur gold prospectors do not use metal detectors giving Australians an advantage.
As this video shows, some New Zealand gold fossickers do use detectors but generally speaking the Australians are correct. New Zealand gold fossickers use sluices and gold pans in or very close to rivers. The advantage of metal detectors are that you can prospect up the river valley walls and not be restricted by the need to have running water.
The current downturn in visitor arrivals to New Zealand has bought out some interesting marketing ideas to help boost falling revenues.. The accommodation industry has been hard hit with the latest bed nights figures showing significant declines. In response, accommodation providers have discounted their room rates to lure customers.
The luxury niche end of the industry has not been immune to the down turn and have responded in a similar fashion. However one particular lodge is currently marketing their discount in a very unorthodox manner.
Blanket Bay Lodge located on the lake edge outside of Queenstown, is one of New Zealand’s premier properties catering for high net worth individuals. Voted as one of Forbes Traveller top 400 hotels and top 20 International Hideaways in Andrew Harper’s acclaimed “Hideaway Report“, Blanket Bay has been very successful in promoting its accommodation to a global audience.
Blanket Bays latest vehicle to promote its “locals discount” comes in the form of live broadcasting from the lodge, by a local Queenstown radio station. The station spent the night at the lodge broadcasting their luxurious merits and this morning continues with interviews with the general manager and exuberating commentary about the food and service.
Radio stations often do live broadcasts to promote businesses like garden centres, hardware, furniture and electronic stores, but luxury lodges…. go figure! For a business that is targeting a very niche market, this form of advertising appears to be a very broad based down market mistake. It is akin to seeing an advertising campaign for Bentley, promoting their latest car and targeting South Auckland bus stop shelter bill boards.
Like most countries, when you arrive in New Zealand, you are required to go through an entry process. This will involve immigration, customs and finally after you collect your baggage, you will be questioned by a MAF Biosecurity inspector.
On a recent arrival at Queenstown airport from Brisbane, I was awaiting my turn in a long queue for the usual biosecurity questions about the possibility that my bag contained fruit, nuts or raw meat and fish. To the credit of the inspector, he changed his monotonous question to that of “did I have any boomerangs or didgeridoos” Luckily I had left my two metre long didgeridoo at home, so I was then shown an equally long queue for the final x-ray machine check of my luggage.
While waiting for the x-ray, I noticed that the people behind me had declared to the officer that they had hiking boots. It is a NZ requirement that all hiking or sporting footwear be properly cleaned prior to arrival and declared to the biosecurity inspector.
The hiking boot visitors were quickly whisked away to have their boots removed from their luggage. The MAF officer then commenced a thorough spray, scrub, rub and finally polish of the offending boots. The boots were then handed back to the travellers who were shown the door to enter New Zealand. Meanwhile I spent another fifteen minutes before the x-ray machine proved my innocence and I was finally free to enter NZ.
It is happening even in the best of New Zealand’s accommodation establishments. I’m talking about hotel rooms that don’t have spare toilet rolls. In these recessionary times I am increasingly finding rooms are poorly equipped with supplies. Forget the coffee sachets, who drinks instant coffee or Milo, but we all need to be supplied with more than half a roll of toilet paper?
The weekend trek to Dunedin delivered the same experience, a large one bedroom apartment style room equipped with a 40 inch flat screen television in both the living room and bedroom and a lovely marble bathroom…. supplied with half a roll of toilet paper. The concept of a half roll is creepy enough but no spare roll is terrifying.
Its been happening all over New Zealand of late. At first I thought it was a simple case of slack house keeping. As this was not the first time this has happened at this particular establishment I thought I should enquire about the lack of one of life’s essentials.
Apparently since the recession, guests are taking the spare rolls, all the tea and coffee and even the towels are on their ‘most wanted list’.
The official coroner’s report into the death last year of an inexperienced tramper has recommended New Zealand’s Department of Conservation review the branding of its “Great Walks” tramping tracks.
The 35 year old Israeli veered of the South Islands Routeburn Track onto an unformed Department of Conservation emergency avalanche route. She subsequently fell on slippery boulders, breaking her neck.
The coroner has raised with the department whether the expression “Great Walk” adequately describe the tramping trip through difficult and potentially dangerous, rugged back-country terrain, with often unpredictable weather conditions. Coroner David Crerar was concerned that “inexperienced tourists – especially who spoke English as a second language – saw “walk” and discounted the seriousness of the situation”
Wellington NZ is known as the windy city and landing at its airport can pose some serious aileron rudder co-ordination. The final into Wellington can be a real workout as this collection of clips show.
Credit card scammers are an inventive lot especially the internet based ones. I love seeing the effort they go to make and host authentic looking web pages of banks and credit card companies etc. The Beijing Olympics website scammers selling fraudulent tickets to the 2008 games was my favourite.
A recent little incident however showed me that keeping it simple is still the best method of ripping off your credit card.
At a restaurant recently I asked for the bill (aka check). My credit card was processed and promptly returned with a copy of the account All seemed fine until a little later I was attempting to extradite a little cash for a taxi from an automatic teller machine. I then noticed that my credit card was not ‘my credit card’ and it was well and truly past its use by date. The old switch-a-roo credit card trick. I had two likely culprits, either it was the ATM machine or it was the itinerate seasonal waitress back at the restaurant.
The ATM wasn’t talking but the waitress apologised profusely for mixing up my card with another customer who was settling their dinner bill at the same time. A very plausible excuse except for the expiry date on the card was some nine month earlier.
Visitors to New Zealand inevitably hire a car that will be left overnight parked in the open in the carpark provided by your chosen accommodation provider. No problem here except when you awake to find winter frosts. This simply requires that you splash some water on the front windscreen to melt the ice to enable you to clear your vision. You then drive off on your merry way to be later stopped by the local police in their many winter morning road blocks. You will find to your great displeasure that you may be issued with an infringement fine for not fully de-icing all windows. If you have thoroughly removed the ice from all windows you may still find the over-zealous officer issuing a fine for forgetting to do the rear vision mirrors.
I witness this regularly in the small towns in the South Island of New Zealand. The locals wise up to the window ice road blocks but the visitors get caught day after day. No need for a visitor bed tax when the NZ Police are collecting revenue from tourists.
Although impaired visibility due to iced up car windows clearly is a safety hazard, it is the level of impaired that is the questionable factor.
It all boils down to policing to population ratios. The NZ Police currently has a ratio of one police officer for about every 510 people. That is not a lot in comparison to England who have a police to population ratio of 1 to 375 and Australia on average that has ratio of 1 to 415. Police resources are allocated based on population size and not on crime percentage per population.
Now in some small towns located in the North Island the crime rate can be extremely high. Police have their hands full chasing real criminals. On the other hand some towns in the South Island have crime that is in the magnitude of stolen bicycles, under age drinkers and frosted up windows. Basically they have little to do but enforce the minor infringements.
When in the South Island don’t drive over 54km per hour in built up areas. Put your seat belt on before you start the ignition and not as you leave the parking bay. Don’t overindulge in alcohol the previous night as you may find that you are still a few milligrams over the limit the next morning.
