Snow Angels!

Thursday, July 31st, 2008 | Travel | No Comments

I never got to do a snow-angel.

Last weekend, I ventured down to Thredbo to get me some hot, hot snow action. There was loads of snow, and lots of action but it wasn’t very hot. In fact, it was fkin freezing. After organising all the appropriate equipment, skis, boots, poles and hot chocolate, we set out for a day of skiing. Well, I was a little frightened at first - but after I had my first stack (head first, backwards, downhill at 30mph) I kinda figured that what didn’t kill me could only make me stronger. In fact, my first stack had all the comedic elements required to reduce my Bestest into a pile of giggling Gortex. First came the swearing, then the wobbling, then the falling. After the falling came the tumbling, the sliding, punctuated by frequent and loud cursing. I then hit the final mogul, flipped feet over face, and somehow landed back on two skis.

“What? I totally meant to do that.”

The Thredbo chairlifts were also much more genteel than their Bulgarian counterparts - none of them threatened to beat me up. Even the T-Bars were polite and curteous. There was only one small incident when I dropped one of my gloves. I did say quite clearly “Shit, dropped glove, bailing, see you at the top.” At this, I then inched my arse off the T-bar and went and rescued poor glove.

What Heidi heard was something like “Shit, blah blah, mumble” at which point, I then fell sideways and landed ungracefully in a pile of my own limbs. I got my glove in the end, so it really doesn’t matter now anyway. Shuddup.

In fact, the only down side to the whole weekend was waking up on Sunday morning after “Lets do another Jager-bomb” Saturday. Now THAT was painful.

4 Dickheads in Mordor.

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | Travel | 2 Comments

It’s quite possible to accidently climb a mountain.

See, I’m a bit of a geek, and I was touring around NZ with a car load of randoms that I met on the internet. It wasn’t an online dating site, before you ask, it was a Lord of the Rings fan site. We all met up in Auckland to travel around NZ and see all the filming locations prior to going to see the premiere of ‘Fellowship of the Ring’. You don’t need to tell me just how nerdy that makes me sound! I dig Lord of the Rings, and for a very long while I held ambitions to get into digital special effects. Thus, I was totally consumed by anything to do with the production of the Rings films.

So much so, that I decided that it’d be great to see the location where they filmed Mordor. That was half way up Mt Tongariro. It was going great, right up until the weather set in while we were half way at the top. Visibility dropped to 5m and the rains set in. It was a total white-out – and so damn eerie! Without a guide to pick us up, we had two choices:

1. Go back down the mountain, sit in the rain for 4 hours and try not to die of frostbite, or
2. Climb up and over the top of the mountain without having the faintest clue where you’re heading, other than vaguely towards a Rangers Hut you heard somebody mention by accident a few hours ago.

In hindsight, it sounds really dumb to climb a mountain with only 5m visibility, but we totally climbed the mountain. It was all going slowly but fine until the weather really picked up and we were hit with 80km winds. Four stupid tourists stuck on a mountain in a storm!

We got there in the end without having to mobilise the NZ emergency services, but we never got to see Mordor properly.

Stuffed if I’m ever going back though! They can shove their Mordor right up their Lord of the Rings.