Lord of the Fillings

In September 2003 I managed another holiday, spending a week on holiday in Queenstown, New Zealand, with my mate Owain.  Originally the point of the trip was to go skiing, but as it turned out it became a magical quest to find our very own Holy Grail – the world’s best pie.

Saturday

New Zealand is around 12 hours on a plane from Hong Kong, roughly the same distance as to Western Europe, albeit in completely the opposite direction.  So although I was used to the travelling time, it was still a good feeling to arrive in Auckland in New Zealand on the Saturday morning, having completed the overnight flight.  The sun was out, the air was crisp, and Queenstown was only a further short hop away.

In our layover before the connecting flight to Queenstown, we decided to get some food, and investigated the extensive catering menu of the Domestic Terminal at Auckland Airport.  What we found was that New Zealand food is dominated by one thing – not lamb, as you might expect, but pies.  If you want a snack in New Zealand, you eat a pie.  If you want some breakfast, you eat a pie.  In fact whatever you want, they’ll have a pie to do the job.

And so it was that we started our week-long pie-eating tour of New Zealand, kicking off with a lamb curry & chutney effort (good crust, spicy filling) and followed up with a steak & pepper (very hot, over-reliance on the pepper).  Thus for every lunch during the week, sandwiches were refused, soups ignored, and burgers spurned as we started our quest for the ultimate pie.

Our flight to Queenstown took us through the mountains, starting our habit of regular ‘oohs’ and ‘aaahs’ at the quite frankly jaw-dropping scenery that we were seeing.  I know many people have been there and so wouldn’t need me to tell them about it, but for those who haven’t then I certainly haven’t seen anywhere like it (pictures 2 & 3).  Just watching the movies doesn’t do it justice.

However the scenery did get somewhat frustrating on occasions; for instance, when concentrating hard on driving up a tight & windy mountain pass to get to one of the ski slopes, and the passengers in the car are saying ‘wow’ and ‘look at that’ every time you turn a corner, but you can’t look round else you risk running the car over the edge & plunging us all into a crevasse.

On arrival in Queenstown we took advantage of the local floodlit ski slope, and managed to get a couple of hours in pretty much straight after we had got off the plane.  There’s nothing lilke a cold ski slope at 8.30 at night to blow away any jet lag you might be feeling, but I would advise in following the trails at all times.   I took one wrong turn and found myself on just my second run trying to negotiate a steep mogul field…in the dark.  It got a bit hairy.

Sunday & Monday

Out on the slopes again, with Sunday only tarnished slightly by the poor quality of a steak & cheese pie at lunchtime. 

Tuesday

Poor weather combined with a pie-free slope-side restaurant forced us off the pistes in the afternoon, so we took the chance to enhance our culture by visiting the local wineries & vineyards, one of which was owned by a colleague of Owain’s working in Hong Kong. 

At the wine tasting you were apparently supposed follow the proper etiquette of swilling the wine around in your mouth to fully savour the taste, before spitting it into a bucket, and rinsing your mouth with water to refresh the palatte for the next go.  Apparently though I missed out on this, as my wine tasting seemed to involve encouraging the guide to give me a generous measure, then necking it in one go and holding the glass out for the next before the guide had finished giving out the first one.  Well it all seemed good to me anyway.

Wednesday

One of the enjoyable things of living in Asia-Pacific, unless you are of a nervous disposition, is that occasionally you get some quite exciting weather.  For instance Hong Kong is entertaining when a typhoon rolls in – you can go home from work & the pubs give out free drinks – and New Zealand has its moments too with high winds & a climate that seems to change about every ten minutes.  Unfortunately though during the week we managed to conspire to miss everything of interest.

Firstly there was another typhoon in Hong Kong while we were away.  It hit at lunchtime, so everyone disappeared off for the afternoon to ‘take cover’ should the office descend into some Wizard of Oz-like swirling vortex…surprisingly enough it didn’t, but everyone enjoyed the afternoon off plus a few shooters nonetheless.  My claim that I should get that day’s holiday reinstated on my annual leave was met with pretty short shrift when I returned to the office.

On the same day, Queenstown was hit by an earthquake.  Well apparently it was, because we didn’t notice.  I only found out the next day when, whilst sitting on a chair lift, I was told by a local guy that he had been asleep & had been woken up by the quake, as it had registered 5.6 on the Richter Scale.  I was completely oblivious to this, although when we traced back the time we realised that we were in the pub when it hit – whether or not this has anything to do with us not noticing, I am not sure.

The final Act of God of the week wasn’t an Act of God at all, more an accident that must have left a few red faces.  One of the resorts on the North Island had had a heavy snowfall overnight, and so went for the allegedly usual practice of letting off small explosive devices in the mountains, in order to dislodge loose snow drifts and prevent any major avalanches.  Unfortunately when calculating the weight of explosives, the YTS trainee on the job got his decimal points in the wrong place, and put too much explosive down.  He then nuked the mountain and started an avalanche that engulfed the whole resort.

Thankfully the resort managers surprisingly had had the sense to clear the slopes first, and so no-one was hurt.  However there were plenty of eye witnesses on hand to see the avalanche & video it for local news; I thought the sight of a ski resort wiped out in five minutes might have made international news, but judging by the number of concerned people phoning me up to see if I had been anywhere near the resort in question, I guess it didn’t…

Thursday

New Zealand people are very friendly, but are also, it has to be said, a bit mad when it comes to sports; there is nothing at all wrong with living an outdoor lifestyle and being active, but they do seem to take this to the limit.  Everywhere seems to have extreme sports activities, and there isn’t a bridge or hill that you can’t jump off or be thrown down.  We had a go at a few during the week, such as the Shotover Jet – a jet-powered speedboat doing 360 degree spins through a tight rocky valley; donut racing – if skiing gets too boring, lie face down on a inflatable ring and just go head-first down the slope with no means of stopping; flying to the coast through remote mountains in a six-seater plane (see picture 5); and the luge – an engine-less go-kart on a steep downhill track, which Owain won with the biggest false start since the runner who was disqualified in the 100m final recently. 

We held off the bungy jumping, sky diving, or cliff-swinging (don’t ask), but it was only some bad weather that foiled Owain from doing the Pits. The Pits is a specially designed aerobatic biplane, which takes you up to a few thousand feet, then just spins & loops & rolls until you feel sick, then brings you down.  Amazing what some people will spend their money on really. 

We watched one Pits trip go up earlier in the week; it started predictably enough with a loop-the-loop and four barrel rolls on the trot, before going on to the more serious stuff.  The best stunt I saw was when it pulled up and headed straight up in the air, slowing down as the engine lost out to the pull of gravity.  The two eventually balanced out, leaving the plane hanging vertically in the air for two or three seconds without moving…before falling back to earth, at which point the pilot kicked the engine back into gear, and accelerated downwards before pulling the plane out of the dive and moving onto his next trick.  Try doing that in a 747.

Friday

New Zealand, as I am sure you all must know, is where the Lord of the Rings films were made over the last couple of years.  And if you didn’t know beforehand, then even the quickest visit to NZ will let you know this without any doubt.

I wondered for a while if the local New Zealanders ever got fed up with the film crews running building strange sets, men dressed in strange costumes round their fields hitting each other with plastic axes, or people wandering into pubs and asking for a flagon of ale and some of the Shire’s finest pipe tobacco, but if they did it all appears forgotten.  You can go on Lord of the Rings tours, buy Lord of the Rings books, and eat Lord of the Rings food - roast orc pie a speciality, dwarf portions available on request. 

Best of all though was on our way out, when we noticed an Air New Zealand plane at the airport, with its hull completely redecorated with Lord of the Rings characters and proclaiming itself to be the ‘Airline to Middle Earth’.  I thought the only things that flew in Middle Earth were those evil black hooded creatures that came to suck your soul, but then I guess they don’t have that many people applying to be an Air New Zealand Stewardess these days.

Saturday

Our travel plans were such that we left Queenstown on the Saturday afternoon to fly to Auckland, then had to stay one night in Auckland before flying back to Hong Kong on Sunday morning.  So, naturally, we thought we’d give the Auckland nightlife a test.

First off we headed to their harbour district which we thought should be home to some fashionable bars & restaurants; however we were wrong.  What it actually was home to was a lot of car parks, and distinctly empty looking bars that had a reputation only for getting busy late at night when all the underage drinkers poured in. 

They did however have some local entertainment; as we walked to the bar area, on a street corner there was a guy busking.  But not dressed in scruffy clothes playing folk songs with his guitar, as you might expect; no he was dressed in an orange boiler suit with bright red workers’ hard hat, like a Village People wannabe, and was singing “You Should be Dancing” by the Bee Gees in a falsetto voice, occasionally giving it a bit of dancing on the street corner to enhance the mood.  Whether or not he is Auckland’s equivalent of Hong Kong’s Melvis (RIP) I don’t know (there is no equivalent in London, and, to be honest, it’s better if it stays that way) but I felt compelled to give him some money just for the sheer bravado he was showing.

After some negotiations with a taxi driver we managed to find our way to a busier area, and following an excellent, if pie-less, meal, retreated to the local Irish Pub for a drink.  It is a cliché but it is true that wherever you go on this side of the world, you can always get a drink in an Irish pub.

It turned out there was an Irish band playing in the pub also, so we were looking forward to some traditional Celtic tunes; however we had a bit of a shock when their first song was the Aussie anthem “Down Under”.  I was fully expecting them to carry on with other well known Irish songs such as “Africa”, “Born in the USA”, and possibly rounding off with “One Night in Bangkok”, but after the first song finished they moved on to more predictable singalongapub fare such as the Beatles and Oasis, and we left happy.

Sunday

After a couple of pies for the road in the airport (curry - nice, minced beef - average) the 12 hour daytime flight back to Hong Kong passed quicker than I expected it to.  This was mainly thanks to free red wine and Cathay Pacific showing both Matrix films back-to-back; however it was also a pretty quiet flight, as Owain was offered an upgrade to Business Class, and left me down the back on my own…cheers mate…