Nov 6 - Franz Josef

We’re getting ready to depart F-J for some of the longer drives ahead of us. That’s not so great. What’s great is we’ll be passing through a mountain range called the Southern Alps by the locals. I’ve looked at the route and it should provide some pretty spectacular views. That’s the norm in this country, so unsurprising. After having scrambled around those rocks the other day, I wish we had time to do more such goofing off, but I’m primarily here oriented as a photography/sight seeing trip, so more active activities will likely have to wait until the next time I visit. I think that you’ve have to focus the geography you’ll be playing in much more to do that here too. Unless you are here for like a month, there are just too many places to explore and trek around in to be able to do more then 1 a week.

Today takes us to Queenstown, which is relatively far to the south. It’s impressive looking on the map until you look at a city map and realize it’s quite small. According to the resources we have with us, it has a permanent population of 11,000 with more then 1 million tourists passing through annually. I guess that makes me 1 in a million, yuk yuk.

Many LoTR scenes were filmed in the regions surrounding QT, so I think we may catch one or two, and Jester also mentioned the possibility of an aerial trip. We’ll swing through town so we can catch a shot of the Internet Bus on the way out. Oh, one thing we were noticing here in F-J. We’ve seen several girls walking about who appear to be couples, or at least far friendlier with each other then girls in the States seem to be with each other. We haven’t noticed it elsewhere, which might not mean anything, but guys do tend to notice things like that.

Jester mentioned to me yesterday that NZ would be a really great place to retire to. I could see that. Living here now would probably be tough for me, but retiring some day far off might be cool. It’s a really awesome place for nature, until you want something you get from modern society, then things could get ugly. Decent Internet access throughout the country would go a long way to fixing that though. I live for information, and it’s not as easily had here as I’m used to.

Oh, one other thing which I had commented on to Jester several days ago, but I think is worth a mention here. Due to our US-centric focus of news, what we most often seem to get the impression of is that the US is sucky/declining, and things are fabulous in the rest of the world and we should take more after them. Well you read world news here, and what you see is a couple pages on the US, which like the US, is focused on our elections and what they mean. And then a whole lot of pages about how the rest of the world is in fact not quite as rosy as some in the US might think. There’s no shortage of problems elsewhere in the world. Fiji (where more then one person suggested I go spend a week) is on the verge of either a military coup or a civil war, Italy is having a mafia war so severe that the government is considering army intervention, and NZ seems to have some employment issues. Papers are using the number of jobs listed in them as a selling point.