The question seemed impertintent because Rob, in his late 20s, had just led us down the rapids of the Kawarau River on body boards. You know, those pieces of polystryrene that people people use in the surf. The water was 10 degrees. The river was, well, frightening.
But I wondered about the guides. They would have to leap into this river every day. They would have to give the same instructions, answer the same (mostly idiotic) questions, pack and unpack the same gear, drive down the same road, arrive at the same destination with the same cafe, every day there were takers for Mad Dog River Boarding, an adventure company in Queenstown in New Zealand’s South Island.
Queenstown, mostly known in Australia as a ski-ing resort, presents two radically different faces outside winter.
Surely no other place of similar size (pop 16,000) is so geared to propelling human bodies in places and at speeds never contemplated by their Creator.
Every hotel and back-packer entrance sports, literally, a raft of phamplets advertising adenalin-pumping pursuits. Some I had not heard of before, including Mad Dog’s use of boogie boards designed for waves in the sea being used on rivers raging enough to generate their own standing waves. Another was fly by wire. The body is strapped to a rocket attached to a high-wire and you fly at up to 170km/h for six minutes above the splendid Queenstown scenery.
Human bodies are attached to paragliders and hang-gliders and projected off mountains high over the town in tandem rides. Trips are run by company’s with names like G-Force, Sky-Trek, Max-Air. White-knuckled they are hurled along the Shotover and Dart rivers in jet boats at up to 75km/h with tiny clearances between the boat and the rocks. They are put into rubber rafts and shot down rapids. They are hurtled down 800m of luge and out of aircraft in tandem sky-diving.
And, of course, there is the progenitor of all this body-populsion — bungy jumping. They jump off a 102m high bridge over Skipper’s Canyon into the river below.
The opposite face of Queenstown outside winter is the sedate beauty of the place — in mind at least, far from the madding human projectiles.
There are only four colours: blue, white, green and grey. Blue lake, sky and far mountains; white snow and cloud; green fields; and grey close mountains and cloud.
A nascent viniculture clings between the rivers and the glaciated walls of the valley.
You can take a trip up Skipper’s Canyon, past the bungy jumpers, to an old gold-mining town and restored school.
Gold was discovered in 1862, thre eyars after the first European came to the are to do what New Zealanders usually do with their land: farm sheep. The discoverer Thomas Arthur extracted a fortune from the Shotover River in a couple of days. And hopeful miners followed like sheep to one of the richest alluvial goldfields in the world. They were gone in a few years, leaving agriculture and tourism to support the place.
Queenstown has one hotel room for every person in the district.
People like Rob from Mad Dog’s mine the river in a different way. Their work is less arduous.
In answer to the boredom question he said, “The river changes every day. And so do the people.”
He’s been at it six years. And that day the river was too wild for novices to to the top 400m, but he and another guide shot it for the fun of it, so they must enjoy their work.
In a way there is a deception about Queenstown’s human propulsion industries. They offer adventure and make jokes of death-defying feats and ghastly ends. But all are perfectly safe. Most people are novices and so are on high edge. They tend to listen to instructions and follow them intently, as if their lives depend on it. The guides are invariably highly trained and practiced and because they have paying customers and market sensitivities they are risk averse and work well within safety parameters.
Having joked about impending doom, the guides, drivers and pilots invariably go to great pains to highlight safety and the fact that no-one has been killed, maimed or drowned since the company began in X year and how someone aged 84 or whatever did it.
In fact, you are more likely to be injured in the coach getting to the starting point. But that does not detract from the fear and thrill of some new method of throwing yourself into air or water.
The best contrast between Queenstown’s two faces comes on the Dart River. Toni, the only female jet boat driver in the area, takes you up to Mount Aspiring National Park at break-neck speed. The jet boat, designed in New Zealand for famers to travel on their shallow rivers more quickly than on track, sometimes scrapes the bottom. But it is virtually impossible to flip. Its engines suck through and disgorge 400 litres of water a second.
On the way back you transfer to Fun-Yaks, a form of inflatable Canadian canoe and you can enjoy the river and mountains in silent peace.
The trip starts in the tiny town of Glenorchy where the wool industry is engaged in an interesting revival.
The pub displays a set of shiny hand shears.
Hand-shearing is on the way back. Several thousand sheep were shorn that way last season in relatively quiet sheds. It is not a fad or an attempt to save energy. Rather the carpet industry prefers the cleaner cut of hand shears. Moreover, a longer and more even coat can be left on the sheep to protect them against the cold.
Incidentally, the shears were made in Sheffield, birthplace of The Full Monty, a film about human revivial in towns that have become industrially obsolete. The shears at the Glenorchy pub were being used to cut the grass and hedges.
And the people around Queenstown need to be versatile and imaginative. The gold ran out. And now the wool market is dipping. You cannot but help notice that nearly everyone in these cool latitudes now wears polytech instead of wool, especially the imaginative people in the human propulsion industry.