Musings of an Idiot

Snowboarding

It looks like the password for the image gallery will not be sorted till Wednesday, so no photos straight away but I will post another few pics here to make up for that. The trip to Mount Raupehu was one of the coolest trips I have had {nothing can beat the Motuhei Island trip which I took with Lance and Benji}. Lance again arranged for this trip along with Annabelle and it was nice that it coincided with my birthday – gave me a chance to do something new and learn something new.

We left Auckland on Friday evening after initial hiccups {change of vehicles at the last minute, late start} and it was really cool that all the four of us gelled together instantly – Tarekh, Anna, Lance and me. Tarekh ended up driving us to the Mount and back as Anna’s BMW looked overloaded and we weren’t sure about it, so we decided not to take the risk and jumped onto Tarekh’s bulldozer..heeheeee…not really – it was a 4WD Jeep (???) It took us close to 5 hours to get to our destination and I must say – night driving is really tiring {not that I was driving or anything} and it was really cool that Tarekh stayed awake the whole time. :-) The drive was fairly un-eventful, except for the classic Austin Powers parking when we stopped by at Burger King for a feed- we had a real good laugh on that.

The lodge we were staying was in National Park –which is about 20 minutes drive from the Mount and it was a nice unit – simple but warm. The only small niggle was that the flush in the bathroom would take ages to fill up and that too only 1/4^th of the tank capacity, so there had to be atleast half an hour gap between any of us using the toilet, Incidentally there was no cellphone coverage in the lodge, so did not receive any phone calls on birthday and that must have been frustrating whoever was trying to ring me.

Birthday’s for me don’t have any major significance – except of course that it gives another occasion to celebrate and spend some money. A thought which popped up in my head was – shouldn’t the mother be wished a happy birthday since she is the one who has given birth?? I went to sleep after receiving birthday wishes from my roomies.

Saturday was a wonderful day – nice and sunny. Started off the day by hiring a snowboard and boots while the rest of my stuff was borrowed stuff from Lance {which saved me some dollars}. It is amazing how much even things like jackets, boots, gloves etc. cost at the skiing centers – the amount of money generated by local tourism is indeed mind boggling. Tarekh drove us to the mountain, as usual, and I decided to take a beginner’s lesson in snow boarding while Lance headed off to the top of the mountain while Tarekh and Anna shuffled between the base slope and the middle of the mountain. My lesson went better than expected – I stayed on my feet/board for a lot longer than I thought I would. The first 10 minutes and the last 15-20 minutes out of the 1 and half hour session were the hardest as I kept falling down during that time. It is a lot more tiring than I thought, especially when you are not used to it and don’t know what to expect. It snowed straight after we all met up at the café. Instead of going back snow boarding, we drove back to our lodge and had a few games of table tennis after which we decided to go to the thermal pools in Tookanu. Anna decided to stay back to have some rest, so us three boys jumped into the vehicle and off we went.

Again I did not know what to expect and it was a 45 minute drive to Tookanu. The thermal pools were a revelation. We got into the private pools which had naturally warm thermal spring water in the pools and it had a consistent temperature of 40 degrees centigrade. It was relaxing and therapeutic – after spending 10 minutes in there you start sweating and have this incredible urge to get out of the pool but at the same time the warmth is so comforting that you don’t want to. The funniest thing was the loud speaker which would yell out some pool number, time to time {we heard it at least 5 times in the 20 minutes we were in the pool} to vacate their pool. Here you are in this amazing setting –enjoying a nice thermal bath under the sky and suddenly the quite is shattered by a voice shouting something over a lour speaker. The private pools were for 20 minute duration each and the most basic system they found for informing that your time was up was a public announcement system – typically kiwi.

After the lovely time at the thermal pools, we decided to get some pizza from a neighboring township of Turangi, which is the Trout fishing capital of the world. But man – what a quite place to live in. It was a Friday evening and the town was dead- the only areas which seemed alive were the BP station with a Burger King attached to it and another local joint called Four Fish – which had a restaurant, a liquor store, a pizza joint and a pub. New Zealand is like that {at least all the towns and cities I have seen on the North Island} – except for the main cities like Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and some smaller cities, where there is heaps of life and activity, the country side is pretty quite. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not but life is definitely really uncomplicated and possibly depressing. Maybe that’s the reason why people flock to the bigger places – Auckland alone holds 1/3^rd of NZ’s population. We did get our pizza from Four Fish and they were yummy. We got back to the lodge and finished the rest of the pizza and this time Tarekh decided to stay back in the room to catch up some rest while Anna, Lance and me headed off to the lounge where we played table tennis while waiting for the rugby game between All Blacks and Springboks to start. I won most of the table tennis games – which we played before and after the rugby game. There was also this wonderful game which was in the lounge. It had 4 handles with a button on top and in the centre of the base was a light area and as soon as you hit start the red light would blink on and off - the idea was that you had to hit your button first as soon as the red light turned green and if you hit your button before it turned green or if you were the last person to hit your button after it turned green then you would get a mild electric shock. I got the shock a few times and was afraid to play the game afterwards but it was addictive and heaps of fun.

All of us took a break and watched the rugby match which the All Blacks won, thus keeping their chances of winning the Tri-nations cup alive. It is surprising how much I enjoy watching rugby now – 2 years back I did not like the game at all and it did not make sense to me as to why you have to pass your ball backward when the aim was to get the ball to move forward, also why the ball had to be oval shaped instead of round and lots of stuff like that but now I think I have come to know the rules of the game and thus enjoy it more. Here an All Blacks rugby game is equivalent to a one day cricket match in India {nations are so obsessed with their sports} – if the All Blacks loose their game, the nation goes into mourning and discussions. After the rugby game –we went back to playing table tennis and as we met up with other people who were staying at the lodge, we played some drinking games {not real drinking games since all of us were tired and all of us wanted to go snowboarding the next day as well} – which was heaps of fun.

We retired to our unit and I fell into deep sleep as soon as I hit the bed and started snoring and it was funny because Lance woke me up, so that I could change my sleeping position and I distinctly remember asking him if I was snoring and he said ‘Yes’ and I changed positions and started snoring again {Lance told me the next morning that I stopped snoring after a while}. So that was the end of my wonderful birthday.

The birthday which definitely stands on top of my list was when I was 13 years old {in 1990}. I had just come back to Delhi to stay with mom and dad, after being away from them for 4 years {3 years in a boarding school in Andhra Pradesh and a year with my second family i.e mom’s sister and her family}. Because of the different schooling system in North India- my birthday fell bang in the middle of our first term exams and on 28^th August, 1990 I had my Math’s exam. And if you know me – you will know how much I hate Math but being silly me I still decided to go ahead and celebrate my birthday. Both mom and dad asked me not to celebrate it on that day but postpone it till later but for some reason I was adamant and instead of preparing for my exam, I was hell-bent on celebrating. My parents relented and Dad took me on our scooter to get the birthday cake and I can still remember holding an umbrella over the cake while dad was getting drenched in the pouring rain while driving the scooter {monsoon season hits Delhi in August-September} around. I went ahead –invited my friends and celebrated the birthday. I was so tired after the event that I did not study and fell asleep and without surprise - I failed my Math’s exam the next day. I felt really horrible because I realized that what mom and dad were trying to say to me was the right thing to do but I ignored them and caused them so much inconvenience and pain, just because of my stubbornness and my desire to self-destruct at that point. Even though the immediate outcome of the birthday wasn’t pleasing at all, somehow that event has stayed with me ever since and probably shaped me as a person because after that moment of realization something in me changed and I guess I value that one event more than anything else because it taught me quite a few things about life. Before you think that I am full of shit, I will return to the present time and space.

Sunday was another glorious day and this time around instead of snowboarding, I decided to just go to the upper slopes of the mountain for sight seeing and that’s where I got some wicked photographs. The funny incident which happened was that I was asked for my ID while getting some beer for Lance and myself - I was stunned for a moment because here I was having turned 28 and I am being asked to prove that I am over 18 years of age. I joked about it with the bar girl and asked her if I should take it as a compliment -she served me the drinks without insisting on my ID after that. A similar incident had happened at Turangi -the evening before, when we got some beers for the night and I was asked for my ID to prove my age. Really - do I look 18 or are people blind?

Since we had to return to Auckland the same evening, we left the Mountain by afternoon, came back to the lodger – packed up and left back for Auckland. The trip back was shorter because we took a shorter route and we had heaps of fun playing a random game Lance invented. Lance said the first person to see a deer on the route back wins a point and we ignored it for half the journey and out of nowhere Lance shouts out the deer, which were in a farm. It was bizarre but really funny and from that point we added so many improbable things to the list and I must admit that Lance won that game. He was able to spot a hawk, a cat, a person carrying a bucket, a bike, a black sheep among other things. The funniest moment was trying to find a person carrying a bucket- we drove for at least 80 odd K.M’s but could not find a person carrying a bucket and I was frustrated and shouted “Something is wrong with NZ if no one carries buckets around anymore” and at the same instance Lance spotted a person carrying a yellow bucket – it was just a really funny coincidence as he spotted a black sheep right after that.

Overall it was a unique trip and definitely something I enjoyed heaps. Now that I am back to civilization -I face the consequences of not having my cell phone ‘ON’ over the weekend. The whole of Monday went into finishing off the paperwork for NZQA and I hope it is finally out of the way for sometime because it definitely makes me brain dead.

The netball game was really close and we lost 28-25. We played really well as a team and we lost those crucial points in the last quarter. Our second round draw has been drawn out and we are playing the same team again the first thing in the next round – so should be fun knowing what their strengths and weaknesses are but have the challenge of not having most of our core team.

I just signed off on the DVD design for the NZ/Australia market, to be released by Arkles Entertainment. Dealing with John Davies has been a real pleasure because he is an open person and is really straight forward – he implemented all the suggestions I had for the improvements in design and that kind of thing is really rare with the distributors. So I am excited on how the movie will fare in the local market.

Anyway, I think it has been a pretty long update as I promised and I think I should stop now.

Till later,
Amit

posted by Amit @ 11:43 PM