Howdy folks! 😊
I realized that I forgot to update you on a couple of things…
First, sand flies in fiordland. Rumor had it that they were awful, perhaps the worst in the entire country.
Rumor might have been right. 🙃
Sand flies are notorious for attacking your ankles and legs, but if you start walking, they’re slow enough that they can’t really keep up with you, so you’re okay to just walk around and leave them behind. The sand flies in fjordland, however, have two major differences: they go after your head and not your legs, so you’ve got a cloud of them buzzing around your face and ears, and guess what?!?!
They can keep up with you. 😶😬😶
So… it was a good thing that we felt done with fiordland, as the little time we spent there, we we’re chasing off a cloud of sand flies around our heads, at least when we were by the river. It wasn’t bad on the coastline of the sound itself.
The other update? As you might have guessed, I didn’t hear from the Expedia people with the confirmation email within 24 hours like supposedly I was going to. 🙄
I think you can pretty much take it to the bank at this point that if someone from customer service tells you there’s going to be a confirmation email within 24 hours, they have no idea what they’re doing at all, they’re making stuff up, you’re never going to get an email, and you can ignore them and go try someone else.
I waited pretty much two days again this time, and when I called back to find out what on Earth was going on, they told me that even though the last customer agent had absolutely promised me, guaranteed me, 100% without any doubt that my ticket was booked, and that I owed no money whatsoever and wouldn’t owe any money whatsoever, lo and behold, apparently, he… shocker…. had no idea what he was doing either. The tickets had only been reserved and not printed, and apparently, I had to fork over $591 additional dollars to go home.
😶
It’s mind boggling the level of ineptitude. The only reason these people can stay in business is the demand accompanied by the lack of competition. No easy endeavor to start an airline. You want to go to New Zealand? Not many options. You’re stuck with few choices.
But Qantas? Nope. Not anymore. Not a choice.
And Expedia. Nope, not them either.
Be warned. 🙃
There’s a part of me that just wants to forget about it and leave them forever behind.
There’s another part of me that wants to work hard to make sure they pay for how crappily they run their companies, how crappily they treat their customers.
Why? If I were the only customer in the world, then maybe I would just deal with it and never use them again, and move on with my life. But I’m not the only customer in the world, and my Justice bone, as you all know, is very very strong. I feel like companies need to take (or be held) responsible for their crap, and I don’t want other people to go through what I have and continue to go through. I’ve lost quite a bit of time, sanity, and money because of their incompetence. Yes, I can afford it, but a lot of other people can’t.
And no one should have to!
I’m thinking about writing an article about my experience and submitting it to various news agencies. Chase did some googling, and apparently it’s not a new thing with Qantas. In fact, maybe they’ll actually get a little of what’s coming to them. Maybe I can help.
If you have any other ideas, please let me know.
Ugh. Been a nightmare times 10.
But now I actually have reserved for and paid for tickets.
I think. 😶
In other news… Lumsden is starting to feel a little like Whangarei. 🙃 The night of the 7th was the 3rd time we’ve slept there. It’s a great place to stay, though, so that’s nice. 😊 Bathrooms, trash receptacles, recycling bins, water fill-up station. 👍 Good stuff.
We headed north toward Queenstown after we got all our stuff back to the normal non-sleeping locations. I was hoping to meet up with someone. She’s in a little town just east of Queenstown, but she wasn’t going to get off until after 6 pm, and we were already in Queenstown by like… noon? –with nothing else to do but head north to Mt. Cook, et al.
After… I think getting some food for Chase?
I don’t remember exactly what all happened, but I hadn’t heard back from the girl I was hoping to meet up with, so I gave up and suggested we just head north to do the rest of the things that we had planned for the trip, as there wasn’t much time left on the trip for either of us, even less for me.
At some point, and I’m not sure exactly how it happened, I noticed a bungee tower from the road, and remembering that New Zealand’s tallest bungee tower was in Queenstown, and that it has been recommended that even if we don’t jump, we go watch, we drove down to give it a look.
It turned out not to be the tallest one (I guess the same company has multiple towers in the area). This one was only as tall as the one in Taupo that Chase and one of our other friends jumped off of.
Chase and I had been looking for other places that we might be able to go cliff jumping, hoping to find a place just a little bit higher than hokitika Gorge. We wandered over to the bridge that everyone was jumping off and found that that particular bridge was 43 m above the river below, and although the water was very likely deep enough to jump from that height, there was absolutely no way that I was going to jump from that absolutely massive of a height–not without significant training, that is. That’s the kind of height you can seriously injure yourself from if you do it wrong.
Funny enough, one of the guys who worked there told us the story of a man who had come and bungee jumped during the day, and then come back a handful of hours later, completely drunk, or otherwise intoxicated, climbed up on the bridge and jumped.
😶
Oh, and he face planted the landing. 😬
But he bubbled up to the surface, and swam to shore, blood coming out of his eyes, and walked away.
😶
Neither Chase nor I were going to do anything like that. 🙃
That said, we did ask the worker if he had any recommendations about possible places to Cliff jump, if there was a way to get down to some of the cliffs on the river that we could see from the bridge. He mentioned that there was a trail that went down to the river, just up the road a couple hundred yards. He also mentioned another River maybe 20 minutes away that had a section where you could Cliff jump. It was a class-3 river, so some decent rapids, but I guess also had that cliff jumping spot.
He told us how to get there, and we tentatively decided to head that direction, as it was on the way to the stuff we were wanting to do at Mount cook.
While we were still there, we got a phone call, coincidentally from that friend who had bungee jumped with Chase, who was up in the northern end of the South Island with a car that had just overheated. She and our other friend who are traveling together had just driven up a long steep dirt road to get to the trailhead for a hike they were wanting to do, and the van had overheated badly on the way up the steep section of the road.
Knowing that both Chase and I had mechanic skills, they called us, miraculously having reception where they were, and I spent a little while on the phone with them walking them through a handful of things to check to see if we might be able to diagnose it over the phone. After going through all those things, it appeared that the fans weren’t kicking on.
So we at least had a tentative diagnosis. Of course, without actually being at the car, you can’t give 100% diagnosis, so it still needed to be looked at to be absolutely certain, but we seem to have a pretty good starting point.
At first, they were going to try and take their van to a local mechanic nearby, but they found out that they wouldn’t be able to even get in for a couple of days, and after Chase and I found that the parts that they were likely going to need were most likely not going to be available on the island, and that there was a good chance that they were going to need to have a fix jimmy-rigged up (a proper replacement fan was three or four months out, if that indeed turned out to be the issue), they decided they would take us up on our offer to drive up to them and help them.
As far as meeting up was concerned, we basically had three options: One, we could drive to where they were, which was 10 and 1/2 hours from where we were. We had to pick up parts, as well, and that was 30 minutes back the other direction, so it would have been actually about 12 hours to where they were. Chase and I were both up for the drive, but the girls didn’t want us to go that far, and there were two other options.
We could go to Christchurch, which would make the most sense, as it was the halfway point between us and the biggest city in the entire Island and the most likely to have parts; Or we could meet in Greymouth, which also had a Mazda dealer (they drive a Mazda) and parts stores, just not as many as ChristChurch would have.
None of us really wanted to go to Christchurch, and my vote was Greymouth because there were places around Greymouth that I had wanted to share with them anyway but couldn’t because we were in different parts of the country at the time, so I thought it would be fun to meet there, fix their car, and then show them some of what we had enjoyed on our own travels. 😊
The girls also voted for Greymouth, so having previously taught them to keep their heater on while they drove, even though it was summer time, they headed over to Greymouth, and we headed back to the parts store to make sure that we had the parts we needed for the fixed we thought was probably going to be required.
Chase and I drove back into Queenstown to the parts supplier, and we picked up just about everything that we could think of that we might possibly need, four different aftermarket universal fan assemblies of different sizes, wire, electrical tape, connectors, and other stuff as well. Then we headed out of town.
Just as we were leaving civilization, we realized that we needed to get gas. We also saw a bridge going over a river that was deep enough to jump into and already had a whole bunch of people jumping off it, so after getting gas, we headed back over to the bridge, parked, and enjoyed several jumps off the bridge into the river, Chase doing a backflip for the first time in his life into water. 🥳
I… didn’t try a backflip. 🙃
But it was nice to cool off because it was 87°, and we didn’t have AC. 🥵
From there, we headed west on highway 6 until we got to the Blue Pools again. Since we were already passing that way, even though it was like 7:00 at night, we decided to do one more trip, one last hurrah. 😊 This time, we finally jumped off the first bridge. We had walked over that bridge several times and seen one little spot that looked like it might be deep enough to jump into, while still very shallow. But after passing it so many times, each time saying we think we could jump there, this time, we weren’t going to leave until we actually had. 🙃
Chase jumped first, and barely touched the bottom with his butt, and I jumped after him, expecting to touch the bottom because I’m a little heavier, but didn’t touch at all until I put my legs down to push back up. It was then that I realized that I was only a few inches from the bottom myself and had just barely missed hitting it with my butt as well.
Success!!! 🥳
With our last hoorah in the bag, we said goodbye to the Blue Pools, likely forever, and continued our journey to meet up with the girls.
I worked on blog posts as we drove until we stopped to sleep on the side of the road in what we thought was the middle of nowhere near hokitika.
Love to all. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 