Jetboating
My friend Chris, the Glaswiegen, is old friends with a girl who runs a bar down here named Louise. She's friends with the head driver for the local jetboating operation, Shotover Jetboats. So today, as a birthday present she took Chris and I down to the river and we went for a ride. A jetboat is a twin engined 500hp jet propelled craft that can cary about 20 people and operate in 6 inches of water. A rather serious $250,000 piece of machinery. When we got there Louise's friend came over and told us that we could either go on the commercial tour or he'd take us out personally. So of course we opted to go out with him and 2 drivers in training. They gave us 3/4 length rain coats and life preservers and we all climbed up on the trailer and into the empty boat. Then the driver got in and proceeded to scare the shit out of all of us for the next 30 minutes. They are very fast, and they pride themselves on how close to the rocks/cliffs in and around the river they can get. On the commercial tour they're restricted as to how close they can run, but luckily we weren't on the commercial tour. These guys can drive, and they love it. They also really like to barrel at a cliff full speed and then at the last second spin the boat into a 360 in an impossibly small space where you really think you're about to kiss a wall/tree/rock. It was, well loads of fun, big wet fun. Everytime he'd spin the boat out and soak us all he'd look over at all of us and say with deep sincerity, "Sorry mate." I'm doing a poor job of discribing this so I'll stop now. I'll be leaving Queenstown and continueing south on Friday morning. 2 weeks left till I fly: Christchurch to Auckland, Auckland to Papeete, Papeete to LA, LA to San Francisco, in one day. That's sure to be loads of fun. I'm beginning to get upset about the election, and my absentee ballot still hasn't come. Thanks to everyone for all the birthday wishes.
Happy Birthday Cin!
posted by jts @ 1:20 AM
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