From Wellington to Queenstown

So last time I wrote I was traveling around the north island in that little spaceship. I have since bid farewell to Ginger and am now working and living at a hotel in Queenstown right on a beautiful lake with mountain views out my bedroom window.

I’ll rewind though and give a quick recap of how I got here.

First, Angela and I drove the spaceship all the way to Wellington. Once in Wellington, I stayed at a zebra stripped hostel, literally a five-story building painted like a giant zebra. Anyways, met lots of cool people at that hostel and chilled there for about a week looking for a job. Wellington is a really cool city, lots of restaurants, cafes, shops, art galleries, and design companies, so it seemed like a great place to settle down and work for several months. Apparently lots of people had this idea however, so finding a job there was pretty competitive.

Not wanting to waste more time lingering about Wellington looking for jobs, my new Canadian friend Tara and I decided to hop on the ferry and head to the south island. The ferry lands in Picton, a place we quickly found to be a sketchy cat town. Basically, our experience there started off when a very eccentric woman with crazy Mrs. Frizzle hair picked us up from the ferry to take us to our hostel. We got there to find cats running around the place. This was our first clue about the cat obsession in this town. At least the cats weren’t in the 27 bed dorm room we were sleeping in. Anyways, it was horrible weather so we decided to hit up the library for free internet. We got to the lib, and my friend Tara sat at a computer next to a guy who was googling images of cats. Clue number two. He kept asking my friend to look at pictures of cats. Tara then noticed the stack of cat books lying next to him. Clue number three. Right after Tara told me that she was leaving because of the cat guy, I looked out the window to notice a cat strolling around the front of the library. Clue number 4. As we were leaving the library, Tara grabbed the local newspaper. Picture of a woman nuzzling her cat on the front cover. Clue number 5. We left this city as soon as possible.

We then rented a car and headed straight to Franz Josef Glacier where we had an interview at a five star hotel. The owner of the hotel let us stay there for free for the interview, so after spending the night at a creepy cat hostel in a 27 person dorm room we each had our own king sized bed in a luxurious five star hotel room. We got the job at this hotel, however Franz Josef is a very small tourist town, so we decided to keep moving down to Queenstown, where we had another interview at a hotel anyways.

Queenstown is basically the Vail or Steamboat of New Zealand; a small tourist town nestled between mountains in front of a giant beautiful lake. The views are pretty unreal. There is a small downtown with heaps of restaurants, cafes, stores, and bars. Generally Queenstown is the ideal city where backpackers want to settle down and work, and we luckily we were able to make this happen.


So my friend Tara and I got jobs working at this hotel’s restaurant. (Check it out at www.rydges.com and check on the Queenstown, NZ one). With the job we can live in the hotel in our own rooms (including our own bathrooms) with all meals included for an awesome price compared to the other options around here. Plus access to the hotel’s pool. Housekeeping once a week. Don’t have to cook or do my dishes. Plus that mountain view. It’s no graphic design job, but it’s definitely a good situation. The mandatory menu and wine tasting for the restaurant staff was not a bad perk either.

I should be living in Queenstown until around April, and then after that traveling New Zealand’s south island, or who knows. I plan on taking roadtrips from here, but otherwise I probably won’t have too much to report for a while!