Sometimes things happen which you simply can't explain.
This had to be the weirdest Christmas of my life! It's a day I don't think I'll ever forget and taught me alot. In fact it was so weird and random I've decided to share it with you. It's a long read but bare with me.
Lets go back in time to Christmas eve, it started off in Dunedin, a city situated on the east coast of the south Island-New Zealand. A place I'd recommend flying into by the way but I'll write about it another time.
I woke up in an Air bnb on Christmas eve and had a nice included breakfast (Thank you Lyle🙂).
After getting ready, we said goodbye and then walked to the intercity bus station to catch a bus to Queenstown. We had somehow managed to rent a room in a house from th 25th December onwards for 2 weeks. The journy took around 4 and a half hours in total and we didn't arrive till avout 7:30pm.
Thats right, I spent the majority of my Christmas eve on a bus! 😅
and here it is
It would of been a pleasant journey had the air con been working! I could barely breath!
Aside from this, some of the views on the way were stunning as we drove further west to our destination. Unfortunately I couldn't get some good pics because I was sat on the wrong side of the bus but the views got better and better.
I took these on the bus
Finally we arrived in 'Queenstown' and made our way to the hostel that we had booked for 1 night...just to fill the gap between moving into the house. Our only option was two seperate dorms and mine wasn't exactly homely...
Guess which bed's mine 🤓
I spent Christmas night in there with no family, no freinds to talk to (my room mates were obviously out getting sloshed) and no presents in the morning...yeh it sucked.
Morning came and I wasn't exactly eager to get up but had to since check out was 10am. After having about half a bowl of musli we watched and waited for the rain outside to at least settle down so we wouldn't get too drenched on our walk to the house.
I took this on the way
When it had stopped raining..
We arrived at the house and met our housemates, predominantly from Brazil. They were hungover from a night of partying but were still polite enough to engage in conversation. What a kind bunch, offering us left over Christmas food. Seriously, unless you've been traveling on a tight budget you have no idea how grateful I was.
A bit later they mentioned that "a few" of them were going to head down to the lake as it's a tradition in Queenstown and asked us if we wanted to come?
We said yes
From then on everything changed dramatically as you'll soon see..
We said we'd catch them up later. "Look out for the golden duck" they said. (They had a big inflatable to take down to the lake.
At this point the weather had cleared completely and the Sun had come out. Then they came back.."your not gonna need that" one of the housemates said as he looked at my rain jacket and jeans.
He went upstairs to change and came back down wearing a vest, board shorts and flipflops/thongs. I thought the guy was crazy! Boy was I wrong...
I decided to trust him and changed into boardshorts and flipflops then headed out. The tempreture had climbed a lot and now the sky was almost clear. As we headed down to the lake it got hotter and hotter.
When I arrived I saw this:
(Yes that is a tent in a lake and yes there is someone in it 😂)
This instantly brightened up our day so we decided to stay. There were quite a few people on the beach and as the day went into the evening more and more people arrived as it somehow got hotter and hotter?
By 6pm I was wearing nothing but Board shorts and couldn't believe the sight in front of me...
This was just the beginning, more people came. The entire town seemed to be standing next to me. Drones flew over my head and over the lake, there was a pro flyboarder showing off amazing skills in the lake. Dolphin diving underwater for a second or two before shooting up in the air like a friggin superhero!
(I'd taken my valuables back by this point in fear of things getting stolen but i wish i took a video of the event.
But it looked kind of like this
This picture belongs to theadventureiscalling.com
Everyone was drinking, having a good time and the police? They were there taking selfies!
I couldn't believe the transformation!
The party went on and more people flooded in. At one point I seemed to be in some sort of rave and couldn't move without my feet getting trodden on or burnt by lit cigarettes. People were on others shoulders and ontop of bins.
The amount of people easily doubled by the time it hit 10 pm when everything just... stopped.
Not a single bad thing happened. No violence, no fights, no bad vibes at all. People simply turned off their bluetooth speakers and simply headed home!
Many (in their drunken state) cleaned the beach of all the beer bottles and left over boxes. There wasn't a single bit of rubbish the next morning.
There's a moral to this story and that is;
anything can happen
This went from my worst Christmas to possibly my best Christmas ever and proved to me that sometimes;
miracles do happen.