by Sarah M. Duncan
I could start…
by telling you about the time I stayed overnight in the Christchurch Casino, playing the pokies to blend in, drinking coca cola and reading in a toilet stall all night because I didn’t have enough money for a hostel.
Or I could regale you with tales from my three day adventure from Christchurch to Queenstown, and how I met a group of six Kiwi and Aussie former world travellers, all over sixty, who graciously invited me into their holiday park cabin for tea.
I could list my favourite places and moments from my South Island rental car trip and my Stewart Island excursion, WWOOFING (Google the term, you‘ll learn something) in the Coromandel on an organic farm run by a warm, intelligent Israeli couple and their two children, one of whom could sing amazingly well at three years old.
I could ramble on for hours about the beauty and homespun pink charm of Akaroa, various islands just off of Auckland, my six weeks working in Wellington, and my Mother’s visit from the states. I have lived in a tent for more days than I would care to count, attended a world wide ‘hippie’ gathering, slept on the beach under a full moon, slept in my rental car, slept in a sort of tree house, not slept at all, couch surfed, skinny dipped and worked a numerous amount of entry level jobs, however tedious, to keep myself sufficiently fed and watered.
My contribution to backpackersblog.co.nz will not be a diatribe of everything easy to hear. For the sake of honesty, I refuse to tell any future or current travellers that my seven months in this glorious country has been a piece of hokey pokey pie—travelling, as Cesare Pavese once said, is a brutality. But it is the best kind of brutality, if such a sentence can exist, where we wanderers turn the other cheek in sacrificing what we thought we needed to be comfortable, and after so doing find we can actually manage to put one foot in front of the other without the discarded “necessity.”
More often than not, my travels have left me metaphorically “naked”, or in clearer terms, with very little money, food, petrol, sleep, time or sense of direction. In light of the latter, I feel at least somewhat qualified, in a few humble paragraphs each week, to offer small bites of insight–not wisdom, I’m far too young for that– for you to have at your disposal if and when an applicable situation occurs.
With that out of the way…
Last Thursday, I found myself standing on Shotover Street in Queenstown with rent to pay, food to buy, an 135 dollar overdraft, a maxed out credit card, and… no job.
When I arrived in Queenstown for the first time, I came to visit a friend of mine; I had no intention to end up living here. I had received a multitude of mixed messages about Queenstown from locals. There were very few opinions outside of two polar extremes:
1. Go, it’s breathtakingly beautiful! You can’t miss it! OR
2. Steer clear, it’s a steaming pile of money grubbing tourist pandering party town sh–well, you get the picture.
The naysayers were right about a few things. Queenstown is very expensive, and it is undeniably a city geared wholly towards tourists. An approximate 85% of the jobs available in Queenstown are to be found in the hospitality industry, and it does tend to attract hordes of what disgruntled locals have dubbed The Flashpacker.*
So why Queenstown, Sarah?
Queenstown is set right in the middle of a mountain range appropriately titled The Remarkables. The drive into Queenstown as green and as luscious as Ireland, rocky and majestic as the Swiss Alps. The lake in the middle of these mountains alternates between a bright crayon blue and delirious melted silver. The air in Queenstown is chilly, with the crispness of a green gold autumn day. Despite the fact Queenstown seems to flash the word “SPEND” around every round-a-bout, if you can look above and beyond that you’ll find the answer to “Why Queenstown?“
Back to the previously described predicament.
I had arrived in Queenstown, rented a room and promptly flung myself at the doorstep of every temp agency in walking distance but with little result. Until, miracle of miracles! a call centre hired me no questions asked, no interview, wham bam.
I was thrilled: fifteen bucks an hour selling people that which they didn’t want! Long story short, it was more miserable than I could have expected…however, I happened to be good at it. On Wednesday, I was told by my boss I was almost “too good” at my job, my sales pitch was perfect, and the only thing I could do to improve was to “dumb down” my script because I sounded “too intelligent.”
The very next day, after working for only two hours, they sent those who had made the most sales into an adjoining room, and without notice, fired the rest of us. We weren’t even allowed to finish out the work day. Even more delightful, the night before the same call centre had hired a new staff for the night shifts, but had not asked their already employed staff if, perchance, they wanted any of these jobs. Sketchy? You decide.
I was, to use the lingo of my generation “freaked out.” I had been counting on this job to help me not just pay my rent, but pay off my credit card bill and overdraft, which at the moment I was living off of out of dire necessity. I was trying not to ask my parents for money out of a combination of guilt and pride, and I was already eating very little in order not to hike up my debt any further. I was scared, I was hungry, and I felt very much like I was out of options.
Once again, I dragged myself to the temp agencies, and although they understood and tried to be comforting with their Barbie-licious smiles, they admitted there wasn’t much work in QT at the moment, which had a subtext, however gentle, reading: you’re screwed. I trudged home to my flat and informed my dear friend and flatmate, Charlotte, of my present pickle.
“If I don’t find a way to make money,” said I, “I’ll have to leave Queenstown. And I don’t really want to do that. I don’t want to leave this flat, or you, or Jenn, or Steve…” Not to mention I had recently joined the community choir and joined a writing group and signed on to be the assistant stage manager of a local production of the musical Oliver!
“Well you won’t have to leave, because you’re not leaving,” Charlotte announced, a statement brilliant in it’s simplicity and clearly not to be contested. Until I was back on my feet, which she swore would happen, Charlotte assured me she would take care of my living expenses as she was more than comfortable monetarily. Not to belabour the verbal picture here, but I started crying, touched by such generosity from someone I had only known a week.
So, with Charlotte’s support still fluttering up and down my spine, I emailed my parents and received a hearty helping of loving help. But the best story is saved for last (as per the custom.) When a group of my friends from back home in the States found out about my circumstance, they gathered together just under two hundred dollars, and sent it my way, a complete compassionate surprise. And the last blessing? I landed a job as a hotel cleaner just blocks from my flats by the pure luck of the classic ‘walk in,’ a strategy I highly recommend.
In hindsight, I could have been more careful with my money. I could have chosen not to have done this, or that, or eaten this, or purchased that. But to be perfectly honest, I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t do again. Of course, in my future trips, I will have a back up fund, save more money before I travel, etc, etc, etc. But what I learned more than financial planning is this:
Travelling alone is lovely, but you can never forget your support system is actually, believe it or not, there to support you. This might be obvious to some of you. But there are those of us who, when we set out to do something, don’t like to admit when our plans go a tad awry. So…ASK FOR HELP WHEN YOU NEED IT. Trite? Over-obvious? Perhaps. But if I managed to forget something this pivotal and easy, you could easily make the same mistake.
Don’t.
*The Flashpacker [Stereotypical Definition]: youthful traveller who is dressed like she or he is going clubbing at all times, is predominantly using their parents credit card to fund their “adventures“ and don’t do much but go out and get their drink on.
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