Visiting New Zealand

Queenstown, obviously one of the best kept secrets

At left are a partial view of Queenstown from the mountain top and of their equivalent to a beach at the edge of the township.

We flew into New Zealand after a three hour, pleasent enough trip from Sydney and the first thing we saw was the huge rugged mountain range. I remember wondering where there would likely be a piece of flat ground sufficient for an aircarft to land. Sure enough, the aircraft turned around and there it was, the Queenstown Airport, neatly tucked away among the suburbs of Queenstown.

Shuttling into the city centre, we arrived at the Nomads Backpackers Lodge after about a 15 minute drive. Our room, an ensuite on the third floor and designed for a person in a wheel chair was larger than we expected and nicely appointed. Even though there are only two of us, it's nice to have enough room to swing a cat just in case one gets the compulsion and opportunity to do so. (I hate cats!)

Queenstown was a surprise. I had expected a lot of old buildings reminiscent of Sydney, but the place looks surprisingly modern and is attractively laid out with nice roads, parks and of course Lake Wakapitu nearby. The lake is very imposing ... huge and fresh water, although surprisingly the Queenstown Golf Course, where the 2014 Golf Open was being held, looked incredibly brownish ... they don't irrigate from the dam. Couldn't believe it, but according to the locals, it usually rains sufficiently not to have to irrigate, but of late, it's been a bit dry. Well, dry for a few weeks, which by NZ standards is a serious drought.

The goods and services tax rate in NZ is apparently 15% which probably partly accounts for the generally higher cost of living than in Australia. Beer and wine seemed expensive as did most other things. If nothing else the exchange rate between the AUD and the NZD was marginally in our favour, but nothing to get too excited about when compared with countries like Vietnam where we can live like kings for almost nothing Australian.

We walked about the city and visited the lookout after a gandola ride. Beautiful views of thel ake and nearby regions. Younger, more keen people bungy jump, fly and ride a luge, which isn't a luge in ice or snow, but a plastic tray with wheels and a steering handle which also acts as a brake. There are different gradients so that the beginners don't wipe themselves out on a hairpin bend.

At the airport a customs official saw "Place of birth: Queenstown" on my passport and said, "Oh, so you were born here?" I replied, "Regrettably no, my Queenstown is in Tasmania and nowhere as beautiful as yours."

Tomorrow is another day and we still have about four weeks to go.

Robin

Defeating Boredom in Retirement

Yesterday, I finally realised my problem ... I'm dying, not from old age or any identified disease, but from boredom. I guess it doesn't really matter what we die from, we were only ever promised three score years and ten and found out that it was a lie. People die at all ages.

Visit Vancouver and do some beer tasting

The key to dying is to have a "healthy death". That is, be rolling along in a healthy state and have a massive stroke or cardiac failure that ends one's life. Far better than lingering along with a dodgy ticker or getting more and more bored and eventually falling off one's perch.

Death is inconvenient because it comes when we least expect it and probably don't want it. I say probably don't want it because I'm sure I will get so disheartened with the state of the world and Australia that I'll be pleased that I'm only visiting. When I see my friends die and wish it had been me, I'll know it's time to get my stuff in order. So far, so good.

But, back to boredom. I tell my grandson that boredom is a state of mind, that there are no uninteresting subjects, just disinterested people. I don't know that I believe what I say, but I do try to practise it. Every morning when I arise from a usually disruptive, unfulfilling sleep, feeling like I've just reached the end of my day and need to go to bed, I decide that today will be a good day and I will be positive. Then I make the fatal mistake of switching on the news. Blah!

So, if you have the positive attitude, what do you do to alleviate the boredom?

First of all, you have to find out what are the reasons you are bored. That's not rocket science. There you were, arising early each morning, showering and shaving, getting dressed and heading off to work. If you were lucky you had a job that was interesting most of the time and provided at least a tad of self-esteem and status for you. You got paid a wad of money every so often, socialised with a variety of other people. There was perhaps even some eye candy you could look at and perhaps fantasize about (if only they weren't young enough to be your daughter). Most of all, you managed to fill in a substantial part of your day with the minutia of work.

When you retire, you have all day to do nothing. But you realise that the same things that kept you motivated while at work may work when retired. Okay, so you've gone from being the CEO of some impressive multinational company, or perhaps a cleaner at the local school. Either way, you are now nobody and the damn housework still needs to be done most days; vacuuming, mopping, dusting, washing dishes, washing clothes, hanging them out to dry. You still have to eat so someone has to buy food, prepare it, cook it and then clean up. Now, instead of having a team of underlings to get your coffee, send your faxes, put petrol in the company car, you're "it." And the worst bit is that you don't get paid. You are now attached by the hip to your superannuation account or if you are really unlucky, to a government pension that hardly provides enough for you to eat,let alone pay for holidays or a new car when your 1993 Toyota finally chucks it in.

By now, if you have made any spiritual progress in life, you've realised that there is no one who looks down from heaven and looks after you and the other seven billion people on the planet. You know you are on your own no matter how hard you wish it were otherwise. You also know that nature doesn't give a rat's bootlace what happens to you or anything or anybody else; she just goes on her own way creating and destroying universes and worlds as she has for eternity.

None of this helps you to find someone else to fix up your problem, you are all on your own. Survive or die from boredom.

The key is to keep busy ... fill in the empty hours with some type of activity. Anything you find interesting and can afford. Try to fill your calendar with so much stuff you haven't got time to think of being bored or dying from boredom.

Merlin the Magician, in the "Sword in the Stone" (TH White, 1938) said, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins. The best thing for it then is to learn something."

Change "sad" for "bored" and you have a partial solution. Learn something.

With all the free time you have after you do your chores, you can enrol in that 10 week Asian cooking class. You can volunteer somewhere where your help is needed. Get yourself a friend who you can meet for coffee, card games, or anything else that appeals to both of you. Take up a new hobby ... something you had always wanted to do, but didn't because work got in the way. Play golf. Play tennis. Ride a bike. Take up beer tasting, collect watches or wine, do something.

Merlin was part right. Learning something new is part of the solution. The real solution however, is to keep yourself so busy you haven't got time to be bored. Retirement, if you are lucky, is a second chance at life. It's time to do all those things you haven't previously had the opportunity to do. Okay, so scuba diving or sky diving may be a bit difficult with your crook back, high blood-pressure and arthritic legs, but there is still many other options.

Instead of sitting around waiting to get sick and die, get out and make the best of the last years of your life. For all you know, it may be the only life you'll have.

Robin

While it Rains in Central Australia, Coastal Australia Swelters

As I write, it has been drizzling in Central Australia for several days on and off and it's raining heavier than a drizzle at present. It's very nice and has driven down the usual high temperatures we get at this time of year.

I have the front doors and rear door of our house open allowing a cool breeze to move through the house keeping it pleasantly cool ... no air-conditioning here thank you.

It's a very different story throughout most of coastal Australia where bush fires have devastated large areas of land and destroyed dozens of houses and live stock. A handful of people has died from heat exhaustion and the ambulance service tells us their paramedics have dealt with numbers of individuals whose hearts have literally stopped working ... cardiac arrests, through heat stress.

Today we are lucky to be in Central Australia. Last month we had our share of temperatures in the high 40s (Celsius), but we are accustomed to high temperatures and have houses with evaporative or split level airconditioning which is not always available in southern houses. We know how to live with heat.

The claim that climate change is a myth is a difficult one to support with the evidence. However, Australia is always hot in Summer and we have a long history of heat-induced bush fires. Some degree of climate change has been with us always so it's hard to gauge whether it's part of a natural cycle in nature or, as some say, caused by our presence and activities here on Mother Earth.

Cutting down trees, driving motor vehicles and running coal-fired electricity plants probably do contribute to climate, so it's a thin argument to claim that humankind doesn't contribute. But when I visited Rabaul in Papua New Guinea in April last year and saw the resident volcano puffing out millions of cubic metres of smoke, I realised that we aren't the only culprits.

As I enjoy the cool weather for as long as it lasts, I can't help but think that while climate change caused by global warming may be of long term detriment to us, there are other issues more likely to have a dramatic impact on life on earth than climate change. One that comes to mind is religious intolerance.

Hope you are enjoying your new year.

Robin