Thursday, April 20, 2006

Baa Baa Baa, Bar Bar Bar

The Cawthon caravan is continuing their progress around the sheep filled Southland, having blown through Queenstown this afternoon on the way to Te Anu. Queenstown is very quaint, with a thriving tourism and skiing industry. We're still in the fall, with no snow as of yet, but that hasn't slowed down the thoroughfare any. The town has the flavor of Park City or Vail, with A-frame condos, a chair lift in the center of town and plenty of bars + breweries to be had.

The tourist buses are in full swing, you can tell by the MTV generation filling the streets with US college kids. I pondered putting on a fake accent just to disassociate myself from them. Quite obviously, the extreme sports industry caters to this crowd. There's bungee jumping from helicopters, parasails and gondolas. Jet boating, sling shotting and other contrived adrenaline experiences are abound. I tried unsuccessfully to coax the parents to give it a go, they declined much to my chagrin.

It has only been in the past six or seven years that the majority of the development has occured in the tourism industry. From our unconfirmed, independent sources, we've found that there is not the same ban on foreign realty investment that Australia holds. Enzed allows money to pour in from mostly US and Japanese retirees who take advantage of the favorable exchange rate - currently at .62 to the dollar, pissing off local residents who find themselves priced out of their own housing market. They should try real estate in California, they'd find that there was nothing to complain about.

posted by ncawthon at 6:18 PM