The next fellow who picked me up - Ben the farmer - was possibly the soundest fellow that gave me a lift in the entire month. He was another that offered me the choice of music from a fine array of CDs, and I hadn't heard 'Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches' for a *very* long time. He dropped me off in Lawrence. Here is a tree, which also lived in Lawrence. We were friends, briefly :

I didn't really bond too much with my next lift, so I wasn't too displeased when he dropped me off further up the road in apple-scrumping country. The next guy, Lachie, was a good chap. His car reeked of weed, he drove like a loon, and he offered me work. He was a rep for an adventure sports company, and he asked if it would be possible to pay me in the activity of my choice in return for making a website for his brother, a motocross racer. Considering I was too skint to do any extreme sports otherwise, and it's pretty much the thing to do in Queenstown, I thought that this was a pretty damn fucking fine idea. Though he tried to persuade me to go off-road motorbiking (not my thing really), I set my heart on paragliding off the mountain and over Queenstown. So we arranged to meet a couple of days later.

My next lift was from a family in a 4x4 (it's quite unusual for those type of folk to stop - see below), with two "playfighting" kids in the back. The lady - despite having a Kiwi accent - turned out to be from Dorset. She told me that - being a web-designer - I could most likely get a lot of business from the abundance of start-up companies in Queeny. They dropped me off a few miles from town, where I got picked up by a lovely lady called Jane (in her thirties, just to fit in with the model) before I even put my thumb out. She dropped me in the centre of town.

...And what a town :

I was gobtwatted by what was the most beautiful setting I'd been to in the South Island thus far. Snow-capped mountains surround a lake, on the edge of which a vibrant and colourful town is perched. I began to seriously consider staying here for a good deal longer than I'd originally planned. If I could get web work here, then it could be a stunning place to live. By this point I'd planned to move to West Wales for the summer, and learn to surf properly; but snowboarding could take its place. So what was persuading me to leave ?

Well, the glut of Britlanders for a start. About 80 percent of the accents I heard were English, which - quite frankly - gave me the willies. I didn't travel 180 degrees around the orb to speak to a load of fucking pommes. I mentioned this to someone (an English bloke, natch) later on my tour in a list of points on Queenstown's downside, and he said - in complete earnest - "that's the best thing about it". It crossed my mind that the South Island was populated by fucknuts, none of whom were native.

I found a pub called 'The Cow' in a backstreet, and asked at the bar if they knew of any haunts that would contain few or no Britlanders. A dreadlocked Canadian called Mike told me that he'd take me to a place where they would be serving $2 pints (sorry - handles) for Happy Hour, and would that do instead ? I decreed that it would. He took me to Winnie Bagoe's (which was swarming with the UK Massive), and introduced me to a fab bunch - Sarah (Oirish), Beth (a Manc), and a consortium of Canadians. The ice was broken in a drinking game which involved participants giving different euphemisms for 'poling'. I like Canadians. They're usually bright, amusing, and will talk until the mooses come home about punk-rock; which suits me just fine.

However, a crawl around 6 or 7 venues - each wielding beer, tequila, or some creative cocktails - and things started to go a bit loop-de-loop. I'd like to tell you more but, being as my intake that evening could best be described as 'ambitious', I can't. So nur.