The 1000 Day Holiday

Party season’s in full swing, the skiing is great, sex and drugs are plentiful. So what could be wrong with Queenstown life?

On the plane approaching Queenstown airport, hungry young men in beanies crane their necks for first glimpses of snowfields.

At this time of year, the Wakatipu is a world of white, breaking into darker shades as new subdivisions are carved on the outskirts of town.

Beckoning below is fun central, Queenstown in the thick of July, the biggest party in the country every night.

It’s a town where on a Monday you can do a pub-crawl with scores of others, where on a Tuesday night you can party with 240 young seasonal workers packed into the Buffalo Club.

And a town that can undo the unwary: where the free-flowing sex and drugs mask disease (mental and sexual), abuse, financial strain, relationship breakdowns and provide a layer of social pressures on the town’s youngsters that are a world away from the familiar realities of small-town New Zealand.

At this time of year, with the increasingly popular Winter Festival still fresh in hungover minds, the permanent population of around 15,000 is swollen by an average of 8000 visitors a day.

Many are having the time of their lives in the 140 bars – and counting – which provide round-the-clock revelry.

As one breathless Brisbane 21-year-old said after a week of skiing and partying: “You’ve got to give up sleep to deal with everything.”

It’s not just teenagers. A barman surveying the older Monday night crowd says: “It’s a bit like never-never land.”
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