Te Anau

Our one-night stay in Queenstown was enough to ensure that we wanted to return: the town is the perfect size, with the friendliest locals, a great selection of waterfront dining, and enough activity to keep everyone entertained. However, our destination on the South Island remained farther south still, in Te Anau, where serving jobs awaited us at the Distinction hotel. The drive down was as scenic as any we had seen yet, with the usual copious amounts of sheep – the sheep population is literally 10 times the human population. Our arrival in Te Anau had us mildly apprehensive, both at the aspect of working a job identical to the one we just left in Jasper and the staff accommodation we were moving into upon arrival. Relieved though we were to unpack our backpacks and finally halt the nomadic nature of the past two weeks, we were disappointed to discover our closet-sized rooms, shared bathroom and kitchen. Normally we would have no problems with the sharing of facilities and we weren’t planning on spending much time in the rooms anyway (we are in New Zealand, after all), but a couple key aspects of this particular staff accommodation were more than enough to have us dreaming of our beautiful room at Lochiel Estates, and even the hostels we had stayed in so far. The rooms had a strong smell I can only describe as a “musk”, with sinks where turning the hot water tap caused it to come off in your hand; a drain nearly clogged with the previous tenant’s hair; lights in the bathroom and kitchen covered in some unidentifiable fuzzy substance; kitchen appliances so ancient we were surprised they worked, complete with a foul-smelling fridge and rusty stove; overflowing garbage cans; a bent hanger jammed into the wall upon which a dirty dishrag hung; dead flies on the counter and a general feeling of disrepair that immediately made us certain we were never cooking in it. As we looked around the accommodation we have come to refer to as “The Ghetto”, Erika dropped the line that we have repeated about 50 times a day in order to keep ourselves laughing: “Home sweet home!”
A walk around town showed us what Te Anau has to offer: a store with apparently exceptional meat pies (Erika begs to differ), a weird amount of Italian food, a library that wouldn’t let us take out books, a couple of supermarkets and a decent amount of restaurants doubling as bars. The Distinction is a lakefront hotel with a nice view, and it is a short walk from a rather rocky beach beside the local conservation centre. There are several nice looking hotels along the lakefront and the locals are friendly and helpful. The biggest downside of the town at this time of year is the weather: it is absolutely freezing at night, and when the weather is unpleasant during the day, there is very little to do. Colder days have found us barricaded in our closet-rooms (which is rather depressing, as the closed door gives one the feeling of being in a cage) while the miniature heater warms the room.
We were looking forward to starting work so that we could start making money to support the drinking problems we would surely develop in such a small town (just kidding!) Coming from the Jasper Park Lodge, we expected this experience to be somewhat similar, what with the copious amounts of staff our age who were friendly and made the job fun. Unfortunately, we soon discovered that this was absolutely no Jasper. The hotel has less than 40 staff members, most of which are middle-aged or retired, and almost all of which we came in contact with apparently quite keen on correcting every aspect of our working habits. Our first shift had us both frustrated with the lack of respect the staff members show each other and the old-fashioned way that the restaurant functioned (not to mention a pretty unsanitary working environment). Our new work place had now become known to us as “Shitty Fairmont” - pardon my language – and the fact that we had people trying to tell us we didn’t know how to work in fine dining, originally a source of extreme annoyance, became the inspiration for yet another amusing oft-repeated expression: “We LOVE our jobs!!!!!”
Our ability to find humor in almost any situation is practically the only thing keeping us sane – we have literally not stopped laughing since we arrived in our 2x2 rooms and balked at the communal bar of soap in the bathroom. However, we didn’t fly across the world to live in what Erika describes as a “trailer park” (that is making me rather sick with the amount of dust and mould) and work at jobs we don’t enjoy. We plan to spend our remaining days in Te Anau enjoying the town and the beach (weather permitting) while we find another living and working situation, hopefully in Queenstown. Until then, you can bet we will be laughing as we enjoy our glamorous life … home sweet home!