The Most Beautiful Place on Earth
Before I came to New Zealand, previous students told me the same things everyone hears from those who traveled before them. “It’s going to be the best time of your life.” “You’re going to come back a different person.” “Don’t even bother going to class, it’s just one big vacation.” All of that seemed to be just a continuation of college itself. I would have the other best times of my life, the other experiences that changed me, and the other occasions I blew off class to compare it with( though it’s much easier to do here. None of my lecturers or tutors know who I am).
But when I was told that it would be the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, I was overcome with an odd sensation. What was the most beautiful place I’d ever been to? Until now, 95% of all my traveling has been done in the name of sports. I’ve been to every state on the East Coast for one sport or another, but you don’t experience much beauty on the highways of America.
Then again, what is beauty to begin with? Surely it isn’t exit sign after exit sign, broken up by an occasional rest area. Is it a moment of humanity, or a breathtaking view? Is it the familiar landscape that appears as you turn onto the street where you live? Is it even that memorable? If so, then why had I gone twenty years without a memory of something truly beautiful? Probably because it was over twenty years before I made it to Queenstown.
A touristy, lakeside ski-town that barely stretches four blocks in either direction, Queenstown itself -- with its cobblestone streets and abundance of shops and restaurants, is one of the two places in New Zealand’s South Island, along with Christchurch, where a visitor can kill a day just walking around. It would be a shame if you did, though. Instead, take my experience in Queenstown, where three aerial views provided glimpses of beauty, be it aesthetic or emotional, that I could never have imagined.
On my first day in Queenstown, a small bus took myself and about a dozen other people up to the top of one of the many mountains in the area. Atop this mountain, extending across the adjacent valley to another rock formation, was a set of steel cables about the width of a garbage can. At the center of the main cable was a twelve foot by twelve foot pod that I would proceed to jump out of and free-fall for nearly ten seconds before the bungy had fully extended and pulled me back up into the air. One hundred and forty meters in the air, the Nevis Bungy offered a beauty that had very little to do with the unsightly brown rock that surrounded us in the valley or the rain-turned-sleet-turned-snow that fell from the sky. This was the raw, unbridled beauty of human emotion.
Within the tiny pod, I was overcome with an unexpected calm, which is crazy for someone who gets uncomfortable simply jumping off the back of dump trucks at work. I had a rush of nerves as I stepped to the ledge. The employee holding onto my harness behind me inched closer to the ledge just behind me and dropped the rest of my rope out of the pod. The resulting tug at my ankles caused me to look down at the foggy, rocky depths that every ounce of common sense in my body (which, I can only assume, is several ounces) was telling me not to jump towards. But before the fear took hold, the countdown started. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and I jumped. The only emotion was pure ecstasy.
Before I even really realized what was happening, I was at the top of the second bounce and had to pull the strap at my ankle that would release me into a seated position. From then on, I tried my best through the blistering wind and freezing rain to take in the surroundings that would forever frame the previous thirty seconds. Not unlike the wind that swirled around me, I was overcome with everything from pride to anger that it hadn’t lasted longer. I just wanted to jump again.
In contrast, another man in the pod was having much bigger issues. Having already told his friends that their advice (“Stop being a [wussy], man.” and “Dude, there’s chicks around, you look like a [witch].”) wasn’t helping, he was sitting in the corner by himself with tears in his eyes. He was truly terrified, and felt no shame in it. But when the time came, the man overcame his fear and leapt away from the version of himself that was afraid. He returned to the pod with an incredible grin on his face.
Now, who knows what motivates people to do what they do? Personally, I was motivated by the simple ambition to experience as much as I could here in New Zealand. However terrifying it was, the Nevis was to that point the most thrilling thing I had ever done.
But what about the other guy? Was he just doing it so his buddies wouldn’t bust his chops? Did he only go through with it because there’s a no refund policy, and he either paid for a terrible view of an ugly valley on a crappy day or for the thrill of a lifetime? I wish I had asked. But just like thousands before him, he had replaced his deepest fear - that he would jump to his own death in a cold, rocky valley outside Queenstown, thousands of miles away from home - with an intense feeling of exhilaration that could mean only one thing: that he had just truly lived. It was beautiful.
The next day, sandwiched between my aerial activities was one in which my feet were firmly planted on the ground. A gondola runs up a hillside overlooking Queenstown, providing a view of the town, lake, and the snowcapped mountains that surround it. This particular day was just warm enough to enjoy but just cool enough to snow, covering the lodge at the top of the gondola, which sat just above the snow line, with a layer of powder. While the snow on the ground behind the building was enough to make anyone feel like a kid again, it was the view from in front of the building, spanning far off into the distance, that brought out a feeling more old fashioned than anything else. I couldn’t help but feel like this was how the world should look.
Tiny Queenstown was bustling below, with more foot traffic than car traffic, and just beyond it the crystal blue lake was reflecting the multicolored mountains that disappeared into the clouds beyond them. And while the prices in Queenstown betray that it is a tourist destination, the reality is that there’s no modern equivalent in America. A place like that would have expanded, with condo after condo and motel after motel sending the city limits sprawling outwards. But here, there’s nowhere else to build. Literally surrounded by lakes and mountains, the only flat ground is already developed. This was Queenstown in its most expansive form. Complete with natural, breath-taking scenery and a downtown area as quaint and comfortable as any, Queenstown was civilization in all of its unbastardized glory. I’d say it was beautiful, though it could just be my own lamentations on a world gone bad.
Still, that pessimism was erased on the backside of the lodge by a scene that can only be described as Neverland. It seemed that no matter how old the people I saw appeared to be, everyone was a child at heart that day. A family of five was having a snowball fight by the door, and right as I stepped outside, the mother ducked and a snowball intended for her from her son flew past my ear and, with a low thud, exploded onto the building. Now, it’s easy to not get mad when you don’t get hit, but I wasn’t just a bystander to a snowball fight (in fact, I was bystander and participant in several. With fresh snow on the ground, who could resist such a youthful, wholesome impulse?) No matter what happened before or since to that family, I was a bystander to a moment of true happiness in their lives.
And that’s before I even got to the luge courses. Carved out of the hillside was a pair of paved tracks to luge down (for a fee, of course). Sitting on a black plastic cart with only a set of handlebars to control your speed and direction, the luge was nearly as successful as the lure of snowballs at turning grown men back into boys. You moved deceivingly fast on the course, and the reckless attitude you were allowed to drive with (because unlike a car, you can’t die if you crash on the luge) harkened back to a day where there were no real consequences for anything. Instead of the responsibilities of every day life, all you had to worry about was trying to control the smile on your face as the wind blew its chill onto your face. For however long you were up there, it seemed impossible not to feel like a little kid again. Beautiful
However, the most unique kind of beauty is the one that is observed free-falling out of an airplane at 12,000 feet. The mosaic of rolling green pastures sprinkled with cows and sheep, the true blue lakes and white-tipped mountains that grew larger with every second was breath-taking. Of course, that’s not the first thing you see when you’re about to sky dive. The first thing I saw as I was swung out of the plane by Phil, my instructor was the heavenly tops of the clouds. It wasn’t until I was 8,000 feet lower (a mere 40 seconds later) that the parachute was deployed and everything slowed down, allowing me to take in the outskirts of Queenstown in all of its natural splendor.
But there was more than just the beauty provided by Mother Nature herself on this, bar none the nicest day weather-wise of our trip. The calm that followed the freefall, in which Phil and I just spun around, was indescribably tranquil. He had done this hundreds of times before, but wasn’t above pointing out little points in the landscape that he thought interesting, such as the uneven line that separated the trees and snow across the mountains. I knew that from that moment everything in my life would be looked at from a different perspective, not only because of what I saw, but what I heard.
Phil was an Aussie who was only a couple of years older than me, and our conversation on the slow descent down to the ground was one of the deep, life altering variety that you only seem to have with total strangers. Phil wore another set of footprints on the beaten path back home, graduating from university and then doing a bit of traveling before he settled into a job. On holiday, he and his buddies did a tandem sky dive, just as I was doing, and the experience changed him. After having that much fun, how could he possibly go home and sit at a desk for the rest of his life? It was impossible, so he decided to come back and become a skydiving instructor.
Now don’t tell my mother, because I’m sure she would have a heart attack if I told her that his story had an effect on me, but how could it not? This is the type of life changing moment that happens when you blow your comfort zone to bits and start truly living life. Because once you become a part of the rat race, it’s hard to get out, so why rush it, especially when you can make good money jumping out of planes and providing other people with life altering moments. What he did for me was beautiful.
So like a good friend, I’ll tell everyone I know who is coming to New Zealand in the future about the things they can expect. Sure enough, I’ll fall into the cliches about “the time of your life” and such, but hopefully I remember to go a little deeper as well. I’ll tell them to always be looking for something beautiful, because you never know when you might witness something that changes you forever.
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