Day 61 on the Road
What to Do When the Mountain is Closed in Ohakune? Go Climbing!
On today’s episode of New Zealand’s Biggest Gap Year where we are doing 365 Days: 365 Activities, we are struggling to find an activity to do in Ohakune when the mountain is closed and we can’t go mountain biking… But we do find an awesome indoor alternative!
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This morning I’m learning that the weather is too crap to anything outside so I’m doing what I do best I’m picking up the phone and calling a few people to try to sort something out. You know, the goal of this trip is we have 365 days on the road we have have to do 365 activities and right now we have no activities. So…
So today it is raining sideways. We’ve been able to here the rain on the roof of the hostel all night it is crazy stormy weather and this has sort of put us in a bit of a depressing mood because we wanted to go mountain biking today. We do the most cliche rainy weather activity anyone could think of which is playing board games. So what’s our alternative? That is our mission today. We need to find something fun to do in Ohakune when the mountain is closed cos there’s a ski field. If you can’t go mountain biking then what else can you do? At about 10 o’clock I have some things lined up which are pretty epic we’re actually going to go rock climbing but not really rock climbing I mean we’re going to go fake rock climbing which is going to be pretty cool. Do you guys want to go climbing. Hell yeah. So yeah, so we put on the harness and we are good to go.
Perfect. Perfect. Come in guys. To do a warm up for the rock climbing there is a wall suspended right in the middle of the [vertigo Climbing] Centre. Me and Robin go head to head in a rock climbing race. Robin you know he is about the height of half of the climbing wall itself so all he has to do is do two climbs and he’s up there. I’m scrambling as fast as I can but yeah, unfortunately I do lose again this time. But I’m a good sport. I shake his hand.
The problem with those clip n’ climb is it’s problem and a good thing is that you only have an hour it’s dead ass cheap it’s like 15 bucks so on one hand you know 15 bucks an hour I better make the most of it so you climb a lot around and everything and you get yourself exhausted. So after an hour you don’t want to keep going but on another hand you kind of do, just your body just can’t so you really want to get back so it was actually so much more fun than we expected. It was really really cool. Yeah this rock climbing is surprisingly a lot of fun actually. You can choose any wall. You don’t have to be like under supervision or anything. Just clip onto the wall, the mat falls, as long as you are attached to something just go. Just climb.
Oh my God.
It’ll catch you if you fall and stuff like that which is quite epic. Yeah I like it, it’s self managed so you can do your own stuff. It’s cool. So there is about 20 different walls right here so both Laura and I are playing around with different ones I’m trying one which is like turning massive wheels while trying to go up which is quite cool. Laura is trying some like ice pick whatever that is so she kind of have to find some tools and then go up. We climb quite a few ones but we are both much much more intrigued by the by the more like rocky side of the things which is much more challenging there’s different paths and everything and it looks pretty cool. This whole climbing wall centre is really awesome. There’s like 15 different walls to choose from or like different sort of climbing sections to choose from there’s things like a rope climb, there’s a mock-up ice climb where you use the ice picks to get up there’s also a race like a timed wall with a big timer on the bottom, there’s like LEGO bricks type thing, there’s like a zigzag like lightening bolts thing so that’s all the kiddy fun section, then on the other side is the mock-up of an actual like rock wall complete with overhangs and cracks in the side and this is like this is the challenging section. But one thing with Laura she’s very resilient so she’s going to keep on trying until she makes it. So she’s going back and she’s trying again and again and again and she keeps on doing the same mistakes until she sadly gives up. This is I think the first time I saw Laura giving up on something she’s like she really you know that’s one thing I like about her she’s really resilient, she wants to nail it. Trust me, if I was in Ohakune for the winter season every mountain closed day I would be at this wall and I would be trying to get up every single climb here cos it’s really challenging but it’s actually a whole lot of fun as well cos it’s just like your own personal challenge to accomplish. So yeah, as you can tell, I kind of like indoor rock climbing this is actually a really fun thing to do and I’m really glad that we found this thing to do today and it’s I think mission accomplished. We have found what to do on a a rainy day in Ohakune. So we were the last people to be using the climbing wall today so that takes us well into the evening and then we are pretty hungry worked up an appetite and just across the road from the climbing wall is a gourmet burger place and we I think for the first time on this trip we are treating ourselves to having dinner out. Usually we’re really keen on obviously saving money on food and cooking for ourselves but it’s got really late we don’t even know what we’ve got for food at the moment so we’re just like Ok let’s just go get a gourmet burger.
