Tangoing to the Tourista

OPINION: So I'm still on holiday but thankfully I've managed to get the intermanet working and am sitting with my laptop, frowning at the massive bank of clouds that are blanketing Wanaka, where I've been staying for a week or so, writes Sarah McCarthy in this week's Uptown Girl.

I had planned to write my column in the garden yesterday afternoon as I sat in the sun but I was worried I might spill Lindauer on the keyboard, so I just got sunburnt instead. I'd forgotten that scratchy, hot feeling that makes sleep near-on impossible and the raging thirst and mild headache (which may have been the Lindauer) and have woken up a bit grumpy and without my coffee-fix. I suppose I could pop down the street and get a flat white and a muffin but town is, as my Mum puts it, A Mad House.

And it is full-on. Touristas spill out of cafes clutching bits of quiche and bottles of orange juice and move in tightly packed clusters of four or five, usually a couple with a child and what looks like an in-law or two, taking over the footpaths. They run across the streets like frightened deer or else stand transfixed, gazing at the mountains the rest of us take for granted (or in the case of the dads, gaze longingly at the tables outside the bars that dot the waterfront now).

The town has also been inundated by Young 'Uns. Boys with large necks and sporting new arm-band tattoos and girls with impossibly long legs and short-short-short shorts wander, either in recovery mode complete with bottle of V or ready to hit the town again. We hear them like villagers hear wolves in the dark, nearby forest. It starts with the visceral pump of a bassline from a nearby party and ends with them walking home from the pub carrying on a shouted conversation that reverberates in the still of the night.

The supermarket here is something that should be studied by anthropologists and psychologists. As I am on holiday I have become chronically disorganised and have visited this place of stress and trolleys almost daily. It's an extreme sport, like going bungy jumping without the trauma of having to get weighed first.

It is always packed and full of either the poor Touristas who stand bewildered, or the Young 'Uns who wander ever so slowly in the middle of the aisles with a basket with an egg in it and congregate at the far end of the shop where the booze is. (Ahhh, booze in a supermarket. You can build as many bloody Velodromes as you like but can you give me a bottle of Lindauer for $8.98? No.) Everyone seems to be buying barbecue food and there's often a scrum around the meat chests, and I have heard the conversation about something called Barbecue Grillers twice now, which has me as confused as the Touristas.

But I just float through the lot of them with my bottle of bubbly and smile, because unlike the Young 'Uns I'm not sleeping in a tent, and unlike the Touristas I live in this beautiful country (and have an Aunty and Uncle or two who live here in Wanaka! Huzzah!)

Happy New Year.

» Sarah McCarthy is a Southland Times staff member.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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