Maximus, the 10 foot snowman

Liam, Tammy, Logan & I made a mammoth 10 foot tall snowman earlier today in the backyard in Queenstown. The resulting effort is very impressive.

Construction started with Liam and Tammy getting the ball rolling.

About 40 mins later the snowman was starting to take shape. This involved creating two massive balls and then using some wood as a ramp to get the balls on top of one another, adding more snow to give it shape, creating some arms, and then creating and positioning the head.

After the head was better affixed, there was lots of shaping with a pruning saw.

Coal was then used for each of the eyes and a mouth carved.

The snowman was thirsty so we gave him a bottle of beer to hold.

It was then time to use another bottle of beer for the nose and give the snowman a hat (the lid from the rubbish bin).

After putting on a scarf, the snowman was complete, and he was given the title Maximus.

Wakatipu Grill, Hilton Queenstown

Wakatipu Grill is the flagship restaurant at The Hilton in Queenstown and is set on the lakefront with beautiful decor throughout. Last night I went there with two friends for dinner but for some reason they couldn’t find our reservation even though I had phoned them that afternoon. We were seated at the bar while they set up a table for us, and after about 15mins we prompted them to be seated. The service was thankfully significantly better once seated.

We started with a nice selection of breads and then I had the all day braised ox tail as my entree. This was beautifully tender and the accompanying parsley puree lovely, however I missed the richer Ox Tail flavour I can remember having in Spain.

For the main course I had the Venison. This was beautifully cooked and accompanied by baby beetroot, but for me it lacked any wow factor. It was however a nice dish.

One of the others had the tortellini with blue cod and scampi for their main and thoroughly enjoyed it.

We had a swede mash and brussell sprouts as sides; both of these were lovely.

A night out in Queenstown

We visited several bars on a Friday night (although apparently you can do this any night in Queenstown and sometimes Friday can be a quiet night), starting with Stacks Pub at the Hilton in Frankton. This is a new bar that is surprisingly well-priced with excellent $17 pizzas and alcohol at non-exorbitant prices. There is also a water taxi that goes from the Hilton to Town (and vice versa) that at $5 per person is great value; not surprisingly the last water taxi for the evening (9:30pm) was our transport to the town for the evening.

The Boiler Room is a nice bar on the waterfront that still had a couple of tables free when we arrived about 9:45pm, but by the time we left was really busy (and noisy) and had a good youthful vibe.

The Ballarat Trading Company was our next stop for a couple of beers; this was a lot quieter and seemed to attract more of a 30+ year old crowd (on the night we we there anyway).

Upstairs from the Ballarat Trading Company is Winnie’s. This bar had a very young crowd and was very lively. They also apparently do really good pizzas. It reminded me a bit of being at bars when back at University.

To top it all off we went to BarUp cocktail bar and stayed here for hours until closing time at 4am. They were playing great music, the wait staff were full of energy, the bar was busy and the Money Shot cocktail was superb. It is not a large bar, but it had an excellent vibe and I expect probably attracts a 25+ year old crowd. On another night we came back hear and it was reasonably quiet until around 2:30am.

Another evening we went to SkyBar, a cocktail bar that is nicely decorated, but we were almost the only people there. It can however be quite busy sometimes apparently.

On the same evening we also went to The World Bar which had a very youthful crowd and was buzzing with activity. You can also order a teapot full of your selection of cocktail.

Monty’s (Queenstown) & the Mud Crab

On Wednesday nights Monty’s has a seafood night and one of the items on the menu is Mud Crab. The mud crabs came highly recommended from a friend, so I just had to check them out with him. On the night we were there the dish came with two crabs and they were beautifully cooked in a sweet spicy sauce that had a hint of chilli and accompanied by a very flavoursome smoked salmon salad. The crab was nice and tender and sweet although a bit fiddly to eat. It would have been good if the shells were pre-cracked, and this would have reduced our eat time of about 1hr 30min! A nice dish none-the-less.

The service was good, there was a good pub vibe and we’d happily return.

Queenstown & Lake Wakatipu

I’ve been having a little holiday in Queenstown for the past week. It is a very picturesque town, albeit cold at this time of the year. My main reason for being here is to go skiing but when the weather hasn’t been up to it, I’ve used the opportunity to look around Queenstown a bit.

I’ve already written about the NZSki Pass, Arrowtown and the Arrow River trail and lunch and wines at Mt Difficulty vineyards, but the town centre and the lake itself deserve a mention on their own.

There is a lovely walk around the edge of Lake Wakatipu in the Queenstown Gardens that has beautiful views looking in any direction. This is within easy walking distance from the heart of Queenstown.

The town itself is also looking even nicer than when I stayed here about 5 years ago and the quality of the restaurants, cafes and bars seems to have improved. I will cover further restaurants, cafes and bars in separate posts.

There is a monument down on the waterfront that I quite like, that has apparently been here since 2000 and comprises 5 different layers each signifying different eras in Queenstown’s history:

• Limestone - the beginning, when moa roamed the region
• Riverstone - the arrival of Maori
• Schist - the gold rush
• Railway Sleepers - settlement and development
• Water - Lake Wakatipu

The two metal rings show the lake levels at the peak of flooding in 1878 (bottom) and 1999.

The Lake is equally magnificent from the other end of the Lake at Frankton.

NZSki is making great use of RFID to enhance customer service

I went skiing yesterday and was impressed with how NZSki is using RFID to enhance customer service.

I started the day by going into the Queenstown Snowcentre to buy a ticket for the bus up to Coronet Peak. Instead I found I could buy my ticket for skiing as well, which was great. The queue was short and when I got to the counter I was asked if I had used NZSki before. I hadn’t, so the person serving me proceeded to ask my name, took my photo, and casually asked me where I was from.

Before I knew it, a plastic re-usable pass for the mountain had been printed for me with my name on it, a reference number and the fact I was an Adult and Male.

NB: Reference number blanked out in picture.

After a 25 minute bus ride, I was at Coronet Peak and then proceeded to the chair lift. What I then found was that at every chairlift and t-bar I went to during the day there was a gate to go through where you needed to hold your pass up to (typically there were 5 gates, one for each seat). This worked fine through my jacket, however for the first gate since I had my cell phone in the same pocket it didn’t work, but the liftie let me through anyway.

I also noticed that as each person went through, the liftie had an iPad that had pictures of who was coming through each gate so they were doing checks to see that people weren’t using other peoples passes.

There were also top-up machines located at both the snowcentre and near the ticket offices up the mountain, where you can use buy your ticket yourself without needing to go to the counter. Similarly, you can also buy your ticket from the comfort of your home through registering and logging in online (more about that later).

The whole process worked well and helped to keep the flow going (not that there was much of a queue today; it was in fact almost non-existent).

I had a superb day on the mountain. The conditions were excellent, beautiful blue sky in the morning (there was a little bit of cloud in the afternoon, although this was minimal and there was still unlimited visibility), no wind, great snow and almost non-existent queues. My legs and feet were a bit shocked by the exercise, but I still managed to do a decent number of runs.

Once I got off the mountain I went to the nzski.com mypass website, entered the reference number on my card and then proceeded to enter a username and password. Some details such as my name and city were already populated. What was also nice was the statistics displayed, showing how many metres I had descended and how many runs I had done (NB: this will be missing my first run, since they just let me through).

There are also leader boards of who has descended the most in the day, season etc. and who has done the most runs.

Today I went back to this site and purchased an afternoon pass for The Remarkables. It was all very simple to do.

I was impressed with how well RFID was used to enrich the customer experience.

<Cross-posted to http://gianouts.blogspot.com>