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This was my second year at Gay Ski Week NZ, and the seventh year for the event. On the surface, it seems to be a thriving Queenstown institution with a bright future ahead of it, and last year, that’s what I took away from it. This year’s experience was like going backstage at the theatre, only to find out that the sets are flimsy and the costumes smell bad.
This year, Gay Ski Week ran from Saturday the 29th of August to Sunday the 6th of September. I arrived on the Saturday, looking forward to a week off and ready for the opening party. . The crowd was great, the music was loud, the booze was flowing, but, with, stacked up tables and chairs still lining the walls, the whole thing felt like something that had been hastily thrown together that afternoon when the organisers remembered that they were charging people for entry. Unfortunately, this was to be a bit of a theme for the week.
The Wednesday night party was in a tiny, weird little venue, and the Thursday was a ski day, so although the party didn’t really get started until around 10, it was all over by 11:30 so that everyone could be up early to catch the ski bus the next day. And the surprise entertainment for the “Spectacular Spectacular” Tuesday night dinner was… Fawlty Towers dinner theatre. Enough said.
It’s not even that everyone was paying to attend these poorly thought-out, last-minute events. It’s that they were paying through the nose. To take an example, if you take one of the regular ski buses from Queenstown to Coronet Peak or The Remarkables, you’ll pay between $10 and $25, and since the shuttle buses run every fifteen minutes, you’ll be able to both go up to the slopes and return to Queenstown whenever you like. If you choose to pay $35 for the Pink Bus (disappointingly not actually pink) you will leave Queenstown at 8:20, and leave the ski field at 4:00. This is fantastic if you have the stamina and the skill to ski all day without doing yourself an injury (which admittedly I don’t) but for everyone else, it’s not necessarily a great option. To make things worse, all thse pink dollars that are rolling in don’t seem to be making it out of Gay Ski Week’s coffers and into the rest of Queenstown. We spoke to several venue managers who were more than a little unhappy with the way the week was being managed, and who are unlikely to host events for Gay Ski Week next year, and walking through the streets of Queenstown this year, I saw fewer signs outside shops and venues welcoming the Gay Ski Week crowd. It feels like Queenstown as a whole is a little bit over the whole event. Disappointing, to say the least.
Despite all of this, though, I had a really good time. It would have been hard not to – Queenstown has an amazing variety of things to do, especially in the winter. I went skiing at three of the four ski fields in the area – Coronet Peak, The Remarkables and Cardrona – and even managed not to break anything. Night skiing at Coronet Peak on the Friday night was a particular highlight – live music, open fires, and almost the whole mountain lit up for skiing. On one of the non-skiing days, I went heli-rafting on the Shotover River – think helicopter ride into the middle of nowhere followed by an exhilirating hour of rafting through some incredible rapids. Followed, in my case at least, by a large drink to steady my nerves. But it wasn’t all action – there was plenty of time in the week for a serious assault on the excellent Queenstown shops, and the similarly excellent restaurants and bars.
One good thing that can be said about the Ski Week parties is that there were plenty of them. The Thursday night karaoke was quite a spectacle, and the Friday night party at 12 bar – although so completely disorganised that they had to make it free at the last minute – was a great night out. The final party was at the same bizarrely cowboy-themed venue as last year, but it was slightly better planned than the rest of the events.
The Ski Week crowd was fantastic, despite their propensity to go to bed early on skiing nights, and they really made the week into something quite special. I met a lot of lovely people, and came away with some new friends.
Do I regret going to Gay Ski Week? No. Do I regret that the whole thing felt like such a naked money grab for the organisers? Yes. Will I be there next year? Probably… but I’ll be feeling a little dirty.
Ed Goode
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