Last weekend I went down to Mt Ruapehu with friends to try skiing in New Zealand. But for a warm up we went to the Snowplanet north of Auckland. This was my first indoor skiing experience ever and I didn’t have very high hopes. If you can hire your gear including glove ski pants etc. which is quite expensive. One hour of skiing plus gear comes to $43. The run is about 200m long and has two platter lifts which take you up in about 90secs. Going down the hill at average speed on skis take about 20secs. Not the best ratio if you ask me. This situation is different for snowboarders. There are quite a few ramps and jumps.

Anyway, back to the trip to the real mountains. We stayed in Ohakune which is about a 20 minutes drive from the valley station. We checked the weather report early Saturday morning and it wasn’t looking very good: Visibilty around 50m and wind. The funny thing was that the weather down in Ohakune was actually really nice. We decided to drive up to the valley station and check out the conditions. Unfortunately the weather report was right. Also the snow was quite slushy. So we went back to Ohakune and after lunch straight into the spa pool. On Sunday morning it was even worse. If I remember correctly all lifts were closed anyway so we decided to drive back to Auckland.

So my first skiing experience in New Zealand didn’t really happen. Well, you can’t really count the snowplanet. Mt Ruapehu is a 4-5 hours drive from Auckland and not even knowing if you can actually ski or not can be quite frustrating. I don’t mind a bit of fog or snow storm but the weather down there can change from one hour to the other completely. I heard that it’s much better this week but a 4-5 hours drive to find out if it’s true is a bit much.