Little Thailand

by Nikki-Lee Lucas (Australia)

I didn't expect to find New Zealand

“I think that was a beach down there,” my friend said to me from the passenger seat. “Should we go?” We were driving around Queenstown in our zippy rental car on the last day of our trip, looking for things to do that didn’t cost anything. New Zealand is a pretty cool country with a lot of cool things to do so we’d blissfully blown our budgets over the last couple of weeks. “Sure,” I said as I pulled the car onto the side of the road and turned around. My friend looked up our location on her phone and told me the beach was called Little Thailand. I said it sounded cute. I pulled up in a small parking bay next to some colourful tourist vans. My friend asked me what I was doing when I got out of the car with no shoes on. “It’s a beach,” I told her. “You don’t need shoes.” We started walking over to where we saw other people coming from. Since we were still high on a cliff we figured there would be stairs to get to the beach, but when we got there we realised it wasn’t so much stairs as it was a dirt path waving its way down through a heap of bushes. We hesitated briefly before starting the trek down. The path was very skinny so every time somebody else tried to climb up the track we had to push ourselves into the trees to let them passed. Everybody who passed us were wet and wrapped in towels, like you would expect from people who have just been at a beach, but the things they said to us seemed a little peculiar. They shouted chants of encouragements to us. “You can do it!” one said, “it’s easier than it looks,” said another. My friend and I looked at each other, starting to wonder if we’d come to the right place. My knees buckled on the rocky steps down the cliff. I definitely regretted not wearing my shoes now. “Surely we’re nearly there,” my friend said. It felt like we’d been crab-walking through trees forever. Another traveller climbed passed us. “You guys going to do it?” he said. My friend and I awkwardly glanced at each other. “Oh, we’re just checking it out,” I answered, pretending to know what he was talking about. When we finally reached the end of the path my friend and I were surprised to find ourselves standing on a tiny metre-wide ledge with three strangers. They were all in their bikinis and board shorts and were trying to psych each other up. I carefully looked over the ledge. There was a ten-to-fifteen metre drop into what was the clearest, bluest water I have ever seen. Little Thailand isn’t a beach, it’s a rock jump. “You guys here to jump?” the girl asked us. “Oh, no, no, no, no,” we said in unison, realising what we’d walked into. We came to see some sand and wade our feet in the water, I thought, not plunge to our deaths. “Come on, it’s only 13 metres or something,” the girl said. I could hear now that her accent was American. My friend and I suggested they jump first. “You guys go. We’ll just have a think about it.” They begged us to jump after them. “Promise you’ll do it?” they said excitedly. One of the guys was eager to go first and jumped with very little persuasion. I watched with baited breath as his body disappeared over the ledge and into the blue water. When he resurfaced he shouted to his friends to go next. The girl was nervous, and the other guy was trying to calm her down. “Why don’t you guys jump together?” my friend suggested. I knew she was thinking the same thing as I was, so I agreed. “You guys have to do it after us, though, okay,” the girl said. “We will, we will,” I told her. The two of them took a deep breath before leaping off the ledge to join their friend. We waited until we heard them hit the water. I turned to my friend and said “Quick. Run!”