Icy Kicks

Queenstown’s annual week-long Winter Festival saw mountain bikers tear down Coronet Peak’s slopes, near-naked bird people leap into a freezing Lake Wakatipu and cross-dressing men in heels sprint toward victory in a drag race. These just some of the dozens of events taking place in the world’s adventure capital this week as part of the city’s festival: a party that combines big-scale events with the sort of quaint community activities more typically associated with small towns. More than 60,000 people attend the festival, most of them young and many of them (the majority of visitors) Australian. The last event added to the programme was determined by popular vote. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people voted for the “Undy 500” race: another opportunity for participants to strip off in public in the extreme cold.