Aspen, CO

"I'm just renting movie after movie these days. Don't go to the movies now that I've got my new widescreen. I just order one and watch it. BAM! Then I get another movie out. BAM! Ten bucks. BAM!"

The conversation, with associated sound effects, is coming from the table of uber-wealthy yuppies next to us. We're at Pacifica Restaurant and Bar, an establishment that is - like most places in Aspen - well beyond the means of your average joe, us included. A main course of grilled Alaskan salmon costs as much as 14 fillets of blue cod at The Flying Squid in Dunedin. I can't see two-dollar shoestring on the menu anywhere, although if there was I'd be expecting one-and-a-half chips attractively arranged on a plate and served with a molecule of tartare sauce. Just the drinks for us today, thanks.

On the road into Aspen this afternoon, I spotted a sign that said "Aspen: Home of the '97/'98 Regional Tier I Girls Hockey Champs". Rather a humble claim, I thought, considering that for a long time Aspen has been the home of countless celebrities and the epicentre of upmarket resort frivolity, a "glitzy playground of the wealthy and famous" (thanks Wikipedia). The list of big names to own properties in the area includes Kevin Costner, Jack Nicholson, Mariah Carey, Michael Douglas, Martina Navratilova, Posh Spice, Antonio Banderas, Clifford Irving, Felicity Huffman and her husband, William H. Macy.

As well as attracting the rich and famous, Aspen attracts no small measure of the rich and not-at-all-famous, such as the two men at the next table, who compensate for the unfortunate fact that they're nobodies by brazenly flaunting their wealth. The Man Who Watches Lots Of $10 Movies is decked out in cream trousers and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, rounded off with genuine "I'm a wanker" designer sunglasses. His buddy, an older man, is wearing a loose, short-sleeved cotton shirt that allows him to show off his oversize gold Rolex watch. He's also wearing boat shoes and a visor, thereby creating the impression that he's just stepped off a yacht, even though we're over a thousand miles from the nearest large body of water.

They are easily the most repulsive men I've ever laid eyes on, and I'm old enough to remember Robert Muldoon.

"We're gonna be flying into Saint Tropez, getting on the boat there and going up the coast to Portofino", says the younger man to his friend. "Got three nights there, then we're cruising further up the coast. Then got five nights at Lake Como, after that we go to Venice for three nights. Then we wind up with three nights in Rome".

The older man has been taking this all in with a well-practised nonchalance and the occasional nod of approval, as if his friend had been running his shower routine past him. Now it's his turn.

"Oh, you'll love Portofino. It's a wonderful spot", he says, pausing briefly to order a vodka double soda lemon from a passing waitress. "Usually we fly to Nice and just get on the boat wherever. From there we take a helicopter to Saint Tropez, although last time we flew because it's only like 40 minutes by jet. St. Tropez is awesome, it just goes off over there. So does Cannes". He pronounces it "Cans", to rhyme with with "pans".

"You shouldn't pronounce it 'Carns'", he continues. "The locals, they'll just laugh at you". Good to know. Normally I'd feel a little guilty about blatantly listening in on someone else's conversation, but these guys are so loud that their conversation unequivocally belongs in the public domain. Any road, the man's vodka double soda has arrived, and he goes quiet for a while.

It's not the first time I've noticed Americans' predilection for mixing alcohol with soda. I once found myself working the bar at a hotel outcatering function for the Young Presidents Association, a group of young American CEOs who go around the world holding conferences and talking about how great they are, not unlike these two.

I'd barely had time to get my bearings when the first young president approached the bar and asked for a vodka club soda. I didn't know what on earth that was then, and I still don't know now. Why would you want to go dipping a club sandwich in vodka and soda? Surely the bread would go all soggy.

"Well, ummmm", I stammered, pretending to rummage around for a drink I knew did not exist in this country, "we don't have any. Sorry".
"What have you got then?"
"Well sir, have Speight's, and, ahhh, a local pilsener".
"And what would that be?"
"Speight's Pilsener, sir". I believe he opted for a Speight's, although it was a long time ago and I can't be sure.

It went on like that for most of the night. Young presidents harrassing me for vodka club sodas, or BLTs a la Bacardi, or toasted baguette dipped in rum, and leaving with either a bottle of Speight's or nothing at all.

Back at the table, the conversation behind me has moved on to exploring great cities of the world. "Good way to see a city is to find a good real estate agent", says the Rolex Watch. "Let him show you around, get a feel for house prices and what kind of stuff is on the market".

We finish our drinks and end up dining with the unwashed masses at Little Annie's Diner, where the burgers and sandwiches are as good as the designer fusion seafood at Pacifica for a quarter of the price. No one in here is talking about the size of their boat or upcoming Mediterranean sojourns. Instead they're talking about the perenially-underperforming local baseball team, and the price of basic foodstuffs before the war. "Grandpa, who is Little Annie?", asks a girl of about seven to an old man at the next table.

Little Annie is obviously the name of a long-dead prostitute. A blurb on the back of the menu reads, "Little Annie moved to the Aspen area in the 1880s and soon became a favourite of the miners. Everywhere she went, she put a smile on the faces of local townsfolk".

"Ahhh, Little Annie was a famous magician", says the man to his granddaughter, doing a good job of thinking on his feet for a man of his advancing years. That's the beauty of dining out in America, I realise. When you have nothing interesting to say for yourself, you simply leave it to the folks around you to fill in the blanks.

Aspen provides an interesting study in what a town looks like when you eliminate the lower classes (or at any rate, shunt them to a cheaper town 20 miles down the road where they don't ruin the scenery). Walking around town this morning, we encountered nothing but happy, contented souls reading the paper in the sun or tending to their gardens. "Would you care for a cigar?", asked a grinning local, pulling a soggy roach out of the garden he wass watering. At the supermarket, a tall, kindly stranger not only pointed out to us where the pre-made sandwiches could be found, but then sneakily lent us his discount card so that we could enjoy 39 cents off the yoghurt potles we were about to purchase. Nothing in this town is too much trouble, and no one ever has to go without.

Wandering through the mall at lunchtime, I walk past a man pushing a pram who looks exactly like William H. Macy. No surprise there, because it is William H. Macy! And there is his wife, the Desperate Housewives star, talking on the phone and looking important, which she clearly is. Suddenly the celebrity hunt is on and we all begin scanning the area for other famous faces. Say, isn't that Chris from the Sopranos over there? A little chubby perhaps. But I could swear that guy who served us at the supermarket looked like Seth Green. On reflection, it totally was him. Cool.

This afternoon we're travelling on the cable car with the hoi polloi (rich people don't take cable cars, they take helicopters) up to the Sundeck at the summit of Aspen Mountain, which serves as the focal point of the Aspen/Snowmass ski fields. There is a cable car in Queenstown, but it's nothing like this one. The Aspen cable car is four kilometres long and rises 3,000 vertical feet, making it three times larger than the Queenstown gondola. Happily, it also looks far less likely to shake itself loose from its cable and send us plummeting to our messy, albeit memorable, deaths.

The sun is beaming down on the station at the summit and a pleasant atmosphere has been created. A bluegrass band is performing to an audience of 30 or 40 people in deckchairs, while on a lawn there are a dozen or so children having fun with hoola hoops. The main building is a giant wooden structure that houses a couple of overpriced souvenir shops and a large canteen. On the exterior wall is a recently-added pictorial tribute to some extreme sports tosser, who recently became the first man to ski down all 54 of the peaks over 14,000 feet in Colorado within a calendar year, during which time about 800,000 Darfur orphans starved to death.

Considering that the sum total of their contribution to the betterment of mankind is less than zero, I have no idea what gives skiers and snowboarders the right to be such smug, self-aggrandising backslappers. Like gallivanting around a mountain on elongated flat sticks and getting pissed on Jager shots every night is ever going to help cure cancer, or solve the Middle East Crisis, or put a man on Mars. I speak from experience too, because I myself have gone skiing and snowboarding a fair few times. That's if you count sliding downhill on your arse for half an hour then spending the rest of the day in the canteen drinking $7 beers and listening to people around you with their hats on back-to-front saying things like "whoa, excellent!" and "like, gnarly, dude" as skiing, and I do.

If I ever met this 54-peaks-in-a-year fella (which I won't, because I don't remember his name and he looks like every other extreme skier I've ever seen with his designer stubble, blue eyes and "God I'm amazing" expression), I know exactly what do say to him. "Listen, dude", I'd say, "no one cares about your total wipeout at St. Moritz last summer. No one cares about the totally gnarly air you got on Shitkicker's Chute, or Tosspot's Trail, or whatever you dicks call it. How about you trade your skis in for a life, get a job, and make something of yourself. And by the way, your cap is on the wrong way round". On second thoughts, I would probably choke on my own hypocrisy before I got all that out.

We decide to take a nature walk, guided by Tom Arnold (not the famed actor who was once married to Roseanne, but a local park ranger on his university holidays). Turns out Tom is as dismissive of skiing as I am, but is remarkably knowledgeable in the field of pocket gophers and local flora. He also describes at length the horrendous conditions that the first miners on this mountain endured. They worked 14-hour shifts, digging for silver with only axes and their bare hands and shipping everything out to smelters on pack mules. At 11,000 feet, they were breathing air 30% thinner than at sea level and the average winter yielded 35 feet of snow. Still, they were handsomely remunerated for their toils: around $3 a week, which would've been enough to allow the miners a couple of hours each with Little Annie, if they were that way inclined.

This evening, our keen snouts take us past Little Annie's Diner and into the Aspen Parker Hickory House. BBQ meat is the name of the game here, or so it seems from a quick glance around at what the other diners are eating. It's got one of those disheartening menus where you know everything is going to be delicious and you can only choose but one. Fortunately, this restaurant caters for families and offers a "Feast" option: two whole racks of babyback ribs, half a chicken, shredded pork shoulder and shredded beef brisket, served with fries, onion rings, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, beans, cole slaw and garlic bread. Piece of piss, then.

"Do you think the four of us could get through all that?", my father asks the waiter, expecting an answer in the affirmative.
"Well it's a lot of food", he says gravely. "But with three guys you should be able to get through it". I can't help but notice he's looking at me in particular as he says this.

I read somewhere recently that the obesity epidemic is at least in part a product of our distant ancestry. For the majority of human history, food has been in short supply and therefore we have feasted whenever we could, in anticipation of leaner times ahead. On the basis of tonight's efforts, no one in our family will need to eat again for generations. My father attacks the ribs and Joey gets to work on the chicken, leaving me to dismantle the tender, juicy piles of BBQ beef and pork. It's hard work, but someone has gotta do it. In a roundabout way, it's for the good of mankind.

My final morning in Aspen finds me sitting outside at a cafe, eating a bagel, mulling over the New York Times Sunday crossword and making comparisons between Aspen and our own alpine resort town of Queenstown. It's inevitable really, considering the remarkably similar histories of the two towns. Both were established as 19th century mining boom-towns. Both went into a prolonged decline when the minerals ran out, only to boom once again when tourism came to town. Both are set amidst the backdrop of stunning mountains, lakes and rivers. The similarity ends about there.

It seems to me that Aspen is the product of careful planning and a shared vision on behalf of its residents. Everything about the town is immaculate and works. The architecture is consistent and fits in with the landscape. By contrast, nothing works in Queenstown. Virtually every building is an eyesore, the streets are clogged with buses and locals have been priced out of town by spiralling living costs. Queenstown is the product of an unregulated scramble to develop as much land and make as much cash as quickly as possible with no regard whatsoever for the the image or character of the town.

And while Aspen's careful planning has resulted in its status as a premier worldwide tourist destination, Queenstown has whored itself out as a sleazy, tacky hotbed of debauchery and occasional skiing. As such it has attracted the worst sorts of visitors: syphilitic Brazilians, low-budget Australians in map-of-Noosa t-shirts, American package tourists from Pschittsville, Arkansas with their t-shirts tucked into their shorts. Sadly, there appears to be neither the vision and ability to turn the situation around, nor the will to do so.

One thing the towns do have in common, however, is their curious lack of history. Even though both towns got their starts as mining centres, each has turned its back on its past and instead attempted to show itself off as a glitzy, fast-paced tourist destination. This leaves me feeling a little hollow, as it did the old man who approached the restaurant entrance last night and asked the waitress where he might find the Red Onion.

The Red Onion is, or was, an Aspen institution - something like the Green Parrot in Wellington - that this old fella no doubt remembered from his much younger days. For whatever reason, be it rising rent or the gradual drift away from old school dining, the Red Onion recently closed its doors and a bit of Aspen history was forever lost. There seems to be no room for sentimentality in this town.
"Well sir, it's down a couple of blocks on this side of the street", the waitress said. "But I believe it's now closed down".
"Oh it's closed?", the old man asked, suddenly alarmed.
"I believe so. Sorry sir".

The old man stood there for a while in silence as if remembering all the good times he'd had in there. Then, turning around to leave, he said to her, "even nostalgia isn't what it used to be".