We’re in glorious Te Anau, the closest town to the Milford Sound fiordlands. The Top 10 Holiday Park here, whilst relatively expensive, easily wins my “Best Campsite” award, globally. The ultra-shabby Torquay Foreshore Caravan Park in Australia would do really well to pick-up a few hundred tips from these guys. To boot, Te Anau’s a nice place with quite a few things going on and certainly worth a couple of days stopover. (Travellers note: You can drive, or get driven, to Milford Sound and back from here in the same day. No need to stay over at Milford Sound itself: we’re told there’s nothing going on there at night, except sand flies and mosquitoes.)

The cold, wet-to-dry-to-wet weather is playing havoc with our skin. My lips are permanently chapped and our skin is cracking on our extremities too! Claire’s toes are cracking so badly that they bleed. It’s a bit painful for her to walk too far, so we wandered into the local pharmacy on the high street. At the back of the shop were a handful of paramedics helping a youngish lady who was flat-out on the floor. Given the situation, we felt a little uneasy about searching around the shop for sticking plasters and so Claire asked directions to the correct aisle.

“Hello!”, shouted Jason as he jumped into view, “I don’t work here, but I can take you to the plasters!”
“You don’t work here?”, we mused.
“No, I actually work for Elastoplast. I am the South Island sales representative and am just doing my rounds. Sorry if I come across a little shaken-up, but the last girl I spoke to just fainted”, he pointed to the women being treated by the paramedics.

In a way that I cannot even hope to convey in words, Jason the Elastoplast Man was hilarious. What are the chances of an Elastoplast representative calling into the pharmacy at the same time as us looking for plasters? He studied Claire’s cracked toe very carefully and pondered the pros and cons of his various products to find the correct solution, as only a man who sells plasters could. After several looks at the offending toe, from several different angles, he said “it’s a shame this didn’t happen next month: we’ve got the perfect toe-plaster coming out for that!”

For the time being, he indicated that the cheapest ‘standard pre-cut fabric dressing’ would suffice and that, sadly, the shop was out of stock. In a very covert message of cloak and dagger proportions he suggested that “we might see each other outside” where he might have a few right-sized sample dressings in the boot of his car to give us!

It’s not often that you meet a person so happy and engaging as Jason. I would have thought that selling plasters would be quite a dull job. Not for Jason: this is a guy that is bursting with energy and fun and he probably makes his company a fortune!