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If you can see the South C Pole from your site it's probably worth learning how to align and use your polar scope. It does mean quite a bit of squinting and grovelling in the dirt though.
If you'll be doing astrophotography then drift aligning through a camera with a refresh rate of about 1 frame/sec is hard to beat and a 2nd technique really worth mastering. Do you have a guiding camera at the moment? If not it really would be worth having one for this alone, but also for some planetary fun (there was a Toucam with 1.25" adaptor going for $70 including postage from memory recently in the classifieds). The great thing about drift aligning is it teaches you the how and why about getting you altitude and azimuth adjusted well. As you get closer to perfect the drift is hard to see though, which makes doing it by eye time consuming and not much fun. I guess I'm assuming you'll have access to a laptop or PC at the scope though mind you.....
Yes, star alignments are just software correcting for mount inaccuracies and polar alignment.
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