Other happenings...

This is just a catch-up post to use some photos I found on my camera. I'll consider myself all caught up with blogging after posting this. (Yes, I'm skipping a lot of stuff. That's just the way it is.)

A long, long time ago (March? April?) my cousin Dylan and his girlfriend Haley came through Wellington on their way through New Zealand. We went to Weta Cave, which is like a museum/shop for Peter Jackson's studios.

Some time later, I watched the dragon boat races with some of my friends, and apparently I happened to have my camera along.

And...here are some shots from a Lord of the Rings tour I took around Wellington last winter. Don't I look just like Legolas here?

This way to Rivendell!

This was where Aragorn's horse nudged him back to life after he fell off the cliff into the river.

Isengard--before Saruman cut down all the trees and made it ugly

Pretending to be Gandalf and Saruman walking through Isengard

If you look very closely at this rock quarry and use your imagination, you can see Minas Tirith.

Lake Waikaremoana Great Walk

New Zealand is a hiking country. (They call it "tramping"--which had a very different connotation in some of the towns where I used to live, so I'm adjusting.) There are long, beautiful hikes everywhere in the country, and they're well-maintained with good facilities. And in this country of a million hikes, there are nine that are designated Great Walks.

I was determined to walk a Great Walk over Labour Day weekend. It started out being the Abel Tasman Track in the South Island, but then work decided to send me to Taupo the week before the holiday weekend. So I planned to do the Tongariro Northern Circuit instead, since it was close to Taupo. (And I'm still looking forward to Tongariro. The hike winds its way through many volcanoes including Mount Ngauruhoe, otherwise known as Mount Doom.) But then I checked the weather conditions a few days before we left for Taupo. Because the hike goes over some tall mountains that still had snow on them (it's early spring here), the Department of Conservation was strongly suggesting bringing crampons and a ice axe in case of avalanches.

Since "hiking" and "avalanches" don't really mix well for me, and since I would have no idea how to use an ice axe even if I had one, I nixed the Tongariro Northern Circuit for now. And then I noticed that the Lake Waikaremoana Great Walk was only a few short hours away. So that became my first Great Walk.

Lake Waikaremoana is a 46-kilometer track that took me 3.5 days to hike. And it was a long 3.5 days. I go hiking a lot, but I don't often carry a full pack. Like, not for years. Lots of years. It took about a day to adjust to the pack and hit my stride, and after that it was easier going. But I was still exhausted every night.

Day 1 was a steep climb AND the lake was very foggy. I quickly got above the clouds, so it wasn't very wet. But every so often the trees would open up and I would see what I'm sure would have been a wonderful view, but on that day it was just solid fog. So I was glad to wake up the next morning and see this:

The rest of the time, the weather was gorgeous. I was really lucky!

You know how I said the first day was steep and foggy? See that cliff in the background of the next picture? THAT'S what I had to climb on the first day! (And it started immediately after the track began--no warming up on a nice level path.) But since it was foggy that day, I couldn't see the top of the mountain from the bottom, so I had no idea how high and steep it actually was. When I finally saw this (on day 3), I felt better about having such a hard time getting moving that first day.

Tent sites are available, but Kiwis tend to be hut campers. There are huts all over the country, most of them first-come, first-serve. They have a cooking area (you have to bring your own camp stove), clean running water (though no flush toilets), and a bed platform with surprisingly comfortable mattresses. The first two huts I stayed in were only half-full, and there were only three other people besides me staying in the last hut. Here are some pictures of the huts.

My second night on the trail happened to be the night of the Rugby World Cup final, in which New Zealand's All Blacks (who had been World Cup favourites for every single cup but hadn't won in 24 years) were playing France. Since I had been watching all the rugby games (they just call it "the rugby" here, as in, "Did you watch the rugby last night?") I was gutted (to use my cool Kiwi slang) to miss the final. One of my fellow trekkers had brought a radio, but the reception was terrible. And besides, I knew the next day would be my long day (10 hours) so I didn't feel like I could stay up until 11:00 trying to hear what was happening with the game.

But the All Blacks ended up beating France 8-7. I hear it was very tense and most people couldn't watch the whole game--they had to leave the room at some point or they would explode. (Wendy, they make me think of you watching basketball.) Kiwis take their rugby so seriously that in the past when they've lost the World Cup, it's sent the New Zealand economy into recession.

So when I saw this (it says "GO THE ABS"--All Blacks) burned into the lawn at one of the huts, I wasn't at all surprised. And I don't know if the next picture is a true silver fern, but it looked to me like even Mother Nature knew the final game was on that night and was cheering for her team.

And this was the end. It seemed so anticlimactic. I waited here for about an hour, and then the water taxi arrived to take me back to my rental car. It seems like there should have been tape to break through while holding my hands in the air, or at least a big sign that said, "Congratuations, you made it to the end!" But there was nothing. I just had to congratulate myself.

Skydiving!

I went to Taupo (middle of the North Island) for a week-long course for work a few weeks ago, and while we were there, my coworker Lekshmi and I decided we wanted to go skydiving. (We were on the course with four male coworkers, all of whom were too scared to join us. Hee hee hee.)

We jumped out of the plane at 15,000 feet and had 90 seconds of freefall. We tandem jumped (strapped to an instructor) and after 90 seconds the instructor opened the parachute so we could sail the rest of the way down to the ground.

I liked the parachuting part the best. The freefall wasn't scary like I thought it would be--we were too high up for my brain to be able to figure out I was falling. (My stomach turned over for a very brief moment just as we jumped out of the plane, but once the airplane was out of my peripheral vision, the feeling of falling went away.) But I felt like I couldn't breathe because the air was moving by so fast, and it felt like water was rushing up my nose. Lekshmi had some serious ear pain. But the parachuting part was really pretty--it felt like we could see the whole country.

This is me and Lekshmi waiting for our turn to get on the plane.

Another coworker took a video of us landing, but I can't seem to get it to upload--it keeps hanging when it's about 85% finished. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

There was a video service available but it cost an extra $150. It wasn't worth it to me. But someone else, who went to the same skydiving place I did, posted their $150 video on YouTube. So just pretend one of those people is me. What do you think--is the video worth the money?

Sevens

The first week in February, Wellington plays host to a huge rugby tournament called Sevens. It actually appears to be more of a giant costume party at the arena with rugby being played in the background in case anyone gets bored. Everyone in Wellington's Central Business District (where I work) was dressed up for two days, large groups of people with matching outfits. (They were also all half-drunk and in good moods!) There was a constant stream of costume-wearing groups walking past my office building; we didn't get much work done that day.

I pulled some pictures off the web, but since I didn't have a camera with me, I didn't get pictures of my favorite ones, which included:

* A group of seven men dressed as Mark Twain. At first I thought they were dressed as someone else and just accidentally looked like Mark Twain, but then I got closer and heard their American accents and realized they probably WERE Mark Twain.

* Green army men, like the army toys in Toy Story

* Gingerbread men a la Shrek

* The Three Musketeers--very elaborate costumes

* A group of men dressed as butchers with women dressed as chickens

The way is shut

The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it. The way is shut.

We went to The Pinnacles last weekend, which is where they filmed Aragorn talking the dead valley folk into fighting for him against Sauron. (Lord of the Rings, for the non-nerdy among you.) It was an amazing hike but really REALLY hot (almost 100 degrees).

Here's Jo, Andrew, me, and Michelle

And then we went to Cape Palliser and climbed the 250 steps leading to this lighthouse. Why? I don't know. Jo and Andrew are nuts.

Cheetos

My sisters-in-law Megann and Desiree both sent me Cheetos for Christmas, which was awesome because we can't get them here! I shared them at people with work, but they weren't too impressed. My coworker Hamish decided I was the Cheetos queen or something, because the next time he went to Christchurch he found these at an Asian food market:


They're barbecue flavored (do you have barbecue-flavored Cheetos in the States?) and they even come with a toy surprise inside.

I'm still looking for cheese-flavored Cheetos, though.

Summertime!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Heidi

My employer, like many employers in New Zealand, shut down the office for the two weeks following Christmas and gave everyone the days off. We didn't have to use our annual leave hours or anything! Yet another reason I love living in this country.

I spent my summer vacation touring the South Island. First I flew into Christchurch, where I experienced two earthquakes in one night. The earthquakes weren't large (just aftershocks of that big one in September) but they affected a large area and further weakened some of the valley walls. (This becomes significant later. See "Storm" below.) The next day, I took the TransAlpine train across the mountains (the Southern Alps) to Greymouth.




I spent the night in Greymouth and was planning to head north the next day, but there was a huge storm that night that cut off all routes of escape from Greymouth. Landslides had buried the roads going both north and south, the rail line (headed east) was flooded so the train wasn't running, and the airport was on the other side of one of the landslides so it was inaccessible too. New Zealand is very crowded ("crowded" being a relative term) this time of year since all the Kiwis are off work and touring the country, plus overseas tourism is at its high point. Accommodation and transportation are booked several weeks in advance. I was concerned about the impact a day's delay would have on the rest of the trip.

At least for that first night, though, there wasn't going to be a problem finding accommodation: the fact that nobody could get out of town also meant that nobody else could get in. We all ended up back in the same hostels and hotels where we had spent the previous night. I changed my bus tickets and bought the very last ticket available for the northbound bus the next day. And I hoped really hard that the bus would run.

Here's a picture of the very swollen Grey River in Greymouth. The picture doesn't look as dramatic as the river looked in person, but you can see how close it was to the bridge and see the logs floating in it. The next day it was 5 METERS lower! That's 15 feet! In one day! And the picture also doesn't capture the pouring, pounding rain. I was completely drenched after being outside for about 30 seconds. (I didn't know yet that the buses weren't running and I'd have to stay an extra night, so I checked out of the hostel at 10, like I was supposed to, and still thought I'd be catching my bus at 1. I didn't want to miss seeing Greymouth, so I just resigned myself to being wet.)


My fellow travelers and I thought the storm was local, just in Greymouth and surrounding areas. We had no idea that this was a Storm of the New Century, which had basically shut down all of the South Island: no buses or trains were operating, landslides had blocked almost every major road, and travelers everywhere were stranded. There really wasn't any way to know this: in New Zealand, the local TV news services have a month-long hiatus from before Christmas until the end of January (I don't know why) so there wasn't any TV news available. The newspapers were still being printed, but Greymouth doesn't have a local paper and the one from Christchurch couldn't get there through the weather. I suppose the internet had news available, but when you're paying a premium for internet service while traveling, you mainly just use it for email instead of surfing news websites, right? So we were all a little surprised when we started calling around and canceling accommodation and the hostel owners were saying, "Yeah, we know you can't get into Picton (or Nelson or Westport or Blenheim) because the roads coming into town are closed and everyone here is stranded." The hostel owners were also surprised to find out that Greymouth had been cut off also. It was a couple of days before we found out how huge the storm really was. And the earthquakes didn't help anything; they just caused more landslides.

The next day was sunny and the crisis was over. At breakfast, we were greeted with the news that the train was running. An hour later we found out that the northbound bus was running (and I was heading north). Road crews had worked all night to clear a single lane, and at times it was a tight fit for the bus, but we managed it. Part of the bus route followed the South Island's West Coast, and the ocean looked like a washing machine.





These are the Pancake Rocks in Paparoa National Park.




Small sections where the road had slipped away. I wish I had gotten pictures of some of the bigger slips!




The big part of my trip was hiking the Queen Charlotte Trek, a 4-day, 71 km journey through the Queen Charlotte Sound at the top of the South Island. My original itinerary called for me to arrive in Picton in the afternoon, spend the night there, and then catch a water taxi to the beginning of the trek in the morning. But due to weather delays, my modified itinerary had me arriving in Picton in the afternoon, catching a water taxi immediately to start the trek, and hopefully finish Day 1 before dark. Everything went smoothly; Day 1 was relatively short anyway, and since the tiny town of Picton was bursting at the seams with tourists, I was glad I didn't have to spend much time there.

Here's the start of the Trek!





And here are a bunch of trek pictures. There aren't really very many stories to tell. Lots of walking and enjoying the scenery. I met tons of really cool people.





The trek went past a bunch of resorts, so there were plenty of activities along the way. I went kayaking for the first time and loved it!



And here I'm getting ready to go water skiing with my new friend Hannah. (I wasn't so good at water skiing, but I did stand up briefly. Hannah was great.)



Kilometer Marker 1! I made it!