Kepler Track

The company I work for closed down for two weeks over Christmas and New Years, so I took the opportunity to hike two of the Great Walks in the South Island.  The first one was the Kepler track, a 60 kilometre, four-day trek.

I'm not ashamed to say this hike KICKED MY BUTT.  The first day was about six hours long, four hours of which was steeply and unrelentingly upwards.  I started the uphill portion strong, but by the end I was stopping every few metres to catch my breath and rest my aching legs.  Most of the trail was below the treeline and there wasn't much of a view...until we ascended above the treeline and could see EVERYTHING.  

Suddenly all the effort was worth it.  The view was gorgeous, and the feeling that I had earned the view was even better.

Even so, the hut was a welcome sight that night.

From the outside, the hut looked like a 1980s split level home, randomly stuck on some hilltop where the only access was by helicopter or walking track.  But on the inside, the hut slept something like 60 people and was incredibly luxurious for a backcountry hut, even on a Great Walk.

There were individual bunks instead of a bunk platform...

 There was a big kitchen with gas cookers, so people didn't have to carry a stove.  (I carried a stove anyway since experience has told me that sometimes the gas cookers in the hut are unreliable.)

And there was a large dining area (inside and outside) with plenty of seating.

And the best part was...there were flush toilets!  In a hut!  (I didn't take pictures of those because you all know what they look like.)  The bad part was the sandflies, especially in the toilets.  I could never remember to put bug repellent on the parts of me that were exposed when I was using a toilet, and those sandflies would swarm as soon as I sat down.

Day 2 continued upwards until the trail reached the peak of Mount Luxmore.  I took my shoes off and had some lunch at the top.

And then we crossed the mountain saddle.

And then the trail went down.  Down, down, down.  I thought down would be fun, especially after going up the day before.  But I was wrong: down was no fun at all.  It was steep and difficult and unrelenting, and my knees were killing me by the time I finally got to the bottom.  I was trying to protect my knees and ended up pounding my ankles instead--one ankle is still stiff almost a month later.

The next two days were relatively flat and wandered along a lakeside.  I didn't get any pictures because, after crossing the saddle, none of the views seemed quite photo-worthy.

I did, however, like this detour sign.  It says, "Danger, Track closed due to: NAZGUL ATTACKS."

And the "After" picture.  I'm tired but I made it!

Early Christmas

A few good friends came over for Christmas dinner and a little gift exchange tonight.  It was quiet and low-key, exactly how I like it.  My flatmate, Tara, had decorated our apartment for Christmas a few weeks ago and it looks great!  (She decorated the houseplant because I said something about how the decorations weren't tacky enough.)  I made ham, mashed potatoes, and green beans a la Wendy (since I didn't get them at Thanksgiving); Tara made rolls and carrots, Jo brought pavlova and berries for dessert, and Andrew brought drinks.  This almost felt like a family celebration; this is my Wellington family.

Tara, Jo, and Andrew

(They're not flipping me off...it's this "fox" thing that they do.)

Even though I like spending Christmas doing outdoors-type things, and even though I don't miss the snow AT ALL, it still feels weird to be playing Christmas music when it's 26 degrees (80 degrees Fahrenheit) outside.

After this Friday my office shuts down until 3 January.  I'm taking advantage of the holiday to do some more backpacking, this time on two of New Zealand's Great Walks in the South Island, the Kepler and Routeburn Tracks.  They're both four-day hikes (Kepler is 60 km and Routeburn is 32 km) and I have three days between them to recover.

So have a merry Christmas, everyone!  I love you all!

Caples Track

I had a meeting in Queenstown last Monday, so I flew out the weekend before to do some hiking (taking advantage of company-paid airfares...).  I backpacked along the Caples Track for three days.  Here are some pictures--it was gorgeous!  (I also dropped my camera in the river while trying to cross, so I'm glad it still works and the pictures turned out okay.)

(Megann, this one is for you: sheep on a hillside)

Project is done!

Yeah, I know.  I'm surprised too.  I didn't think I would ever post again.  But the camera and the computer were in the same room for once, so I thought, "Why not?"

"So, Heidi, why haven't you posted anything in so long?"  Check this out: http://systemoperator.co.nz/publications

Some of you have heard me talk about the big work project that consumed my life for half a year.  Here it is: the System Security Forecast.  It required the efforts of ten full-time engineers for six months, plus about a dozen other people on a part-time basis.  And I was the one assigned to oversee the whole thing.  I've discovered that project management is not my thing.  The project went well (we met the deadline, the work done was of excellent quality, and nobody got extremely crazy until the very end) but I'd rather be working on a project than trying to get other people to work on it.  On the plus side, we're already getting good feedback from people who are reading the report.

I've spent the last two weeks learning how to exhale again.

Ward Christmas Party

This is what the Ward Christmas Party looks like in New Zealand.  Don't forget to bring hats and sunscreen!

Hydropower governor course

A few weeks ago I blogged about my coworker Lekshmi and me going skydiving in Taupo.  We were in Taupo for a week-long course for work, all about control systems and hydropower governors.  The teacher was nice enough to send us some pictures of the course, so I'm posting a few here.

We were told at the beginning of the course that there would be an exam at the end, and whoever got the highest score would get a trophy with their name on it.  Anyone who scored above 80% would get a certificate saying that they passed the course "with distinction."  Guess who busted her butt, studied hard, and won the trophy?

HVDC Visit

This is one of those posts that nobody except me will find interesting. Sorry. I'm a nerd.

Some of my coworkers and I had the chance to go to one of our HVDC stations last week. HVDC stands for High Voltage Direct Current. Most of the power transmission lines in the world carry AC (alternating current) power. The cables along the large high-voltage AC power lines come in groups of three, plus a fourth wire which is at the top of the towers and is designed to carry lightning strikes safely to the ground without knocking out your power.

DC power lines are much more rare. They're typically used in situations where the power generator is hundreds of miles from the cities or industrial plants which will use the power. A long AC line will lose a certain percentage of energy per mile due to the characteristics of the line, and these losses can add up significantly over hundreds of miles. A DC line doesn't lose energy in the same way, but it requires some huge and expensive pieces of equipment to change the electricity from AC to DC at one end of the line, and vice versa at the other end. (The picture at the top is a good example, even though I got that picture off of Wikipedia since my pictures of this room didn't turn out very good. See that little person standing there at the bottom? Yeah, these things are huge!)

New Zealand only has one DC transmission line (actually two lines on the same path). Back in the 1960s, Auckland was growing and running out of nearby generation to support its energy consumption. There was plenty of cheap and environmentally clean hydro generation available in the lower part of the South Island, but since Auckland is in the north part of the North Island, there didn't seem to be a way of getting the "good" power from one island to the other. Proposals were made to build new coal-fired or gas-fired plants near Auckland, but then a group of engineers decided to take a chance on some brand new technology: HVDC lines. At the time, it was only the second HVDC line in the world and the first to use undersea power cables.

I think it's all pretty cool, and I know I have some (a few!) nerdy friends who agree, even if they won't admit it publicly. Here are some pictures from our site visit:

That huge piece of equipment in the picture below is a transformer that was brought to this site in the 1990s as part of a big upgrade project. We saw in a video how it was transported. Since it was too tall to be loaded onto a truck and driven under the underpasses (AND it weighs 330 tons, so a normal truck wouldn't be able to carry it anyway), it had to be hung between two trucks. The trucks looked like centipedes, with about 90 wheels each, and each of the wheels could move independently. It took five days to transport the transformer 17 kilometers (about 10 miles), and they had to do it in the middle of the night so it didn't snarl up traffic too much.

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?