Life at the end of a rubber band

Pictures

Okay, now I’m actually writing this in march, when this happened over a month ago. But I have my numerous pictures to jog my memory!

Today is extreme bungy jumping day. Ian went out of his way to get us booked on AJ Hackett’s THRILLOGY bungy jumping tour, which includes 3 jumps from world-famous spots. On our way to the first jump, I notice the guy who drove our van to the canyon swinging place, where I conveniently lost my camera the previous day. On a hunch, I ask him if he found it, he says yes, and I have to restrain myself from jumping on and hugging me. I settle for jumping up and down like a little kid on Christmas, instead.

With my precious camera in hand, I’m ready to rock and roll and we head to the station to get weighed in and ready to go. We make a few practice jumps while waiting in line. I find out that I weighed in at 80kilos, or 176 lbs. Need to eat some more food.

BUNGY BACKGROUND: Before I continue, let me give you some bungy background. It was first popularized by AJ Hackett, one of your typical Kiwis with a complete disregard for personal wellbeing. I may have mentioned this before, but New Zealand is very conducive to extreme sports as it is near impossible to sue operators for negligence or injury should your dumb extreme-sports self meet up with the wrong side of the ground, shark, or failing parachute. In exchange for this limited liability, the Kiwi government will compensate you directly if you get injured/maimed/killed/castrated/etc.

Any, AJ Hackett somehow figured out it would be fun to jump off a bridge while tethered to giant homemade rubber band. I suppose the first site was over a river so if the cord was accidentally made too long, at least the water would break your fall. We definitely saw some videos of ancient Africans performing similar feats, but it seems that the Kiwis were to first to commercialize this business.

What disturbed me most was when I learned they still custom-make their bungy cords on-site for their jumps. I was assured by several different people that the cords would hold you even if they were severed more than halfway through, so this comforted me a bit

Anyway, back to the bungy.

KAWARAU STATS:

• Height: 42 meters (137 feet)
• Strung up by: Ankles, backup waist harness
• Jumping from: A bridge

Once we get our forms sorted out, sign our life away again, and rummage through the souvenir shop (I refrain from buying anything until after I have completed the jumping alive), we hop on the van and head to our first site, Kawarau, coincidentally the world’s first Bungy site.

So this site uses the popular string-em-up-by-the-feet-hog-style method of attaching you to the cord, which is actually fairly primitive. It consists of a towel wrapped around your ankles, with a cord simply tying you to the main bungee cord. For backup, you’re clipped to a safety harness so that makes us feel a little better.

The dude at the site asked me how wet I wanted to get. I said “A light dusting”, and I see him let out the cord quite a bit. On second thought, I went ahead and took off my shirt just in case. Good thing, too. For maximum scariness, I decided to jump backwards off the platform. It was pretty extreme, if I do say so myself, and I did have pretty good form in the process too.

After my light dusting, which turned out to be a full torso dunking, replete with freezing water, they reel me in on the raft and untie me. That rope gets pretty damn tight on the ankles, but better to have no circulation than to let gravity take over!

Conclusion: Bungee jumping is extreme, my pulse definitely took a while to come down, and now I’m pumped for some more action. Good thing this was the beginner jump—bigger ‘n better things to come!

Our next stop was at the Nevis, one of the world’s tallest land-based bungee sites.

NEVIS STATS:

• Height: 134 meters (440 feet)
• Jumping from: High-tension cable-supported jump pop
• Strung up by: Releasable ankles with full-body harness backup.

I thought I had gotten over the initial fear by going off the first jump, but this proved me wrong. Once I saw the jump pod suspended over the canyon, my knees definitely got a little weak. I wasn’t the only one who was nervous, some of the girls were practically flipping out (I won’t point out any names here to protect the (somewhat) innocent).

To get out to the pod, we had to take a cable car which was quite small and shaky. When they had us clip onto the safety line in the cable car, I knew this was going to be extreme.

This bungy site was far more advanced than the first one, with lots of winches, ropes, cables, buttons, pulleys, etc. I guess the workers wouldn’t have liked hauling up a 100-meter long rubber band by themselves. The worst part about this one was the little dentist chair they had you sit in as they strapped you onto the cord. This was mainly because you knew you couldn’t go back at this point.

Actually the worst part is stepping out to the edge with the cord pulling at your ankles and nothing but canyon underneath you.

Once you actually jump, the fear changes to exhilaration quickly and it is one extreme rush. This jump was so tall that once I rebounded, the second free-fall was still longer than the first bungy jump of the day. After the second or third rebound, you’re supposed to reach up to release your feet from the bungy cord, so you’re just hanging by the harness. This helps keep you from killing too many brain cells from the blood rushing to your brain. I must say though, it is rather unnerving to unhook part of yourself from a bungy cord, no matter what else is attached!

THE LEDGE BUNGY:

• Height: Approx 50 meters
• Strung up by: Full body harness, at the waist
• Jumping From: Ledge extending from the side of the mountain

This bungy had us suspended from the waist. The advantage to this is we could jump off however we wanted. I elected to try the “running man” all the way down, and the results were fairly humorous. This one was by far the least scary of the three, but I still had a lot of fun doing it.

EXTREME STREET LUGE: A nice unexpected gem at this final bungy site was a downhill street luge course. The idea is simple; cost a souped-up-skateboard down a racetrack, ride up on a ski-lift, and do it again. The speeds were pretty damn fast, and we had a blast doing it. The experience reminded me of Mario Kart for humans. I knew it would be fun once I saw that helmets were required, but I was rather surprised when I didn’t have to fill out a won’t-sue-if-I-get-maimed-or-killed waiver. At $5 a run, it was a bargain.

CASINO: I was thrilled to learn that Queenstown had a casino. My logic was that I had survived all the extreme events thus far, so obviously my luck was good. Since I like playing streaks, it made perfect sense to hit up the casino. Sure enough, unlike the other nights, I came out a little bit ahead and was back even for the trip.

Once again, this weekend is packed, and we have to be up and at ‘em early to catch our flight back to Wellington. Being up since 7AM really takes the steam out of you.

--P

Canyoning, Swinging, Jetboating, oh my!

Pictures

EARLY RISER: My morning began early, against my will, when the fire alarm convienently went off around 4AM. I was dead asleep, but it’s hard to sleep through an alarm when the siren is just feet from your head on the top bunk. It’s rather surreal being woken up in this matter, as it took me quite a few minutes to figure out exactly what was going on and if I was actually awake or not.

Of course, it turned out to be a false alarm, and the entire hostel grumbled back inside, cursing the unknown forces that set off the alarm, and we got a few more hours of treasured sleep. 7AM arrived much too quickly, and we were up and getting ready for extreme canyoning.

CANYONING: Now, if you’re like I was, you’re asking, what is canyoning? In a nutshell, it what’s you used to do in the neighborhood creek/river when you were a kid, but on an extreme level.

We were picked up by our canyon guides out front of our hostel. Our group added on two more people, a guy from California on the tail-end of his honeymoon (but the wife didn’t want to come), and a German backpacker girl. The two tour guides rode up front. The passenger passes back a waiver for us to sign, while the driver slams in a techno tape and we hit the road to the canyon site.

We don’t talk much until we get there, where we’re fitted up for wetsuits. This is the third time I’ve put on a wetsuit on this trip, so I now know I wear a size 4. At this point, I’m still not quite sure what we’re getting into, but as I strap on a climbing harness, I assume it will be fun. The guides introduce themselves as Swedes who have been doing this for quite some time. They apologize in advance for their “Swinglish” and tell us to make them repeat themselves if we don’t understand them.

Our outfits are capped off by helmets (another “extreme indicator”). Mine is labeled “Elvis”. One of the guides notices I got the Elvis helmet and says “You know, zee King?” as he thrusts his hips around. I laugh and confirm that yes, I am indeed familiar with Elvis.

The trip starts off with a little hike (all hikes are now little compared to our Mt. Doom trip). At the top, we encounter a zip-line. Excellent. Our guide gives us a quick rundown of what to do: “Just run as fast as you can down this hill”. Check. Being the intrepid soul that I am, I decide to go first. I clip on, start running, but apprehensively. After all, I am headed straight down a canyon. Fortunately, the zip line takes hold and carries me across the canyon, a good 80 feet in the air or so.

I come up a few feet short of the end, so the Swede on the other end has to pull me in, chastising me for not running fast enough. I feel a little bad until I see the rest of the group comes up shorter than I did on the line. Suckers.

Next up, we have to rappel into the canyon. Unlike the abseiling we did in the cave a few weeks ago, this was controlled by the guide. All we had to do was walk down the face of the canyon and he would control our descent. This went pretty smoothly, and the group assembled in the canyon.

The basic idea at this point was to simply traverse through the canyon. There was a moderate stream running through it that turned out not to be as cold as I expected. What made this extreme was that we would jump off and slide down everything we could in the process.

Our first stop was a small rock slide, a few feet. The guide shows us how to go down, and once again I end up being the guinea pig. For this slide, I crossed my arms, sat down, and slide down backwards, head-first, into the pool below. This was rather disorienting, shocking, and fun at the same time as the cold water gave me a nice surprise. I was fortunate to be wearing the helmet as I slightly brushed a rock with my head on the way down.

We romped down a few more small slides like this and then came to our first big slide. This one was a good 3 meters or so tall (10 feet) and was a chute of water plunging into a pool below. It was rather intimidating, but the idea was simple: just keep your arms in and legs together and go! This was quite fun, as the slide terminated earlier than I expected and dumped me through the air the rest of the way.

Once we all went down that slide, it was time to learn how to jump from tall places into shallow water. Oh boy. We climbed up a rock face, and after quick instructions, jumped 9 feet (your typical high-dive height) into a 3-foot pool. Basically, you have to make as big of a splash as possible as to slow yourself down as quickly as possible. Seeing as none of us were crippled in the process, I assume we all did it correctly.

The rest of the trip was more of the same. I chickened out on one jump that was too high into too shallow water for my liking. (“If you don’t do this right, you’ll probably get hurt”). No thanks! Fortunately, most of the group chickened out as well so I didn’t feel too bad about it.

One pool we had to do a belly flop into to avoid hitting the bottom. I should have done it on my side as I banged up the boys a little bit as I hit the water. Oof.

We returned, got unsuited, and I laughed as Kun tries to get Dan out of his wetsuit.

JETBOAT: Our next extreme activity today will be Jetboating up the Shotover river. What is jetboating? Take a jetski, make it hold fifteen people and add horsepower to boot, and you have a jetboat. Throw in a clinically insane driver who likes to drive up a narrow river, and you have the Shotover Jetboat.

This was much more commercialized than I expected, with an intro video on the bus and processing that resembled that of a theme park. We meet our driver, who makes the expected “Unfortunately I’m your driver, this is my first day” jokes. I was rather disappointed by the lack of seatbelts on the boat, that meant there was little chance of us getting tossed out. The boat pulled away from the dock, we do some quick manuveurs for the camera, then speed up the river.

The river itself is absolutely beautiful, with the bright blue-green water we saw in the lakes on the way here. Much of the river is surrounded by canyon, which makes for an interesting time while speeding through it at 40mph.

The jetboat itself was quite interesting. It was powered by two supercharged engines, each putting out 250HP or so, giving the boat some 500HP. This sounds like a lot, but for a boat it isn’t all that impressive. The boat itself could operate in about 4 inches of water, which I found very interesting. This was also very useful in the very shallow parts of the river.

One of the trademarks of jetboats is doing the little hockey-stop maneuver where the driver cuts hard to one side and guns it, making the boat spin around in its wake. This is pretty fun the first few times, but gets old after a while.

The trip lasted for about 30 minutes or so, and we head back after that and get some history behind the river in the process.

All in all, the trip was fun but probably the least extreme activity we’ll be doing this weekend. I wish I could drive the boat, now that would be interesting.

CANYON SWING: Apparently, New Zealand has some bored people. There’s no other way they would come up with this stuff. Canyon swinging is our final stop of the day. What is Canyon Swinging? Well, apparently someone got drunk and decided it’d be fun to swing out on a 100-meter cable over a gigantic canyon. Brilliant!

It is basically a really really big version of the swings you rode in the playground as a kid.

We arrive there in one piece in a van that’s been retrofitted with racing-type seats for all of the seats. Whoever installed them was a bad welder and half of them barely held together. Extreme. The employees at this place remind me of aging California surfers.

A brief hike brought us to a interesting little canyon swinging compound, consisting of a few structures barely clinging to the side of the canyon and some interconnecting stairs. The place seemed like it was put together by a skilled craftsman without much engineering background. The cables spanning the canyon were impressive, and we contemplated how the heck they got them installed.

The canyon itself was huge, spanned a few hundred feet from cliff to cliff, and had a small river at the bottom. I didn’t appreciate the scope of the canyon until I saw a kayaker coming down, who was a small dot from where we were standing.

I was second to go in our group. The harness was fairly complicated, complete with shoulder, leg, and waist straps and a lot of buckles and clips. They got it on me quickly enough, and before I knew it I was teetering over the edge of the abyss below. While extreme, these guys had other people to “process” and wasted no time in getting me through. After some thought, I picked my fate as falling backwards off the platform. I can’t emphasize enough how scary this is. Gravity is fast. 9.8 meters/second^2 is very fast. You don’t realize this until you’re plummeting away from a platform, and you temporarily forget you have something to catch your fall.

The freefall was intense, lasted for a good second or two, and then the harness started pulling me in the huge sweeping arc across the canyon. From the platform, you can hear the whooshing noise of the unfortunate swinger (if it isn’t masked by screaming) as they careen across the gap. Once I was settled into the swing, the rest was pure fun once my adrenaline flattened out.

It was definitely a great way to kick off our extreme weekend.

On the ride back, we get out of the van, only for me to realize that I have left my camera behind somehow. I panicked, because that little thing is my lifeblood (if you haven’t noticed by now). There is a noticeable gap in the pictures that night, but hopefully I’ll find it tomorrow.

Cheers,

--P

Cruising to Queenstown in style

Pictures

We turned in early last night, because we were up at the ass-crack of dawn today. We needed an early start so we could get to Queenstown on time. The Rental Van Crew (which I was drafted into) was unfortunate in that we had to get up an hour before the rest of the schmucks to go get our vans for the trip. Ah well.

The rentals this time were Toyota Previas or something to that tune. They were slightly smaller than the Hiaces we were used to renting, but had air conditioning and handled much better. These attributes would prove to be handy later on.

Our flightplan today included making a pit stop at Mt. Cook, a four-hour detour which looked like it would be interesting. Nobody was quite sure why were stopping there, or driving an extra four hours to do it, but nobody could think of a reason not to, so we went. Two vans of our group of three made the detour.

The drive up, at first, was rather bland until we reached the first of two phenomenal lakes. You have to see the pictures to truly appreciate what we saw. Blue. Everywhere. And not like the generic blue of the ocean, this was a shimmering almost glowing blue that was surreal. The water framed snow-capped mountains in the background, and made the perfect scene for pictures destined for postcards.

We stopped a few times for photo ops, and then continued onto a po-dunk town for lunch. I eventually settled on a little hole-in-the-wall café which turned out to be quite tasty.

We didn’t arrive into Queenstown until late that night, and we pretty much crashed once we checked into our hostel. The rooms were quite big – 8 people to a room, with little shower/bathroom pods for every two rooms. No air conditioning (grumble), but it was just barely cool enough to make the sleep bearable. It was too bad we had to be up at 8am the next morning, because we saw a lot of bustling activity around and wanted to check out some of the nightlife. Tomorrow is going to be EXTREME!

--P

Trip to Queenstown, stopover in Christchurch

Pictures

Okay I’m getting behind on updating this thing. Good thing I take a metric asston of pictures to help remind me what to say.

I’ve earned several nicknames so far, best of which is “trigger”. You schmucks will thank me later!

Today marks our departure for Queenstown, the extreme sports capitol of the world. The entire goal for this weekend trip will be to do as much extreme stuff as possible.

A little background: New Zealand has very interesting laws when it comes to liability for extreme sports companies. In other words, it is nearly impossible for customers to sue the employees or companies for just about anything, even if its their fault. So, without America’s litigation-happy thundercloud looming over the heads of these companies, they go all out and offer some quite dangerous stuff. As well all know, danger is directly proportional to fun, so this translates into a smashing time!

We can’t fly directly to Queenstown for monetary reasons (their little bushwhacker airport is too expensive), so the plan is to fly into neighboring Christchurch and drive the rest of the way in rental cars.

Our flight is uneventful, except that we arrive at the airport way too early. That’s what you get for being used to American airports. Christchurch is an interesting city, obviously founded by Christians and the like – there is a large photogenic cathedral in the center of town, near the hostel we’re staying at. Since we’re leaving early in the morning for Queenstown, we only have a brief look around the city (hence the reduced quantity of photos today), before turning in at a relatively early hour.

At least our rental vans have air conditioning this time.

In our brief wandering around that night, Matt finds the All Blacks store (NZ’s famous Rugby Team’s sports shop), and gets a free ugly sock. Not sure exactly how this works but it did.

Long drive tomorrow.
--P

Jeff’s 21st B-day Smashtasticpart

Pictures

Tuesday is party day.

Finally kicked the cold. I think.

More importantly, my colleague Jeff Levy is turning 21 today. We will have some fun with him.

CALL ON ME: We rounded up everyone for dinner, which turned into going to happy hour for a while. A few beer later, Jeff is up and dancing around to his theme song, “Call On Me” by Eric Prydz, which we know and love for solid dance beat and its raunchy music video. We had to request it a number of times before they played it in the middle of their ongoing set of moderate rock music, but eventually the bartended succumbed to our pressure and played it. He probably just wanted us to go away. Jeff proceeded to stand up and shout “My name is Jeff Levy and I LOVE THIS SONG!”

That was the point we all do the little hand-over-the-side-of-the-face-I-don’t-know-this-idiot move.

We eventually decided to relocate to a sushi joint before we continued our debauchery.

SUSHI: Our chosen target was a quaint place called “Catch”, a sushi-conveyer place. The premise is simple: make a lot of sushi, put it on a conveyer belt. When you see something you like, grab it, eat it, and pay for it. Brilliant. I ran up a $15 tab like usual (it’s so hard to stop eating sushi) and proceeded to try to get Amanda to eat some Sushi. After a series of funny faces and much protesting, I get her to choke down a chicken roll, and I even manage to get her to try a piece of raw tuna (without tell her it was raw of course), but I gave up after that.

Meanwhile, Jeff discovers he doesn’t like the taste of Sake.

Next stop: Big Kumara, where you can have a jug (small pitcher) of beer with some high quality wings for NZ$9.50. What a deal! We polish off a few of those, drink some more beer, and Jeff has his first stomach purging of the night. I think he drank a little too much beer too quickly.

Anyway, Jeff rallies and we move along to our final desination, Bodega, a bar famous (in my mind) for its lousy champagne and crappy DJ. At least it’s cheap, and that’s what we’re going for.

Nothing of too much note happens after that, except Jeff is running around hugging everything with boobs at this point, and we have to keep an eye on him. Regardless, he’s having a great time and that’s what we set up to do. A good 20-30 people from the program show up to help take care of the $3 champagne, and we all have a grand time.

Eventually, Jeff decides he’s had enough, and we hop in a cab and call it a night.

Another birthday with perfect execution. Man, we’re good.

--P

01-23 Breakin' it down

Sunday

This damn cold is coming back a bit… No talking for me today.

Today there was some sort of X-games type of festival down in Wellington. Being the intrepid explorers that we were, we wandered downtown to check it out. The main draw for us was a breakdancing competition, but we were pleasantly surprised with everything else there as well.

They had a large stage set up and some local bands playing. I didn’t particularly care for any of them, as they did their best to sound American anyway. I saw a lot of punk teenagers running around (apparently they didn’t get the memo that Punk is out, hip hop is in). There was a large ramp set up for idiots to go off of and land in the water, although I think we missed that part.

BUST A MOVE: The break dancing competition itself was a sight to see. I have always enjoyed watching b-boys as they’re called put their moves out, battle style, to the other b-boys and girls. I was surprised to see a group of girls in the competition—they held their own but couldn’t touch the skill of some of the guys on the floor.

The format was interesting. If you’ve never seen a breakdancing battle before, it’s basically just like that episode of South Park, “You got served!” One dancer will go up to the other, maybe talk some shit, but he does most of his smack talking with his moves. They’ll do crazy spins, footwork, and freezes (where they pause in a contorted position for a second), and based on crowd response, that’s how good their moves are. Then the other person will respond in kind, usually trying to one-up the previous dancer.

What we saw was nothing short of amazing, but they weren’t the best breakers I’ve ever seen. The group that eventually won had some good talent on there, and provoked a lot of “Oh smack!” type comments from the crowd.

I felt crappy after that and wandered back, but it was a good time nonetheless.

--P

01-22 Mountain Biking Bonanza

Pictures

Saturday

As if we weren’t punished enough from walking several miles both up and across volcanic terrain, our itinerary included a nice romp down a mountain biking trail on Saturday. Having never been hard-core mountain biking before (unless you count jumping off of stacks of 2x4s in the front yard when I was 11), this would be an interesting trip.

I haven’t really kept up with the technology in mountain bikes, so I was rather impressed with the bikes we rented. They had the full deal – shock absorbers, disc brakes, and one-click shifters. Spiffy. Rolling around the parking lot, I notice my front brake is rather weak, so I tighten it up.

To make things interesting, New Zealand and the rest of the civilized world likes to switch the front brakes, i.e. the front brake is now on the right hand, back on the left, instead of the other way around like us Americans are used to. This is sure to make for some interesting times.

The trail we take is actually an old 4x4 trail that runs approximately 25km through the NZ countryside. Not knowing what to expect exactly, we thought we were only going to be going a few kilometers. The initial part of the ride was easy, although somewhat uphill. With cohorts Tim, Luke, Eddie, Jeff, and Eric, we were pedaling along at a good rate. Most of us were in decent shape, plus or minus a few fat cells here and there. Luke and Eric were more experienced, so they hung to the front of the pack.

Things got interesting once we finished our half-hour ascent and began our three-hour descent. Part of the deal was to have the rental guy pick us up from the bottom of the trail so we didn’t have to pedal all the way back up (which was conveniently at his house).

Luke, being the badass speed-demon that he is, flew down the trail, and we frequently came up upon a pile of bikes and bodies, the frequent participants being Luke and Eric as they kept eating dirt and running into each other. I think Luke eventually got tired of the facial (and groinal) punishment and slowed down a bit for the rest of the trail.

Earlier in the day Lisa was predicting I was going to kill myself, so I decided to be extra careful to prove her wrong. For the most part, I was successful, with a few teeterings and totterings here and there.

The trail itself was absolutely beautiful, as it snaked and hugged the mountains as we rolled down. Most of it was grassy and not gravelly, making for good traction and a smoother ride. There were parts where the drop-off was quite scary and would have been a major inconvenience should one of us have fallen off. Fortunately, this scenario didn’t come to pass and we arrived safely at the bottom.

At one point in the journey, a small herd of sheep wandered onto the trail, and of course ran as we approached from behind. For a good 5 minutes or so we herded the sheep down the trail, until they got smart (or more likely lucky) and turned off the trail into a neighboring pasture. Sheep are some of the dumbest animals I’ve come in contact with yet.

The last leg was the most difficult physically since a lot of it was either flat or slightly uphill, unlike the extremely long downhill route we took earlier. Jeff was struggling for a while until he learned how to shift gears right – I figured out pretty quickly that shifting properly saved a lot of extra effort.

In the end, we all made it there in one piece. While we waited for the rental guy to finish talking to the painters at his house, we played with his retriever, Ziggy, who was one of the coolest dogs I’ve met in a while.

At the end of the ride, I realized my camel-back was dry and I had consumed 3 liters of water, and I didn’t pee once. That’s a lotta sweat. The ride back was quiet as we were exhausted, outside of some small-talk with the Dutch rental guy who was trying to immigrate to New Zealand to continue running his hostel business and eventually move into livestock farming. Interesting fellow.

That afternoon, once the girls returned the van, we decided to pick up and head back. Once again, I ended up driving the diesel beastly Toyota Hiace Minibus. At one point, we ran over a hubcap or something and it knocked a hole in our exhaust somewhere, turning the purring minibus into a roaring sputtering machine from hell. Needless the say, the rest of the ride back was a bit more nerve-wracking.

We got there in one piece, and I didn’t drive on the right-hand side of the road once!

Until next time,

--P

My Precious...

Friday (Pictures from Today)

Girls take so damn long to get ready. The manly men wanted to get going by 8am, but the girlies took until 8:30 to primp and prime for the hike today. To fend off any potential beatings, I'm slightly exaggerating. But we did wait on them.

Today's target is Mt. Ngauruhoe, better known as Mt. Doom from Lord of the Rings.

I top off my new Camelback (plastic bag with long straw attached) with 3 litres of water. I'm not sure if I'll need it all or not, but I reason that I can always dump out the extra later. I vacillate for a few minutes between putting on my hiking boots or my tennis shoes, but ultimately settle on the tennis shoes because they're more comfortable. We're going to be hiking 20+ km today, so any slight discomfort could turn into a huge pain in the foot later.

Once we arrive at the starting point, we unload and get going. At first, the hike is uneventful, as we trudge along on a gravel path through gently rolling hills. At this point I'm thinking it'll be a pretty easy day. But then the rocks and the real hills come. The nice pretty gravel path terminates abruputly to a little trail snaking upwards through some fairly steep rocks. This is more like it.

The landscape in the area is littered with igneous rocks ranging in size from baseball to volkswagon. After looking them for a few minutes, I realize that all of these rocks came flying out of the sky from the volcano that we will be soon climbing. We can't see the peak yet--it's still covered in clouds. Regardless, I would hate to be one of the unfortunate ones that was around when this thing went off.

When I was a kid, I remember being afraid of volanoes from what they told us in class. I never wanted to set foot in Hawaii, because you never know when those things are about to go off! But the reality is, they can detect eruptions weeks in advance now, so we're OK.

The trail continues to vary between rocky embarkments and man-made paths. The trail on a whole is well maintained, even with the occasional porta-john along the way. Once we pass the last porta-john, we start what we think is the real climbing.

At this point, the trail is fairly difficult, causing us to pause every 10 minutes or so to catch our breaths. There are no trees, and very little vegetation, so it feels like we're hiking in the desert. Fortunately it's fairly cool out, and it balances perfectly with the amount of heat we generate from hiking.

About 2.5 hours into the hike, we reach the base of Ngarahoe. We've already ascended a few thousand feet and travelled several kilometers to get to this point, but we have quite a hike ahead of us. We talk to someone who just got down from the mountain, and he says it takes about 2 hours from where we are to hit the peak.

We decide to eat some lunch before continuing. We are surprised with how much altitude we've covered when we see some of our snacks have puffed up from the lower air pressure. I only have a peanut butter sandwich and some random nuts and stuff, but it keeps me satisfied. A brief pow-wow reveals the girls aren't interested in climbing a mountain and they decide to conitnue on the easier trail to go see some lakes that are supposed to be interesting.

After lunch is done, we pack up, and head off into the clouds. The cloud cover is quite close to our position now, and we can see the streams of clouds breaking over the ridge off in the distance. The cover breaks for a moment, and we get our first glimpse of what we're about to tackle. My only impression was, "We're going to climb THAT?!" The slopes of the mountain are quite steep, from our current position it appears there is nothing less than 30-40 degrees or so.

The actual climb turned out to be quite difficult. After we get into the rhythm of the climb, our pace slows considerably to a few steps every minute. The beginning was fairly straightforward, it was easy to find footing on the rocks, but the terrain quickly turns into this soft mix of ash and cobble-stone sized rocks which are extremely difficult to find a firm place to step. Often, we would take a step only to slide back a half-step. It's fairly frustrating, and extremely tiring.

I was surprised with how much the terrain changed over the course of the climb. The colors of the rocks went from gray to red to black and all sorts of variations in between. After about an hour of climbing, we finally break the cloud line and for the first time my life I am peering above the clouds without being in an airplane. The view is spectacular, and we all pause for a few minutes to snap some photos, breathe, and enjoy it.

Luke remembers that we're climbing Mt. Doom and pulls out a bag of rice cakes, offering "Lambas Bread" to anyone who's interested.

Number of "My Precious" and other various Gollum quotes heard on the hike: 15

Breathing is notably less productive as we continue to gain altitude. I'm not gasping for oxygen, but I am definitely having to take more frequent breaks than I would at sea level. Now I understand why pro football teams don't like playing in Denver.

We summit shortly before 3PM. Ngauruhoe's peak lies at about 7,500 feet. Over a mile of vertical climbing. Not bad.

The top of the volcano is actually a huge crater that you can precariously walk around. It's quite intimidating, and it looks like something you don't want to be falling into. We're not alone at the top, there are a handful of other hikers who have made it up as well. We chat briefly with them, meeitng a girl from Sweden and a guy wearing a baseball cap made of straw from California.

We look down and find the aforementioned porta-john on the landscape. It is a tiny dot. We also see the path we walked to the base on--it looks like a thread. We are HIGH.

Enough dilly-dallying at the top, it's time to go down now. We had promised the girls we would meet them at four. Getting off this thing turned out to be quite interesting and fun. It was very hard to step down the slope without falling over. However, noting that the gravel/ash combo tended to slide down pretty easily, we discovered if you plant your feet just right, you slide down at a controlled pace.

One we got the technique down, we essentially surfed the rocks down to the bottom of the mountain. The only catch was that our shoes got filled to the brim with rocks and we had to stop several times to empty them out.

We eventually regroup with the girls and begin our long journey back. My legs are starting to get tired at this point--if I bend over the wrong way, I get cramps in my quads. I rustle through my backpack and find an extra bannana; I remember hearing something about potassium helping that out.

Fortunately, since the walk until this point had all be uphill, the walk back would all be downhill. It goes by much more quickly, and we reach our van around 6PM.

What a day.

Needless to say, we're starving by now, so we go and find a local pizzaria to eat at. Jeff and I split a "prawn pizza". We're suprised when this thing arrives as it has 3 steamed-with-heads-still-atttached prawns just sitting on top of the pizza. Regardless, it was quite tasty and fills the void in my stomach.

We all crash at 10PM from exhaustion. There's much mountain biking to be done tomorrow.

On the road again!

Thursday 01-20

THE WEEKEND! Thursdsay is designated travel day. After beating the tar out of my econ test, stuffing down some lunch while studying for our biogeography midterm, and packing my backpack, we finally get some downtime.

This week's target: Tongariro National Park and Mt. Ngarahoe (approximately prounounced Nar-a-hoe-ee. You may be more familiar with its surname, "Mt. Doom" from Lord of the Rings).
There's a little mixup with the vans today, apparently the rental place doublebooked our phat ride with another subgroup on our trip. We realize this as they roll up in the van we were supposed to have.

After an hour or two they sort out the snafu, but we're left with an 11-person van instead of a 12-person one. But, it is still diesel.

DIESEL POWER: In New Zealand, Diesel vehicles make a HUGE difference. Not only do they average 10-20% better fuel economy of the comparable petrol (gas) versions, but Diesel here costs 30% less per litre as well. Gas tends to hover around NZ$1.10 a litre, which rougly works out to US$3.10 per gallon, whereas Diesel is about US$2 a gallon. Needless to say, you see way more Diesels than you would in the States. And, since the Kiwis don't have quite the gasoline-in-the-veins-lay-tread-and-burn-rubber attitude in the states, they don't mind the sluggishness of the vehicles as much.

Oddly enough though, Atlanta and LA have much stricter emissions laws than NZ. Go figure.

With the late start, we end up driving mostly at night. Factor in NZ's winding two-lane mountain roads and a half-full cab of antsy girls in the back, it made for a very interesting ride. Roads in NZ tend to wash out a lot because of the soil makeup, but often instead of fixing them right away, they just make the road one-lane and put up caution signs. You can't let your guard down here.

We make our favorite stop at the infamous Playground of Death and Litigation Paradise(tm), with a few more bruises but no major injuries still. I think we're pushing our luck with this one.

We find the hostel late that night. Thanks to good thinking by Tim earlier that day, he called ahead and got them to leave us a note for where our rooms were.

This hostel is quite a bit nicer than the other hostel we stayed in. I think they put us in a part with no other tennants that night which is good considering the amount of noise we made coming in and getting settled in.

We crash early--lots of hiking to do tomorrow.
--P

Just another Wednesday

Wednesday

It seems like Wednesday is going to be the downtime day here. There's not much going on downtown, and we often have tests Thursday. Most of the younger students who aren't slackers yet usually "study". I tend to walk around disencouraging the practice. Yes, I'm that guy.

I eventually decide I should at least make a minor attempt to study for the econ test tomorrow, and poof, there goes the night.

Everything cool will happen tomorrow.
--P

To hell with being sick.

Tuesday

Status: My nose is running like a track star. I think this cold is peaking today. Damn.

I wake up early, eat some breakfast, then conk back out for a few more minutes. I wake up again, throw the finishing touches on my economics paper that’s due today, and proceed to drag my delirious ass to class, where I proceed to zone out/sleep through the class. I think the professor notes my lousy state and leaves me alone.

I try the sleep-all-day and drink tons of water approach. Biogeography falls victim to this as I sleep through it. Scouting reports indicate I didn’t miss anything important. Good.

Since the rest of the day is a moot point, let’s have a quick lesson on NZ culture.

RANDOM NZ STUFF: Some other things I’ve picked up along the trip:

• “Thanks” is used like “Please.” As in, “That’ll be $10.00, Thanks!” This still catches me off guard – why are you thanking me when you have yet to receive payment?
  
• After further investigation, “Bugger” is probably a borderline curse word. We don’t really care, and still find it funny to yell it out randomly in crowded places.
  
• My American accent sticks out like a sore thumb. People pick up on it instantly. It’s very weird when all of a sudden, you’re in the minority. I’m trying to use a little more of the local dialect to try to fit in better, but I feel like an idiot doing it.
  
• The metric system only has a loose hold on this country. McDonalds still has a “1/4 Pounder w/ Cheese”. Probably because “.113398 kilogramer w/ cheese” lacks the same zing to it.
  
• The airplane industry still uses feet – I just recalled that we ascended to “15,000 feet” and not 4572 meters. I think this is more that English is a global standard in aviation.
  
• Womens shirt sizes here are driving our girls crazy. If you’re a Size 0 in the states, you’re a Size 10 here. Haha, you’re fat now!
• If women had anything to say about it, America would be on metric by now… instead of weighing 110lbs, they’d be 50 kg.

Someone's got a case of the Mondays!

Monday

Current status:

Weather: windy and cool, sounds like the dorm is going to blow over
Cold: coughing lungs up, but dealing with it
Breakfast: Eggs over easy gelatinize when left in a heating pan for an hour. Yuck.
Laundry: 32% clean clothes left, almost time to do laundry.
No. of pictures taken: 2400.

SICK: This New Zealand bug is really starting to take a hold of me. Nothing is more frustrating than being sick on a trip like this. I’m only fortunate that it is such a long trip it won’t have a huge effect on my total enjoyment of the experience.

CLASS SUCKS: I drag my coughing, sneezing, pathetic self to econ so I don’t use up an absence, only to learn I got a 0 on a quiz in there. Nice. I find more comfort in that everyone but one person failed said quiz. Usually, you’d think the professor might take a hint and adjust teaching style… Oh no, she re-administers the SAME quiz again before handing back the previous failed one or even discussing it. Some of the students are pretty chapped, but my senior-induced apathy gets the better of me and I just laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

Afterwards, I amble back to my room and sit around feeling sorry for myself and reading. When you’re in a lousy condition, you don’t really want to interact with people because you don’t want them to see you in rough shape (and if you’re nice, you don’t want to get them sick). It also rules out my ultimate plan of meeting locals.

Still, I’m feeling well enough to keep going today with my routine, so I eat lunch and head off to biogeography. Much to my dismay, I arrive 5 minutes late to a pop-quiz-in-progress. I have resigned myself to failure at this point, until a comrade informs me the quiz doesn’t count for anything. Close call.

After class, I rouse enough energy to venture down to the internet café and upload some more pictures. This takes all of an hour or two, I come back, leaving one piece of business to take care of: calling mom and tell her that her son jumped out of the airplane. She takes the news surprisingly well, although I’m sure she’s just putting on an act to sound cool.

I go to bed early hoping to get an edge on this stupid cold.

--P

Last day of Taupo Field Trip

Sunday

TOO EARLY! Once again, we’re up early at 7AM. I’m finally starting to get used to it, but then I realize my entire weekend has been wasted to early wake-up times. I’m getting a taste of the real world and I don’t like it.

LAST DAY: We make two stops before heading back to Wellington today. First, we visit the Waikato river, which isn’t that important geographically but is very nice to look at. The water is a crystal blue, almost turquoise, and rumbles down through a narrow cut in the land. I wonder aloud what rafting on it would be like, and our professor comments there is a dangerous undertow at the end of the rapid. Darn.

The river alone is responsible for 15% of New Zealand’s power generation, which is pretty impressive for a river. Since the country has a nuclear ban, it is now apparently on which forms of alternative energy generation they use.

WONDERLAND: Next, we stop at a park which has a whole slew of geothermal toys. The first attraction is the mud pits, which boil, churn, and bubble constantly. The high acid content of the steam coming from underneath dissolves the rock and keeps the area muddy. It’s quite impressive, as it reminds me of a hot tub full of mud. It also smells like hell because of the sulfur content. A handful of my peers (names carefully omitted), can’t handle the smell in conjunction with their hangovers and wander off into the woods to relieve their aching gastrointestinal tracts. Some are sneaky and we don’t find about it until later.

The final stop is at another conglomerate of geothermal attractions which were quite impressive in their own right. See the pictures for the highlights, but my particular favorites were the artist’s pallet and the devil’s pool.

After our romp in the Geothermal Wonderland, we load up and head home.

REDNECK CARNIVAL: One of the interesting rest stops we make is at a little place that seemed to located between two cities. I can best describe it as a redneck carnival – it had a little bit of everything but seemed to be run by a small group of people. It had a little restaurant, an ice cream shop, random chickens and peacocks running about, a maze, and even a jetboat track out back. Our bus driver claims their lamb burgers are good, but I decide not to wait in line for one.

When everyone is finally ushered back onto the bus, we make our now traditional last rest-stop at the Adventure Park in Levin, a cult favorite among us. We seem to beat the odds yet again with no major injuries.

After a long day, what more could one ask for than a Kebob? My 4^th met its demise shortly after we got back into town. Man those things are good!

--P

Jumping out of Airplanes for the hell of it

Saturday

YAWN: We get up at the ass-crack of 7am today. The bus is leaving at 8am sharp, and we now know they mean business.

I was smart and grabbed some food yesterday, so I make myself a ham and cheese croissant before we go. This time, Vladik makes the bus.

We have a half-day planned today at the Waimangu Volcanic Valley. We see a lot of cool colorful bubbly steamy smelly things that are best described by the pictures from the day.

But, our minds are elsewhere, because we’ve scheduled a skydiving trip this afternoon.

The idea has been kicked around since we learned we were going to Taupo. New Zealand is known as the extreme sports capital of the world. The basic reason is NZ has laws making it nearly impossible to sue the companies that take clients out, short of extreme negligence on their part.

CHICKEN: By this afternoon, our skydiving group gelled into group of about 25. A handful of people chickened out at the last minute, and we give them crap. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t at least slightly nervous, but I put on my macho act and poke fun at the skydiving naysayers.

Erik starts making up statistics to scare the rest of the group, despite the fact he’s not even going. “You know, 3% of the parachutes don’t open, right? So that means if 26 of us go, that means one of us will die!” I think this is hilarious, but some the more borderline people do not. In reality, the statistic is more like 1 in 50,000. You’re worse off in a car driving around town.

The company that we picked, “Freefall”, delivers the total package. For a low price of several hundred dollars NZ, they’ll pick us up, strap us to another skydiver, toss us out of a plane, give us a video of the process, and drop us off. Thanks to some skillful negotiation by one of our group members, we get a sizable discount for bringing so many people.

LETS ROLL: We arrive at the hanger/staging area around 1pm. The airplane they use has a capacity for 18 jumpers. Since no-one in our group is licensed, we all have to go tandem (strapped to an experienced jumper). I don’t argue with this, as I don’t trust myself steering a parachute to a safe landing. This means the plane has the capacity to take 9 of us, plus tandem jumpers. They offer an option to send up another guy to take video of you doing the freefall, but this is expensive and I opt out.

The group is eventually split into 5 jumping groups. I end up in the second one. They show us a quick video, which is mainly just a promotion for ordering the free-fall video. Part of me wonders if/when they’ll give us instructions on what to actually do when diving.

The first group gets suited up fairly quickly, and I take the opportunity to snap some photos. There is definitely an air of uneasiness as one of the Kiwis working there straps harnesses onto people. The harnesses they use mean business. They resemble a climbing harness, with additional shoulder and chest straps. Once you get cinched into this thing, there is no way you’re coming out of it. I notice there is no parachute on these harnesses, apparently that is for your tandem guy to worry about.

STRAP UP: To complete the getup, they give you a little helmet that looks like the ones used in old-school football games and some plastic goggles to keep the wind out of your eyes. The costume is rather humorous and makes for some good photo ops. We rotate between impersonations of rugby players and World War I fighter pilots.

By now, the first group has started floating down and making their landings. The sheer exuberance on their faces is unreal. After their tandem pilots drive them in to safe landings, they unclip from their proverbial life boats and start jumping up and down and hugging everyone in sight. If I didn’t know better, I’d say all of them had just won the lottery.

It’s my turn. After I get strapped up in the harness, I meet my tandem jumper, Chris. Chris is a likeable guy from the states who has been living down here for a few years. He doesn’t talk a whole lot, so I bombard him with questions to keep conversation going. I’m sure he’s heard them all before. Turns out he’s jumped all over the world, and claims NZ is his favorite place to jump. I’m not sure if he’s being honest or using a marketing line on me.

LOAD UP: As we load up the plane, I notice that somehow I’ve ended up in the back of the line. No worries, until I realize the last people in the plane get to sit in the doorway of the airplane. This is the first (and probably last) time in my life that I’ve sat in a plane, taxiing down a runway, with my legs hanging out the side.

The plane we’re in is a single-prop airplane, reminiscent of an old-school WWII fighter plane (but hopefully newer). The door is located behind the wings, which means we’re less likely to smack something on the way out. The door itself is a roll-up type, with clear slats so you can see out. For our ascent to 15,000 feet, I will be pressed against this door, which is barely ½” thick.

RIDE UP: Needless to say, this is one of the scariest plane rides of my life. The whole thing is rather rickety, and there isn’t much between me and falling out. Oddly enough, I remain quite calm for the ride up, comforted in part by my confidence in that the people running this thing know what they’re doing. I’ve heard stories of jumpers with a sense of humor wearing fake harnesses and expressing mock shock as they rip them off before they jump. I secretly hope there aren’t any pranksters on this trip, and my wishes are granted.

Being the last into the plane means you’re the first out. Chris has me sit up and he straps me tight to him. What would normally be an uncomfortable slightly homosexual situation is damped by the whole extreme sports nature of the thing—I’ll swallow my pride as long as he gets me down safely.

DANGLING BY A THREAD: The next part is where it gets crazy. The magic red light comes on, meaning we’ve reached altitude. They roll up the door, and there is nothing between me and the ground 15,000 feet below except Chris, who is holding on behind me. He turns me around, and I am now hanging out the plane, arms and feet dangling in the 120mph wind from the airplane. The only thing keeping me from plunging into the abyss at this point are the four clips that attach my harness to Chris’s.

I sit in this position for a good 30 seconds or so, in a weird mix of fear, shock, elation, and awe. The fact that I knew what was coming next didn’t help at all, either. Chris chooses now as the time to give me instructions on what to do. “Hold on, lean your head back, and tuck your legs under the plane”. Easy enough. I steal one more glance at the ground below (I think the sadistic part of me wanted me to be as scared as possible for my money) before Chris propels us out of the airplane.

They say a sizeable portion of people don’t remember their first jumps. Maybe they pass out or something, but I remembered mine in crystal detail. Chris shoves us out of the plane, and we tumble head-over heels a few times. I see the airplane, the ground, the airplane again, then finally the ground once more. At this point, my stomach has slammed all around my chest cavity and the flood of adrenaline is starting to pulse through my veins.

FREEFALL: Chris tosses out the little trailer chute that will keep us facing the right direction for the rest of the freefall. As we level out, I am now face down, staring at the beautiful NZ countryside below, with the wind blasting me at terminal velocity, which works out to about 120mph. I had initially thought the entire freefall would feel like those Drop Zone type rides at theme parks, but after the initial drop and tumbling, it is strangely comfortable. It’s like you’re floating around in a giant cushion.

The air is cool to my skin but not freezing, and as I look around I really start to take in the awesomeness of freefall. Chris, apparently bored, uses his hands like rudders and sends us into a fast spin to make things even more interesting. I get another surge of adrenaline from this. Every time I try to open my mouth to let out a “Whooo!!” the air blasts in, pulling my cheeks open, and its hard to get anything out.

The actual free-fall lasts for about a minute. In some ways, it seems a lot longer, in others a lot shorter. It’s difficult to pin down. Regardless, it was definitely the most thrilling minute of my life. I still get jittery when I watch the videos of people jumping out of the planes. But, as they say, all good things come to an end, and as we approach 5,000 feet, Chris pulls the chute. The jerk from slowing down from 120mph to 30mph isn’t as bad as I expected. Apparently it takes about 1,000 feet for a chute to properly deploy.

Should that chute fail, all modern chutes have backup chutes in them, and a special system called Cypres. Should a chute not be deployed by 2,000 feet, the system will automatically deploy the reserve chute for you. So, if for some reason you’re unconscious or simply forget to deploy on time, this system takes care of you. From what I’ve read it’s saved over 100 lives so far and is now standard.

CHUTING: Parachuting turns out to be almost as fun as the freefall itself. Two little handles pop out, and with that you can steer the chute. Pull the left one, you go left, pull the right… you get the idea. Pull both and you slow down. Chris steers us toward the landing site, then hands me the controls to play around with. If you pull one of them hard, you go into a tight spin which really throws some g-force on you. We do this for a few minutes, then Chris takes the controls back and steers us in for a picture perfect landing.

LANDING: If you land a parachute correctly, there is absolutely zero impact. If you do it wrong, you could break some legs or even be killed. In reading up about skydiving accidents afterwards, it seems most deaths come from experienced jumpers getting too crazy with their landings. Everyone else makes good landings, except for Seth, who somehow ends up on his ass. We laugh at him after we see he’s OK.

Once we unclip from our tandem partners, everyone in our group runs together and hugs each other (myself included), and we high five and handshake every person in sight. If you’re down, the perfect pick-me-up is skydiving. Most of us want to go again, but the slight issue of money and time prevent that, but we will be looking out for more opportunities on this trip.

If you’ve never been skydiving before, it’s definitely on the top 10 list of things you need to do before you die. The experience will stay with you for a lifetime.

Since we’re all pumped from skydiving, we go and find some food, then head downtown for another night of partying. We still have to be up early on Sunday, so we don’t stay out that late.

HELL PIZZA: For dinner, we eat at this fascinating chain called Hell Pizza. It is the single most effective marketing I’ve ever seen in a restaurant franchise. Everything’s centered around the Hell theme, and it’s done well. For example, all of the pizzas are named after sins (Gluttony, Lust, Greed, etc). Their bottled water is called “Holy Water”. One of their delivery vehicles is a converted Hearse. The pizza boxes fold up into little coffins to store leftovers. The cashiers are wearing goth makeup while the cooks sport shirts that proudly proclaim “Bitchin’ in the Kitchen!”

Oh, and the pizza’s pretty good too. I am definitely going to open one of these places smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt, just to piss off people. And I’ll get rich in the process.

Cheers,

--P

The Buried Village and Geothermal Power Plant

Visit to the Buried Village

RISE ‘N SHINE: There is nothing worse than having to get up early after a long night of partying. The bus is leaving today at 8:30AM sharp. Most of us didn’t get back until 2AMish last night.

Apparently I narrowly dodged a hangover, and the shower wakes me up enough to be coherent and realize we have about 14 minutes until we need to be on the bus. I quickly rouse the other two roommates, and we get going.

LEFT BEHIND: Once I get aboard the bus, I notice not everyone is there yet. Groggy students eventually file on board. With all but two people on board, the impatient bus driver pulls away. We look back to see poor Kevin hauling ass to try to catch the bus, but then he gives up. The bus driver, despite our gentle reminders “YOU’RE LEAVING KEVIN YOU MORON!”, finally pulls over after a few hundred meters, and somebody runs back to grab Kevin.

Now we’re minus one, but Vladik doesn’t make it. For the remainder of the trip, when they ask if we have everyone, someone will chip in, “Vladik’s not here!”

Our first stop is an overlook of the city of Taupo. Professor John gives a quick lecture, which boils down to “we’re sitting on a giant volcano”. If I was younger, I’d definitely be a little spooked, especially when he mentions they’re still “active.” Fortunately, “Active” means erupts every 20,000 years or so. He points out the different volcanoes we can see from the spot, all with complex Maori names that I can neither pronounce nor remember how to spell.

We hop back on the bus, confirm that we have everyone but Vladik, and continue to our next destination: the Buried Village.

The Buried Village is a village that got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time when a volcano erupted all over it. The interesting part is that hot lava didn’t destroy the place, but tons of ash did, effectively preserving the village. Despite the tragedy, it did manage to act as a huge time capsule and gives us a good insight to the past.

A well-stocked museum sits by the village, and we go in there first. We are greeted by Huru, a slightly overweight Maori who will be guiding us through the Musuem. This guy is definitely one of the most interesting people we’ve met on the trip so far. I’ve never seen anyone more passionate and enthusiastic about what they do than Huru. It turns out he’s a direct descendant of people who lived in the village, which helps explain why he loves what he does.

He tends to use “Ladies and Gentlemen” as an interjection and not just a greeting, and glues together sentences with the phrase. He also talks with his hands, waving them furiously as he gets excited about something, and frequently slapping the displays to make a point. Huru turned what would otherwise be a pretty boring walk through a museum into a fairly interesting topic.

Afterwards, we perform our well-rehearsed sunscreen ritual and head out to see the village itself. I was rather disappointed, most of the good stuff that was excavated was brought into the museum, so the main remnants consist mostly of old structures. The architecture of the time wasn’t particularly advanced—everything followed the “hut” theme or variations of it, but it was still cool to imagine that 100 years ago people were here, clueless they were about to be obliterated by a volcano.

The trail leads down to a very pretty waterfall, which makes for a good photo opportunity. Jeff wastes no time in slipping and falling knee-deep into some mud. I laugh. I later learned that Geoffrey does the same thing, in the same place just minutes later. I laugh at both of them.

SHEEP FUN: Lunch consisted of some mediocre Quiche with salad. I was really hungry, so it probably tasted better than it actually was. It probably wasn’t worth the NZ$10 they charged for it. I wander around and snap some more random pics. I noticed a sheep earlier on, and run back to take pictures of it, remembering that I had no good pictures of the most populous animal on the island. When we walk over to it, I “baaaaa”ed at it as a test. To our surprise, it looks up from its all-important meal of grass, gives a quizzical look, and “baaaaa”s straight back at us. Talk about fun! I try it again, but the sheep outwits us and figures out we’re just messing with it.

We load up, take a head count, confirm Vladik is indeed still missing, and continue to our next destination, the geothermal power plant.

I think my expectations were a little high for this. As we approach the site, all we see are tons of pipes, some terminating in the ground. This looks kind of neat from the bus, but I was hoping to get inside one of the turbine buildings or something. Turns out, all we do is look at the stuff from a hill.

THERMOLAND: The engineer talking to us is exactly what you would expect an old-weathered engineer to talk like. He speaks a little too loudly, and throws in engineering statistics much like an anchor on Sportscenter would. He assumes most of us have had a large background in geothermal energy conversion, and we are quickly lost as he rambles on. Having taken thermodynamics, I pick up bits here and there and find it quite interesting, but most of the younger people on the trip just roll up their sleeves and catch some sun while he talks.

NZ's geothermal plant is unique in that it's the first plant in the world to run directly off of steam coming out of the ground. Most other plants are "Dry steam" types which drop water down a hole with hot rocks at the bottom and the water is turned to steam there. This plant, a "wet steam" type, uses steam from water that is already underground. Amazing, this is enough to provide 330 megawatts of power. While only a fraction of NZ's power supply, it is a clean resource that hopefully doesn't need replentishing. Too bad not every country has a few tappable hot spots in their neighborhood.

At this point, we’re a quite a ways from Taupo and the drive back takes over an hour.

MUSSELS: We roll downtown to find something to eat, and a small group of us settle on a random café. According to the waiter, their New Zealand mussels are something to write home about, so I order the Surf ‘n Turf (steak ‘n mussels) to try them out. I’ve never had a mussel before, and they are rather intimidating to eat. They look like something out of fear factor. I grab one, fearlessly scoop it out and chow down, and man are they good! I love it when I get exposure to a new type of food.

We call it an early night, seeing as we have to be up at 7am the next morning. Some of the more intrepid party-goers make an expedition anyway, and I question their ability to get up in the morning. However, I have some faith; any seasoned party-goer can wake up anytime, anyplace if it’s important enough.

Roadtrip to Taupo

BREAKFAST: Cold pancakes, sausage that’s probably from two days ago, and other assorted cold things. I think they lower our expectations so that when they do decide to serve us good food, we think it’s awesome. I long for the days for Brittain food.

We entertain ourselves briefly by trying Marmite, the local “spread” (think a salty/nasty version of jam), under the supervision of a local. We still don’t like it. Maybe we will by the end of the trip.

Class sucked today; the econ teacher sprung not one, not two, but three pop quizzes on us today. I call shenanigans on this move--it has to violate some sort of international treaty. We spectacularly fail most of them. She needs to adapt to the lackadaisical study abroad attitude.

The weather today is amazing. It’s breezy, clear, and cool. I just want to sit outside all day, but then I remember I’ll get burned to a crisp if I do that. Drat.

DUH-HUH: Elisha comes to me complaining her internet isn’t working, that I screwed up something on her computer when I configured AIM to work on Victoria’s network. After looking briefly, I politely inform her the internet works better when it’s plugged in. She curls up into the fetal position on her bed. And you wonder why we think women suck at electronics...

ROADTRIP!: Today kicks off our weekend excursion to Taupo, which will be the longest school-sanctioned field trip I’ve ever taken. Three pure days of non-stop Geothermal exuberance!

We load up the bus and meet our bus driver, and cranky old Kiwi who has no tolerance for being late as we’ll later learn. This trip takes the same road that we used to get to Rotorua last weekend, so most of us have seen the sights before. The bus driver plays tour guide on the way up, informing us of fun little facts about each city (“Old Kiwis retire at this city, they built this windmill to attract tourists to this city…”) and our geology professor fills in useful geological facts about where we’re driving (“this road used to be underwater 4 millions years ago!”), which is actually fairly interesting.

DIE: I’ve come to conclude about New Zealand that while there isn’t much here to be afraid of in terms of dying from small things—there are no land-based predators, diseases are relatively benign, and there aren’t any killer scorpions or iguanas like Australia—the island has a tendency to blow up sporadically every 20,000 years or so and wipe out whole areas. There’s always some fine print…

LITIGATION PARADISE: One of the rest stops we make is at a combination rest area/playground. In short, this is the most badass playground I have ever been on in my life. This alone defines the legal differences between NZ and America, because this playground wouldn’t last a day without someone getting sued for a kid killing themselves on it.

We’re talking zip lines, trampolines, giant hamster wheels, huge slides, and basically anything FUN that you can think of. We had a blast. Most of the small children there gave us quizzical looks as the mob of 20-22 year-olds swarmed the playground like 10-yearolds. They’ll understand when they get older and visit America’s super-padded pathetic playgrounds suitable for mental patients.

Four bruises, 50 pictures, and 10 minutes later, we escape the playground as the cranky bus driver honks impatiently at us. I suspect this might be the most fun part of our trip—we’ll see.

The rest of the trip is uneventful besides a few more rest stops.

NIGHTLIFE, GO: Once we get to Taupo, we’re immediately bored and go check out the nightlife. More of the same here—empty bars suddenly becoming packed when the group of rowdy Americans storm in and take over the place (We seem to be good at that) then dying again as we migrate on, sucking all the life of the bar with us. We eventually settle down at one place called the Holy Cow, which is a prime picture-taking spot I decide, and fire away.

Tomorrow, we have to be up at 7am, ready to roll at 8am. Not looking forward to that.

--P

Maori welcome ceremony

Wed Jan 12

PAINTERS: I woke up this morning to some painters banging around outside my window. They have this large scaffolding set up. It’s rather disconcerting to look out your third story window to see a scrappy Kiwi peering in saying “G’day!” I smile and wave back and silently curse the cheerful painter.

Skipped breakfast today. I’m sure I didn’t miss much.

Got my econ test back, scored above the average. This is what gets me in trouble in my classes, because now I am definitely not studying for the rest of the term. Here’s hoping.

Biology was interesting as always. There’s something about that class that just knocks us out cold though. I think it’s a combination of being right after lunch and having the lights dimmed for the projector.

MAORI: Today, we’re scheduled to go to a Maori welcome ceremony.

The Maori are the natives of the island. They are a fascinating group of people with a rich culture that has resisted the Westernization that has plagued the island. A Maori is hard to miss, they are dark-skinned Pacific Islanders, and as a whole they are big people—both tall and “big boned”. They have effectively cornered the market on bar bouncers, and with good reason. Even the most badass American wouldn’t mess with a 300+ pound Maori. But, as a whole they are quite friendly to us Americans

THE MARAE: One of their traditions is to welcome visitors to their island in a ceremony at the local Marae. The Marae is their version of a community center, comparable to a Jewish Hillel. Each local grouping of Maori has their central Marae; the one we visit is located on Victoria University’s campus. The facility is an elegant mixture of traditional Maori carvings and architecture and modern amenities like air conditioning and emergency exit signs. Here are some pictures of the Marae.

Before we go over, we’re given a primer on proper protocol and manners in the Marae. Most follow common manners – take your shoes off, don’t chew gum, sit on pillows (the butt shouldn’t go where the head goes, we’re told), pass food over people, etc. We practice our little song that we’re supposed to sing at one point in the ceremony. Here are the lyrics, for the interested/unenlightened:

Me he manu rere aue,
Kua rere ki to moenga,
Ki te awhi to tinana
Aue Aue
E—te tau tahuri mai

Roughly translated, it means “Thanks for having us over”.

The ceremony is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It’s performed entirely in Maori, so we can’t understand a bit of it. There’s a lot of chanting, singing, shaking sticks, and other weird things that go against western customs. You’re not supposed to look the Maori in the eye while they’re talking during the ceremony, which goes completely against what we’re used to as Americans. The reasoning is your spirit might get sucked out or something like that. The people performing it are transformed into their roots, completely absorbed in the rituals. We are somewhat surprised afterwards when they speak to us in perfect English explaining what they just did.

After the ceremony, we are treated to a dinner, Maori style. The preferred cooking method would be suitable for a military camp. They take hundreds of meals, pack them into a giant cage, and drop them into a heated pit. Traditionally, this pit is in the ground so the flavor of the soil seeps in a little bit, but this modern Marae uses an above-ground concrete pit. Some of us help raise it out and remove the meals for serving. We eat, and help clean up the kitchen afterwards. As a parting gesture, we belt out a version of Ramblin Wreck for their enlightenment. I'm appalled to find some of the students on the trip don't know the lyrics, and chide them for their ignorance.

That night we hang out at the dorm, play cards, drink beer, and eat pizza. Tommorrow is going to be a long day of travelling.

--P

More birthday outings

Monday was pretty much a routine day. Everyone’s tired from the weekend activities and class is boring as usual. ‘Bout the only thing I got done was make a huge batch upload of my pics at the local internet café. I pretend to study for my econ test, but as usual get distracted.

Tuesday, however, turned out to be more interesting. The econ test came and went—I’m really starting to dislike the class. I probably did just as well as most of the people who studied, according to my informal exit polls after the test.

Tonight was Saira’s birthday. We’re getting better at celebrating birthdays. Erik and I stroll downtown looking for restaurants to have dinner—sushi preferred. We finally settle on a place that is tucked away in a small shopping center but looks like it can handle our group of 10-15 people that will be going out later.

BYO: One common theme of NZ restaurants is many will allow you to bring your own wine for a small corking fee. Being the budget-savvy students that we were, we grabbed a few bottles of stuff that cost half of what they charged at the restaurant and probably tasted just as good.

The sushi itself was excellent and not too pricey. Many of us are used to the $1 menu at Rusan’s, but we survive. The selection is rather insignificant to Rusan’s menu, but what we order tastes very good and has great presentation. Elisha, despite my warnings, asks the waiter if he knows what Sake-bombs are, and of course get s a confused look in return.

For post-dinner celebrations, we work our way around a few bars, and eventually end up at one place that’s having a “Beats and Bubbles” night. They have a DJ playing some more obscure music (thank goodness), and serve champagne for real cheap until midnight. We’re all entertained. I snap off a few pictures for posterity’s sake, and we all have a great time.

WALKING HOME: As we are leaving, I end up in the last group trying to get a cab. There were five of us – me and four other girls. The cabbie informs us that he can only hold four, so being the gentleman I am I let the girls grab the cab and I fend for myself. I thought for a few minutes, decided I didn’t want to fork out for a cab by myself, so I hit up the walk back to Weir House. Problem is, Weir House is locate on a hill, and one thing I learned that night is you have to climb 186 steps to get to it. But, once you commit to the walk home, you gotta stick with it, and that I did.

--P

Journeys down the white water

Sunday 1/9/05

Daily stats:
No. of pies consumed to date: 5
No. of pictures taken: ~1150
No. of hot New Zealanders spotted: 0

I’ve lost count of the number of days we’ve been here. So I’ll stick with just dates from now on.

We go through the same routine as yesterday for getting up: 5 alarm clocks go off in random order, and everyone fights the urge to stay asleep for another 10 minutes. Some were successful. A lot of us went out the night before, some longer than others, and we’re all pretty tired. Someone wakes up and accuses another (names withheld) of pissing out the window when they came back last night.

Today, we have a shuttle picking us up, so we can’t dilly-dally around too much. Apparently we will be making a breakfast stop too, so we don’t have to do the mad dash down to the local café for some more pies.

The trip over is uneventful, if not a little hazy as we spend most of it waking up. We’re delivered at the staging area for the rafting place, and lo and behold: more wetsuits. I figure that from now on, if I see a wetsuit, it means we’re going to be doing something fun. I won’t be disappointed.

RASTAKIWI: I put on my cool act, remembering my wet suit size from yesterday, but nobody seems impressed. The registration guy deserves a mention: he’s what could be classified as a RastaKiwi, a half-baked mix between Rastafarian and New Zealander. He is slightly odifierous, and it’s apparent his dreads haven’t been washed in weeks. He was probably high while we were talking to him, but with these types, you can never quite tell if they’re high or not since they’ve smoked so much. A large tattoo of what I think is the outline of New Zealand covers his left calf. Needless to say, this guy is quite cool in the Jimi Hendrix sense of cool, and makes for easy conversation.

SUIT UP: The wetsuits are similar to the day before, except no jacket this time. Instead, they hand us these fleeces which appear to be the last thing I would wear in the water. One of the rafting guys comments on it’s a miracle what you can do with recycled milk bottles. Looking closely at the fleece, I notice that in fact, while it feels like a standard cotton fleece, it is in fact plastic. It basically won’t wick up water and is more or less water proof. Brilliant!

We meet our raft guide, Nick, after suiting up. Your typical charismatic Kiwi, he seems a little less boisterous than the others we’ve met but has an air of confidence about him that is comforting. We have no idea what we’re in for on the river, just that we’re going rafting.

As we get to the river, we learn that today, we will be tackling class 4 and 5 rapids on the river. For reference, rapids only go up to class 6. And to think we’ll be taking a boat of beginners down this river, I suddenly become slightly concerned. Nick better be damn good!

THE RIVER: This river in itself is special as it was dammed up several years ago for power generation. Originally, it was going to be running at just a trickle, saving the flow for the power generation up stream. As it turns out, the rafting industry is a fairly powerful lobby in New Zealand, and they protested the drying up of this river. They eventually negotiated that the dam would open up 28 days each year (basically on the weekends in the summer), for recreational purposes.

There are 8 of us in the raft, with Nick and another guide-in-training in front, with myself and 5 others from the study abroad group taking up the rear. Somehow I end up in the back of the raft, which apparently gets the most action as far as getting flung out and getting wet. Lucky me.

After a quick lesson in commands to expect from Nick, we set off down the river. There are 3 other rafts in our group and some crazy guy hitting up the rapids in a canoe. It turns out that this guy is one of the best rafting guides in the area. After watching him navigate some rapids, I believe it. I can’t sit in still water in a canoe without capsizing it.

START OFF STRONG: We start off strong with a class 4 rapid to get our blood going. We are the last in the group to go, so we get to watch the other three rafts make it down one by one. The first raft isn’t very lucky—they end up going down the rapids sideways, and the last thing I see is one of the occupants getting jettisoned from the raft as it capsizes down the rapids. Our guide scurries off to help pull people out of the water, and we get a little concerned.

Fortunately, everyone in that raft is OK, if not a little bruised from being pounded against the rocks by the powerful current. Apparently, the wetsuits provide a decent amount of cushioning.

Nick returns after a few minutes, smiling, mentioning that the guide of that raft was trying to get certified today but probably failed. The problem with all these extreme sports activities is you can never tell when the guides are joking or being serious, but I think he’s being serious this time. I resist the urge to ask if Nick himself is certified, scared for what he might answer.

Nick appears to know what he’s doing, as he skillfully guides us down the killer rapid smoothly and quickly. One of the commands he taught us is “GET DOWN!” which basically means hop into the bottom of the raft and hold on for dear life. We learn very quickly the importance of this command as we plunge down the first rapid. Overall, it wasn’t too horrible, and the water is a bit warmer than the freezing water from caving yesterday.

After we make it to the bottom of the first rapid, I turn around, look, and saw we that we just went down a 4 or 5 foot water fall. Wow. If I had seen that before hand, I would have definitely protested the insane act of trying to go down the waterfall in our proverbial barrel, but Nick makes it easy.

CLASS 5: Needless to say, I am confident in Nick’s abilities now and look forward to the rest of the river, with a “BRING IT ON!” type attitude. We navigate several more class 4’s, then approach our first class 5. We park on the side and Nick gives us some instructions. One part of this rapid is called the Toaster. The rocks earn the name because they’re so close together that if the raft goes through it, it’s like a piece of toast going into a Toaster. Nick emphasizes the importance of getting down in this situation, should we encounter it. The thought of being wedged between a raft and two rocks is rather disturbing, so I hope we don’t end up in it.

As it turns out, we navigate it nearly flawlessly. As I turn back to look up the rapid, I am truly amazed what we just came down.

GOING SOLO: We do several more rapids, with cool names like “the Roller Coaster”. We get to one class 3 and park the raft. Nick tells us we can get out and swim this one if we want. I’m a little skeptical, but Nick’s advice hasn’t led us astray yet, so I figure it’s worth a shot. He instructs us to “Just make sure you take your breaths carefully, and keep your feet up.”

The reason for the feet up thing is so if your foot catches something, you don’t get slammed face first into the rapid by the current, where you will really be in trouble.

I hop out of the raft and start paddling. Swimming in a strong river current is truly scary. You can paddle like hell, but you barely go anywhere except where the river wants you to go. I’m swept away down the river. At first, it’s not so bad, even almost pleasant. That doesn’t last for long. As I enter the first rock, I get sucked under for a bit. When I resurface, I gasp in some air, but catch a little water in the process.

I get sucked under again. I struggle to keep my feet in front of me. There’s water, noise, and cold everywhere. To add to the confusion, I look behind me, and see another group’s raft bearing down on me. I think they’re probably laughing at me, but I’m worried I’m going to get plowed over by them and try to paddle out of the way.

Fortunately, the current keeps me ahead of them and I continue my water-logged journey down the rapid. One of the other guys floats up besides me gasping for breath – I help him keep his head up while he recovers from the combination of inhaling water and a too-tight life jacket.

Eventually, we make it to clear water again, and the nightmare is over. It is truly one of the scariest experiences I have had, and taught me real respect for the power of fast-moving water. In retrospect, there was a very low probability of me getting actually hurt, but the lessons learned are valuable.

The rest of the trip is more of the same. At one point, Nick turns control of the raft over to the guide-in-training. I can’t quite make out what he’s saying, so I just copy what everyone else is doing. The river has eased up a bit, so it doesn’t really matter what you do.

Overall, the experience was fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone who even remotely likes extreme activities. It wasn’t horribly difficult, but it definitely wasn’t easy either.

Afterwards, we carry the raft back up to the top of the hill, and we hang out for a while waiting for the other group to finish. We found a nice spot on a cliff to sit and watch the river for a while, and the view is quite pretty.

ZORBING: When the other group finishes, we load up the van and go off searching for a thing called “Zorbing.”

Zorbing is best defined as the thing everyone thought of as a kid but never bothered to put it together. The basic idea is you get inside a giant 10-foot diameter plastic ball filled with water and roll down a hill in it. You can load up two or three people in it to make it more interesting. It’s pretty wild, but pricey too - $40NZ for a 30-second ride. I decide to sit this one out and take pictures instead.

You really just need to look at the pictures to appreciate this one. When people exit the Zorb, it looks like the thing is giving birth. Our group went down a few times, and everyone was absolutely giddy when they pop out at the bottom. I get a little jealous, but we’ll have an opportunity to go again soon in Queenstown.

After Zorbing, we go take a quick spin through the Agrodome, a local attraction. The actual facility fell quite short of my expectations for the place; I had visions of a giant facility filled with all sorts of fun activities inside. Instead, the Agrodome is a collection of redneck sporting events that you might find in backwoods Georgia. To add insult to injury, they didn’t have a street luge that we were looking for.

FRIED GOODNESS: So, that brings us to our journey back. 6 hours of driving on NZ roads. Fun. The only thing of note here is we stopped at a Fish and Chips place aptly named “the Grand Central Fry.” We had read about in some tour guide. Imagine the Varsity, but with fish instead of burgers ‘n dogs.

I order a piece of some fish I don’t remember the name of, and some “garlic chips” aka fries drenched in garlic butter. I receive a neat little package of butcher paper that’s piping hot. I unwrap the bundle to a conflicting sight. Part of me is delighted, but at the same time I can feel my arteries trying to run away in protest. Unfortunately, arteries lost this battle and I demolished the fried pile of goodness. My stomach felt a little queasy afterwards, possibly from the injection of a quart of frying oil into my system, but I was satisfied as well.

I was surprised there wasn’t a coronary surgeon set up next door.

The drive back was a long 6 hour uneventful drive at night. The only interesting part was we weren’t quite sure where our dorm was located downtown, so we ended up guessing. By some crazy chance, we get it right. I think I’ve used up my luck for this week…

Until next time,

--P

Day 10: Cavin' Down Under

Day 10: Saturday Jan 8, 2005

STINKY: When I wake up, I forget where I am temporarily until I inhale.

Rotorua stinks like rotten eggs, all the time. It’s because of the large amount of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) emissions from the nearby geothermal areas. If you’re lucky, the wind blows the right way and it doesn’t smell as bad.

WAKEUP: Waking up in a hostel is easier than one might think. Since we had 8 people in the room, and at least 6 of them set alarms for the butt-crack of 8AM, I had no trouble in grudgingly rolling out of bed bright and early for our expedition underground with the Black Water Rafting Co. We stroll down the street to grab a quick breakfast from a small cafe before we head out.

PIE!: I think I have finally figured out the official food of New Zealand: pies. I’m not talking about the typical fruity pies that we’re used to in States, but rather meat and cheese filled little pies that are really yummy. About the size of a small hamburger, these flaky pastries pack a punch in small package and are delicious. I down a bacon and egg pie, which of the available steak, mince, chicken, and other varieties seemed the most logical choice for a breakfast pie. I wash it down with a Coke.

COKE: Soft drink side note: Coke is damn expensive down here. Your typical 12-oz Coke, which is actually 330 mL, costs the equivalent of $1.50US. Ouch. Fortunately, there is no Pepsi here. The Kiwis have good taste. And, get this: no 2-Litre bottles that I’ve seen yet. 1.5L is the largest you can get. Still, I have to shake the soft drink habit before it breaks my wallet.

We load up our rental vans and kick off the 45-minute drive to the rafting headquarters. Nothing is physically close to anything around here. Once we get there, we perform the pre-game ritual of slopping on sunscreen, changing into bathing suits, and unloading valuables from pockets. The adventurous members of the group, which is most of us except for some pansy girls, opt for the Black Abyss tour, which we’re not quite sure what is involved but sounds cool and extreme. For $160NZ, it better be cool. They said it’d last a few hours so I figure I’d get my money’s worth.

They divide us up into groups of 8 and I end up in the second group. We kill time by playing some pool and I shoot off some random pictures. Pool down here is interesting, because the balls are much smaller and the tables bigger. I think it’s Snooker and not Billiards, but I’m not sure. Since there are still 15 balls on the table, we play it like Billiards.

THE GUIDES: Our group is finally called and we meet our tour guides. There’s a guy and a girl. I can’t remember their names but for simplicity we’ll call them Chris and Emily. Emily is the first to greet us. She looks like a typical Kiwi girl, not very attractive but witty, energetic, and fit. She’s carrying a cordless drill, revving it aimlessly while giving us the intro spiel. I can’t help but wonder if we’re going to be helping fix the cave on our expedition. Chris bounces up a minute later and the two jibe at each other for a bit. It’s obvious they worked together before. When we ask them how long they’ve been doing this, they answer “This is my first day!” like every other tour guide on the planet does to be funny. I let it slide, but I’ll be expecting better jokes from now on.

Chris's accent and mannerisms remind me of an uglier Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter. He seems to have a reckless appetite for fun, but enough confidence so that we’re not too scared. His Kiwi accent is fun to listen to, and his jokes are a bit funnier than Emily’s.

SUIT UP: The dynamic duo leads us down to a converted storage container that stores wetsuits. I knew we would be getting wet, but I wasn’t expecting a wetsuit. Having never worn a wetsuit before, I am intrigued. We spend a few minutes guessing sizes and selecting equipment. After 15 more minutes struggling, tugging, pulling, zipping, and adjustments, we’re transformed from Atlanta city boys and girls to grade-A divers armed with rappelling gear and helmets. I knew we would be doing some climbing and whatnot, but I definitely wasn’t expecting this.

The wet suits feel funny, since they hug every part of your skin. They work by holding a thin layer of water against your body, and using that as insulation against the colder water around you. Apparently, the water in the caves that we’re about to frolic in is a balmy 50 degrees F. Oof.

Emily cracks a joke about making sure everything fits right so “your love spuds” don’t get in a jam. I take her advice seriously, just in case. The helmets we put on are pretty nice; they have these cool little LED headlamps in them. Little did I know how much we would need them.

We’re bussed over to the obscure cave entrance which is a few minutes away from the suit-up facility. The cave itself is partially hidden behind some bushes, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you wouldn’t see it. There is a sign across a path saying “Caution: No Entry,” behind it which leads into darkness. Cool.

Abseiling, also known as rappelling, is doing a controlled descent down a rope using some specialized hardware around a climbing harness. We’re taught how to do this without killing ourselves. Chris tells us if we get in a bind to scream so they know we’re in trouble. Hmm. Once we get the hang of the technique, which boils down to tension the rope to stop, and let go to descend, we waddle over to the entrance and begin the descent.

DESCENT: There is a platform which goes about 10 feet into the brush and abruptly ends directly over a huge black hole of which you can’t see the bottom. There is a rope dangling down by the end of the platform. Chris clicks onto the rope and zooms to the bottom, making the descent look easy and to belay the rest of us in case we screw up. I’m second to last to go, but since I don’t hear any screams or loud thuds echoing up from the hole, I assume the descent isn’t terrifying and I look forward to it.

Emily clicks me onto the rope, double checks my harness, and sends me on my way. The descent is surprisingly slow, since the weight of the long rope (a good 30 meters or so) adds a good amount of tension to the braking device. I pretend I’m a movie star for a bit and do the hop off the side of the wall number, but I remember Emily telling us that might hurt our back so I don’t do it for long. The initial descent goes through a quite narrow hole that I just fit through without scraping on by. I don’t consider myself extremely claustrophobic, but once I was surrounded in a tunnel of rock hanging by a rope, I was getting a little uneasy.

A few more feet down, and I plunge into darkness. My headlamp is the only thing illuminating anything, but I’m still too high to see the bottom. Once I get past the initial narrow opening, the cave widens and I’m descending down a huge rock face. I relax again and continue down and make it to the bottom shortly after.

GLOWWORMS: Once I get down and unhooked, I make my way over to the group who is waiting. They tell me to turn off my headlamp and look up. In complete darkness, the ceiling of the cave is dotted in little points of bluish-green light. This cave is populated by glowworms, which are actually a type of fly as Chris will later explain. They are quite pretty, and as my eyes adjust I can see more of them. There are literally thousands in the small part we’re in, and we’re sure to see more as we go along.

ZIPPPPPP: We regroup and work our way to the next part of the cave. Chris and Emily shrug off questions as to what’s going on next. We get to another part of the cave and Chris drags Melissa, the only girl in our group, to the front. He takes her harness, clips it onto something, and tells us to turn off our lights. Then, he shoves her off the side of the platform we’re standing on, and it turns out to be a zipline running down into the pitch black darkness of the cave. Melissa’s screams bounce around and become progressively more faint until she hits the bottom of the zipline.

Going down a zipline is one thing, going down a zipline in absolute darkness and not knowing when you’re going to hit is another. It was exhilarating, and I couldn’t help but giggle a little (after “woooooooooo!”ing all the way down) as I hit the bottom. They unhook me and the rest of the group zips in one by one.

This part of the cave is much larger, and there are many more glowworms. They almost look like a blue-green starry night, except that we’re in a cave. I notice a pile of inner tubes sitting in the corner of the cave, I hear a riving running in the background, and I figure out where our wetsuits are going to come into play.

TUBIN': We each grab a tube, make our way over to the edge of a rock, and look down the 8-foot drop to the water below. One by one, we jump in, butt-first, and with a loud slap hit the cold water. When I go, I nearly flip over from rotating too much, but survive. The cold water is like a slap in the face, and stings for a few minutes until my body heat warms up the insulating layer in the wetsuit.

We paddle a few minutes up the underground river, and find some gunk on the walls of the cave that doubles as face paint. We all put some on, and as a result we look like some weird combination of miners and divers sitting butt-first in inner tubes.

We continue upstream for a while, where Chris explains the nature of the glowworm. To make a long story short, the glowworms are the larvae of flies that eat stuff that gets stuck in their snot, their shit glows, and they turn into flying gonads with only two days to live when they become flies. Fascinating.

We form a chain and float down the river while looking up at the top of the cave. By this point I’m fairly warm despite the 50 degree water thanks to the wetsuit. The glowworms are beautiful and the 5-10 minute float is very peaceful.

At this point, we ditch the inner tubes and begin the cave exploration part of the journey. This was the most fun part by far. We float down the river for a bit in just our wetsuits. The buoyancy of the wetsuit helps quite a bit with this. We have to keep our feet down so our butts don’t smack against the random rocks at the bottom of the shallow river.

EXPLORING: The rest of the trip consists of spelunking throughout the cave, gradually making our way to the top. We follow the river most of the time, at points climbing up underground water falls which looked flat out impossible to do. With some egging on from Chris and Emily, however, they proved to be manageable, and by the time I complete each one (There were three), I feel quite accomplished. I was first up for one of them, which is always scary in itself. At one point, we have to navigate under a rock face that is only inches above the water line, leaving just enough room for your head to stick up while crawling through on your belly. Some of the guys in the group don't like this at all.

At the final waterfall, Chris tells me to turn off my headlamp once I get to the top of the waterfall and try to feel my way out of the cave by following the stream. While not all that difficult, fumbling around in a completely dark cave proved to be quite eerie and I will admit I was a bit scared. Once I caught a glimpse of sunlight though, I knew we had reached the end and it was like crossing the finish line of a long race.

Part of me wanted to do it again right away, but I was pretty sore and tired from the whole ordeal and I was relieved when they provided us with hot showers and soup afterwards. I wish I could have taken pictures down there, but it was too dark for an underwater disposable (as Jeff found out first hand) and too hazardous for my precious digital camera.

The total experience was incredible and it really gave me a new perspective on extreme sports.
I am starting to understand why New Zealand is the extreme sports capital of the world.

When we get back, everyone's pretty worn out, but we hit up the bars for a little bit for good measure. Nothing too exciting to note from that, except the house beer at the Pig and Whistle sucks.

Tomorrow: Rafting!
--P

Day 9: Journey to Rotorua

Day 9: Friday, Jan 7, 2005

Journey to Rotorua.

• Sunburn status: Finally starting to clear up. Gone from "Tomato" to "Peeling Grapefruit". Still applying sunscreen religiously.
• Breakfast: Skipped.
• Class: Fell asleep a few times, got a nice dirty look for a wise-crack about New Zealand currency.
• Lunch: Extremely average.

Last night was pretty rough, so I woke up as late as possible. I’m starting to fall into my habit of showing up for class at about five minutes into lecture. Since there seems to be no appreciable tardy policy, this will probably continue. We talked John, our Biogeography teacher, into rescheduling class today so we could get an earlier start on the trip. We are fortunate to have a professor who understands our goals in this program and is willing to work with us.

TRIP BACKGROUND: Ryan, one of the bored co-ops prior to becoming a world traveler, decides we need to take a trip up to Rotorua, a city about 6 hours north of Wellington. The objective: Go white water rafting and/or sledging. Rotorua feels like Chattanooga in a way. With 42 people from Georgia Tech here, about 38 of us sign up to go. That’s a pretty impressive attendance ratio.

For the curious, sledging is an interesting activity which falls under the class of sports that people probably invented while drunk. This places it alongside sports such as snowmobile racing, curling, and jai-alai. The idea is that you take a boogie board, strap on some fins and a helmet, and take on the rapids solo. As you can imagine, it’s incredibly dangerous and therefore fun. People are stoked because we heard there’s one part of the river with a 23-foot waterfall. Check back for pictures for a better idea of how this works.

LOGISTICS: To get to Rotorua, we decided rental vehicles would be the cheapest and most convenient form of transportation. We booked four Toyota mini buses, which hold 11 people each. The vehicles resembled stretched out minivans. Like most of the vehicles in the country, you can tell these are designed with fuel economy in mind. Translation: they had tiny engines. The big hurdle for us is the driving on the left side of the road thing. Being a member of the minority that knows how to drive stick and is over 21, I am volunteered to be a secondary driver.

Driving these vans, on the left side of the road is quite an experience. First, the driver’s seat is located on the right side of the vehicle. Keeping this bulky box centered on the road is a challenge, because you’re used to doing it from the left side of the van. I note the other drivers in our group are having similar problems—all of the vans are hugging the left shoulder.

The controls of the vehicle are also different; the stick shift is still in the middle, so you shift with your left hand, and the turn signal is on the right side instead of left. We speculated this could be a coordination issue, but after a few minutes of driving it felt natural again. Fortunately, the pedals were in the “correct” order, as that would have led to a mechanical-bull-like ride.

ZOOM ZOOM: We Americans take our interstate system for granted. There is no parallel down here. When we leave town, we do drive for a stretch on a 6-lane “motorway”, but it quickly whittles down to a 2-lane country road with a speed limit of 100km/hr (~62mph). There is no parallel to our gargantuan 18-lane arteries that will drop you wherever you want at a leisurely 70mph, hills and small towns be damned. New Zealand roads fit neatly into the country-side, as if they are a part of it, hugging unobtrusively around mountains and serving as the backbone for small towns. If you’ve ever driven down US 1 in a rural area, this is what your typical NZ road is like.

TOWNIES: NZ towns seem to follow a formula which I pick up on after we pass through a number of them. First, the speed limit drops to 80 km/hr. Then, there is a “No Engine Braking” sign (for large trucks, so they don’t wake up everyone). Finally, a series of shops, strip-mall style, cling to the road for about half a kilometer or so. In the dead center of town, there is always a roundabout, then next thing you know, you’re back on the main road.

ROUNDY: There aren’t too many stoplights along the road, but they had something worse: roundabouts. If you’ve seen the Simpsons, you know the danger of roundabouts. If there is any significant amount of traffic, you could end up in one for days on end trying to get out. Fortunately for us, the ones we encounter are fairly empty and we proceed unhindered. They are also handy for performing “Michigan-Left” type maneuvers, where you want to turn to the far lane (Left-turn in the US, Right-turn here), but it’s too crowded, so you make the easy turn, hit the roundabout, and come back the other direction.

EARNHARDT: I finally get my chance to drive about halfway through the 8 hour trip. After sitting through an hour of traffic, aimlessly chatting with the other riders, and shooting off a few hundred photos, there’s really nothing else to do. Our van, in terms of occupants, wasn’t the ideal van for a new driver to be learning the ropes. First, imagine riding with your mom: “Slow down! You’re not in the lane! Fasten your belt! What are you doing?! Look out for that car!” Now, multiply your mom by six, and you have somewhat of an idea of how my ride went. While one backseat driver is rough, when you have 1 passenger seat, two middle row, and three backseat drivers teaming up on you, things can get aggravating.

Needless to say, I had no choice but to egg them on. Unfortunatey, the van lacked any significant power, so the next best opportunity was to take turns at high speeds. Fortunately for me, we had just entered a nice winding stretch of road with speed limits of 20-30 km/hr in spots, so I had some fun with it. Lisa casually comments a few times that I’m scaring her, which, coming from someone who drives like Dale Earnhardt on Atlanta roads like Ponce De Leon, is a compliment.

It’s hard to speed in New Zealand. According to the locals, they set up automatic speed trap cameras that you can’t see, so speeding is never a good idea. Granted, that’s provided you can even get a loaded van up past 100km/hr, which turns out to be quite a challenge. Besides a traffic jam at the beginning of the trip, we make decent time and arrive that night in Rotorua.

HOSTEL: This brings us to one of the more interesting parts of the trip, the Hostel. I’ve never stayed in a hostel before, so this would definitely be a new experience for me. Hostels are common in nearly every country but the US, so anyone’s who traveled abroad before is probably familiar with them. For the uninitiated, a Hostel is basically a cheap-ass motel that saves money by lumping you into rooms with other people, sometimes random.

The hostel we stay in is called “Cactus Jack’s” and is themed quite well. If you look in my pictures section, you’ll see some interesting photos. The place has an air of being well-planned out, meticulously cared for, but aging and shabby at the same time. It feels like a converted house in some places, and like a low-budget theme park in others. One part of the hostel has a string of rooms filling stereotypical western motifs. One of the guys stayed in a room done up like a jail house, and the bathroom on that hall was labeled “The Shit House”.

The hostel caters to backpackers and college students like ourselves, so we meet some interesting characters. The owners ask us to stay quiet after 10PM, so we try to respect that. A handful of people want to go out, the rest are exhausted from the trip and want to get an early start tomorrow and go to sleep. Having slept a bit in the van, I go check out one of the bars near the hostel, but am disappointed with the beer and the people there and head back.

IN THE NAVY: When I get back to the hostel, I chat with a handful of other people from our trip sitting in a commons room. After a few minutes, one of the hostel caretakers wanders in, a diminutive but tough-looking Kiwi in his 40’s or 50’s. A veteran of New Zealand’s Navy, he lives up the part by cursing like a sailor, using “fuck” as an adjective, noun, verb, and punctuation. He chats us up for a bit, “Why the fuck aren’t you guys out on the town right now?” and we end up in a long conversation with him about New Zealand politics and world events and more.

We learned a lot of interesting things from the season Kiwi. New Zealand’s Navy has about 12 boats in it. The New Zealand dollar used to be worth way more than the American dollar. Nuclear ships, including American ones, were recently banned from docking here. The Kiwi is obviously agitated about this, as American sailors dumped tons of money into the local economies when they landed. Like most Kiwis I’ve met so far, he’s not a huge Bush fan, making fellatory comments about Tony Blair and Bush, and sodomistic ones about the Australian prime minister.

We eventually retire for the night, ready to get up early for our adventures tomorrow. The room sleeps 8, but fortunately we’re all exhausted and fall asleep quickly. Two of the guys are being cheap and don’t want to pay for a room, so they sleep in the van. If we were by a river, the scene would have been perfect.

--P

Day 8: Amanda’s B-day outing

Day 8: Thursday, Jan 6, 2005

• Sunburn status: Face peeling, with a chance of arm skin peelage later in the week.
• Breakfast: Skipped.
• Class: Boring
• Lunch: Adequate.

One of the neat parts about this trip is that quite a few people have birthdays and provide the perfect excuse to hit up the town. Our test subject is Amanda, with her 22^nd birthday kicking off what looks like will be a ritual for the rest of the trip. Some of the details were rocky, as hers was the first, but I think we’ll get the routine hammered out and we’ll be able to throw a birthday bash like seasoned wedding planners by the time we get to Australia (or “Ozzie” as the Kiwis call it).

The formula is deceptively simple. Step 1: Dinner. Step 2: Bar hopping. Step 3: Plan next birthday. Step 1 is the hardest part, because the group has a hard time gelling into a definite number. Running around halls and asking people if they want to go yields a decent estimate, but by the time we go to leave, more people have jumped on board and some have left. We have become accustomed to this—if a trip is planned, and it looks neat, the bandwagon effect takes hold and next thing you know you have 35 groupies tagging along. I take pride in being one of those groupies fairly frequently.

Once you factor in the size of the group, excessively small restaurants are ruled out, and the very nature of college students eliminates any high class place. For a birthday, though, you don’t want to treat someone to McDonalds, so as you can imagine finding a good place to eat suddenly becomes much more difficult.

FOOD: We selected a Malaysian restaurant; someone recalled hearing good things about Malaysian food. Erik and I go early to scout out the other places, but we decide to give this place a go. The name of the place escapes me, but the food was fantastic. Service was pretty rough, a side-effect of the no-tipping nature of the country I’m sure, but once everything comes we’re stuffed and satisfied. I ordered a lamb curry dish on the logic that we’re practically tripping over the things here, so they must taste good. I was not disappointed.

2 bottles of wine, 3 appetizers, 8 beers, 12 entrees, and 67 snapshots later, we conclude dinner and make our way to meet up with the rest of the group to indulge in the American ritual of getting your chosen victim (in this case Amanda) completely trashed. We are partially successful, and we all have a good time. Some of the guys are sad that the restaurant took a while and we missed happy hour, but we get over it.

CALL ON ME: The first bar we go to we have been frequenting for a few days now. Compared to the typical college bar, this place is pretty nice, with plasma screens showing music videos and a good ambiance. It is completely dead in there until we show up. There are about 30-40 of us there, and pretty much dominate the place. I can see why people think Americans are rude, loud, and obnoxious, because we are doing just that. But it doesn’t matter, because we’re the ones having fun. We dilly-dally around. I remembered a music video that Jeff is quite fond of and go to request it at the bar. If you’ve seen “Call on Me” by Eric Prydz, you will know why. To sum it up, it’s a bunch of girls doing aerobics in tight outfits in quite a, uh, non-traditional manner. The looks on the girls faces in our group—a mixture of disgust and shock—is priceless, and we all have a good laugh.

We check out another club down the street, which is quite a classy place. Why they bother carding people who are obviously over 18 is beyond me, but they do anyway. This place is nicely decorated and has a great atmosphere, complete with a multi-colored dance floor. I know our group likes hip hop, so I go request some from the DJ, figuring that with all the other American influences here, hip hop made it over on the boat. He gives me a funny look at all of the songs I asked for then promises me he’ll work something in. He eventually plays some old skool stuff, which we’re content with.

For some reason, this country is completely obsessed with “California Luv” by Tupac. I have no idea why. Some of the girls in our group flock over to me. I’m happy until I realize I’m being used to escape some creepy Kiwi guy that was hitting on them. You take what you can get here.

The night concludes with our now traditional taxi ride back up the hill, and me convincing Amanda that “She’s a trooper”.

--P

Day 7: A night inside.

Day 7: 01-05-2005 A night inside.

This damn sunburn is starting to peel. I look like an onion. I leave a trail of dead skin wherever i walk. Breakfast sucks. Fortunately, these are the worst parts of my day and everything gets better.

Nothing eventful happens in class, except the feeling of impending doom that hangs in the air of Economics class. This teacher hasn’t taught study abroad before, and she’s not about to go easy on us. Damn. Geography continues to be fascinating. Problem is, whenever he turns off the light to show a slide, I pass out. Gotta look into that.

INTERNET: You don’t know how good you have it back in the states. The internet at this university is awful. The first few days, it was so slow I was contemplating just paying for a dialup account so I had something that worked. Later, it sped up, but I found out they charge us $.15 a megabyte! I’ll be burned through that in a matter of minutes if I don’t keep an eye on myself. I wonder if they’re loading up data on a ship and driving it back to the states. It also cuts out every hour or so for no reason at all. I am going through withdrawal.

Needless to say, Internet Cafés here are pretty popular and they’re found on nearly every block. I found a good cheap one which gives me an opportunity to upload pictures (with unlimited data transfer), and take care of other bandwidth intensive tasks. Jeff, Elisha, and I run down to take care of some pictures and e-mail after class.

After the café, Jeff, Elisha, Dan, and I decide to grab a bite to eat at a nearby Kebob place, aptly named “Abra-Kebob-bra”. I love the name, as it makes use of three great words: “Kebob”, “Abracadabra”, and “Bra”. Fortunately, the food reflects the name. Homemade bread, fresh lamb, and yummy hummus. Delicious. I opt for their fettucine this time, and I’m blown away. We run into a group of girls from class and eat dinner with them. Good times.

DOWNTOWN: Downtown Wellington is a great city. The city feels proportional to a small city, such as Savannah or Macon. It’s quite hilly in parts. Everything is modern, with LED crosswalk signs and well marked roads and signposts. It seems to be pedestrian oriented in spots, with some roads closed to pedestrians only. The city is obviously trying to improve its image as well, sporting a snappy slogan “Absolutey, Positively, Wellington”, but the style of the logo looks like the “PARENTAL ADVISORY” label on explicit CDs. My first reaction is that we accidentally wandered into Amsterdam, with foul language and hookers on every corner, but I think they just have an American marketing guy playing a joke on them.

The city is situated on the shoreline, with parts of it extending onto a little peninsula that protects a nice-sized bay from the ocean. The rest of the city winds up into the hills, which at points has the feel of San Francisco. The combination of waterfront and hills makes for a great day of walking around. The house we’re staying at, Weir House, is located at the University of Victoria, Kelburn Campus. Unfortunately for us, it is located on the side of a huge hill, which makes it really easy to go downtown, but really hard to come back. Apparently, the locals thought the same, so they built a cable car right by our dorm which goes up and down the hill.

CABLE CAR: This cable car is exactly what I have been planning to install on the Bobby Dodd hill for years (any Georgia Tech student who was a freshmen on east campus will know what I’m talking about). It’s a neat little system which consists of a single track, split in the middle, and two cars that act as counterweights for each other as they go up and down the track. In the middle of the track, there’s a split so the cars can pass each other. Ingenious. The whole setup is about 50-60 years old it seems, but it’s been updated. Rides cost $0.75 NZ a pop at the student rate, and it sure beats trudging up the 186 stairs that are on the walkway.

CROSSING THE STREET: The cross walk signals here are interesting. Every intersection has a button you can push to activate the signal. Once you push it, it starts beeping as feedback to let you know it’s trying to get you across the road. Very clever. Once the signal changes, there’s an artificial whistle which blows to tell you it’s safe to cross. The signal also makes this little go noise which sounds like a ray gun, and starts beeping really fast to let you know the signal is still green. I suspect the noises are there to simulate a policeman blowing his whistle, and also to help blind people find their way across the intersections. It scared the shit out of me the first few times, but I’ve gotten used to it and it still amuses me.

BUSES: Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that the city is wired for electric buses, but there are none in sight. It appears the city has gone BACK to diesels and gotten rid of the electrics. I need to find out why this is. On the same token, the bus drivers here are absolutely insane. Not only are there a lot more buses than in Atlanta, but they drive top speed down tiny roads. Jeff dodged a few the other day due to looking the wrong way crossing the road.

PIZZA: Anyway, that night, we decide to stay in and just hang out. I enjoy the opportunity to get to know some other people on the trip better, and a few beers help that out. The pictures tell most of the story, but I’ll just say that we like Scrumpy. A lot. At some point, we order some Dominos pizza. One of the guys haggles with them to get them to deliver to us, as apparently we are pretty far away. Like they had a tip coming anyway! Hah!

Another aside:

PORTIONS: It’s true, we Americans are fatasses. We ordered large pizzas from Dominos, and here they are only 12-14” pies, or the size of the average medium. At McDonalds and Burger King, the extra-large drinks are 16oz, or the same size as a small drink in America. At the gas stations, there is nothing that is even remotely close to a Big Gulp 64-Oz Corn-syrup-loaded Insulin Bomb.

Anyway, back to pizza. The idea of tomato sauce down here is different. I thought the pizza would taste the same as the states, but it is actually quite different. Besides the miniscule portion size, the toppings are significantly different, and the tomato sauce is much sweeter. The cheese tastes slightly different, but I can’t figure out how. Maybe it’s made from sheep milk or something. The crust is also different, but in a better way. I think the overall pizza is a higher quality than a typical dominos pizza. I noticed a flyer from a place called “Hells Kitchen”, which sounds like a tasty meal. The lack of a religious right down here is extremely relieving.

Cheers and Beers,
--P

Another update...

So it's been officially a week since I've gotten into New Zealand, if you factor in the time shift. Tons of stuff has been going on, and I haven't had time to write it all down yet, but the gory details will come soon.

What I can offer is more pictures. A lot more.

Click here, and check frequently for updates!

As they say here,
Cheers and beers,
--P

Pictures!

Greetings all, pictures will always be posted here.
I have pictures from my plane trip out, day 1,
and pictures from our expedition to Auckland, day 2. I'll post some narrative later.

Gotta run.

Day 6: The Great Seal Hunt

Day 6: Tuesday 01-04-2005 Finding Seals

BREAKFAST: I woke up again early this morning and beat my alarm clock. For me, this is revolutionary. I feel like a new man. Must be the air. Something tells me this won’t continue, however. I wander downstairs and have a mediocre breakfast. The “chef” here, if you’d call him that, doesn’t really try too hard – eggs again, with what appears to be leftovers from yesterday mixed in.

VEGGIE JAM: I’ll take a moment to elaborate on this Remolade stuff they love down here. It’s some sort of vegetable jam that they spread on everything. They use it like we use peanut butter or jam. We proceed to entertain ourselves by betting each other to eat it and laughing as one girl twists her face like she just ate a lemon. After several looks of disgust, I decide I won’t have any better luck and I put off trying the stuff.

Someone comments on my sunburn. Sleep was troublesome again; I hate sleeping on my back. Now that it’s been two days since burn-day (henceforth known as B-Day), you can definitely separate the men from the boys when it comes to burns. I’m pretty burned, but Jeff gets the award for most with his fabulous impression of a tomato. A rumor is going around that someone got sun poisoning. Oof. The class still looks funny, when you see a row of burned faces in a line during lecture. We’re such tourists.

Classes are uneventful. Biogeography gets more interesting, and I start goofing off in Economics. I have a feeling my antics will land me in trouble at some point, but so far all I’ve gotten is some dirty looks from the teacher.

TO THE SEALS: Anyway, someone heard a rumor there’s a seal colony that we can go see and maybe get some photos of seals. Sounds interesting, so being in a bandwagon mood and not wanting to find anything else to do, I tag along. I load up my backpack with some water and granola bars, not knowing how far we’re going, or even bothering to ask.

We catch a bus down to the shoreline. It was an interesting ride, I meet a school teacher and group of kids going home from downtown. We chat about a variety of things. I find out some good places to eat, and I apologize for contributing to the hole in the ozone layer. One of the kids tells me not to move to New Zealand after I profess my love for it, she says it’s boring. Understandable, if you look at the available playgroup equipment. “Take a clothespin with you,” the kid tells me. I ask why, she responses “Because the seals stink!” and she makes a face. The teacher comforts us by reminding us we might be lucky if the wind’s blowing the right way.

We arrive at the coast and the view is amazing. Most Kiwis (New Zealanders) probably take it for granted, but being able to see out across the sea with beautiful green mountains and unspoiled oceans is quite refreshing. Across a river outlet, we can see houses perched in the middle of green hills – the kind of hills you want to roll down on a summer day. Jeff comments on how this is what he was wanting to see when he came to NZ. I can see now why the producers of Lord of the Rings picked this country to film in.

THE WALK: So, I finally ask Erik, who seems to know what’s going on, how far we have to talk to see the seals. He casually replies, oh, about 6 KM or so. For the metric impaired (we’re just starting to get used to the units), that’s almost 3.75 miles. Factor in the round trip we’ll be making, and these sneakers are gonna rack up 7 miles on the ol’ soles. When you consider that we’re also loaded with cameras and liable and stop at every pretty spot we see and take pictures (which will be a lot), this is going to take a while. At this point, it is about 4pm, and we have about 5 hours of sun left. So, without further ado, we head out.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the trip except that it’s long. I feel like we’re on a pilgrimage through the desert, except replace desert with beautiful scenery and we have seals for a destination. There are some unique features out here, like dried seaweed which looks like a dead animal at first glance. The rocks are red from high iron content, which make for good photos. New Zealand used to be located on a huge fault, which accounts for the mountains and rocky features of the island (if you could call it that). The path we are walking on can also be driven on, if you have an all-wheel drive vehicle. We are passed a few times by vehicles, and the girls start plotting ways to get rides from the next one that comes by. None of them go through on their ideas. One group of drunk scuba divers drives by waving and hollering out the window. We wave back.

I continue shooting pictures – the scenery provides some great opportunities for panoramic shots. Someone asks me how many I’ve taken, I think I’m up to 5-600 at this point, and it’s only been a few days since we’ve gotten here. They make fun of me, I reply that they can't have any pictures. They shut up.

WHAT SEALS? Fast forward two hours, and we get to the point where the seals SHOULD have been. Curses, foiled again. We see some old-timers in a rickety boat hanging out on the beach. One of the guys goes and asks them where the seals were. I’m standing a little ways away and can’t quite tell if they are laughing at us or with us. The guy returns to our group and informs us that, if there were any seals, they’d be back a few hundred meters. Darn.

We wander back a little ways and look for a good dinner spot. Most people had packed extra sandwiches, and I realize that I’ll have to make a meal of my granola bars. Oh well. Luke gets bored and climbs up one of the rock peaks. Dumbass. I take cue and climb up a shorter one that doesn’t look as dangerous. Dumbass. I snap some cool pictures and make my way down. We kick around for a few minutes more and start the long journey back. While walking, we notice a side trail that shoots straight up one of the large hills (borderline mountain). With no good reason, four of us take off up the hill to get a better view. It’s quite nice at the top, the rest of the group looks like little dots. Since the trail is sloped, we do an impromptu reenactment of Donkey Kong with Dan rolling rocks down the hill and myself jumping over them like Mario. Of course, no Donkey Kong reenactment is complete without an adequate soundtrack, provided by me and Dan.

Come 9PM or so, we finally reach the bus stop. Needless to say, we’re exhausted and starving at this point, and we begin our journey back to town. We stop at a good local chicken place and chow down. We hit up one of the local bars and have a few beers, then call it a night.

To wrap up the hike, I must say it was one of the most beautiful walks I have ever been on. It was also by far the longest. My feet were extremely tired, and I don’t know if I’ll ever walk that far again. I took over 300 pictures on the walk, and had some good conversations. The coast vaguely reminds me of the California cost in the northern part of the state, but I definitely like this better. Oddly enough, in a country full of sheep, we only saw one animal, and it was a goat. Hmm.

NEW ZEALAND BEER: I’ll take a minute to talk about NZ beer, should you ever find yourself in the area. First and foremost, the staple brands of the US are nowhere to be found. No Bud Light, Coors, Natty, or any of that crap. Thank goodness, this is one area where NZ has escaped US influence. The expensive imports are still around (Heineken, Newcastle, Corona), but they are usually out of our price range. Case in point: $18 NZ (about $13 US) for a 6-pack of Corona. No thanks.

So far, I really like Speight’s Gold and Dark Ales, Lion Brown, and Export Gold. There are a handful of others I can’t remember at the moment. The standard price of a beer at a bar here is $5 NZ for a pint (or ~$3.50US) and you aren’t expected to tip. So, needless to say, it is cheaper to drink here. I have yet to be disappointed with any beers.

SCRUMPY: For a staple drink, we’ve found something very interesting: Scrumpy’s Strong Cider. Aside from having a name that’s fun to conjugate (“Scrump-run anyone”, “That’s scrumptastic!” “Scrumptime!” etc.), it’s cheap and tastes pretty good. I think the locals are concerned with the quantities of this stuff we’re buying. I have a feeling nobody from around here actually drinks it.

Cheers and Beers,
--P

Day 5: First day of class.

Day 5: Monday: 1-3-05 Class. Boo.

TO HELL WITH UV: My sunburn really hurts. Oof. I couldn’t sleep on my side or stomach like I prefer. And I think I managed to burn my scalp. I definitely learned my lesson. Sunscreen will become part of the morning routine.

TO HELL WITH CLASS: We got to meet our professors today. First stop, Managerial Economics. I didn’t really want to take this class, but it’s the only one that fits into my schedule. The teacher seems pretty straightforward, armed with a nice list of credentials. The class is rather disappointed with her intent to take the class seriously, as none of us really traveled 10,000 miles to study economics seriously. Still, it seems like it will be useful in the long run, provided I can stay motivated and actually keep up with the work. I have a feeling that my status as “lame duck” student will impede my progress in this class.

We break for lunch, then go to our next class, Biogeography. The professor is a witty faculty member from the local university at which we’re studying. He starts off class, amused by the batch of sunburned faces sitting in his class, and points out that New Zealand has some of the highest levels of UV radiation in the world. It has to do with the proximity to the ozone hole over the South Pole. We are not very surprised to learn this. Apparently, you can burn in 10 minutes here. Or 6 hours, as we found out first hand.

This class seems very interesting, especially considering we’re going on a field trip to study some of the things we learn in class, including volcanoes and thermal pools Everyone’s excited.

DEM SHOES: After class, I wander downtown to go find a pair of sandals. I check out a few of the stores, find some sales, and finally settle on a pair of Neckermans, a sandal similar to Birkenstocks. At $80NZ, these are a steal ($60US), and are of comparable quality to $120US Birkenstocks. I am beginning to enjoy this conversion rate. I buy the sandals, walk around for a bit, and realize they’re too small for my feet. Fortunately, they swap them out for the next size, and they feel great.

INTERESTING NZ THINGS, PART 2:

NO SMOKING!: That’s right, no smoking in bars or restaurants here. Gone are the days of “Smoking or Non?” and having to wash your clothes immediately after a night on the town. I feel bad for the two people who smoke on our trip, but inside I’m happy.

DAYLIGHT: There is a whole lot of it here. The sun sets at 9:30PM, and rises around 6AM. That’s almost 18 hours of light a day. It’s great. I still don’t feel tired during the day, I suspect it’s some combination of the excitement of being in a new country, jet lag, and caffeine. I usually wake up before my alarm goes off, a first for me. I suspect this will wear off in a few days.

STICK SHIFT: Everyone and their mom drives stick shift here. Busses, taxis, trucks, cars, they’re all stick shift. I think the high oil prices ($1.11/liter ~ $4.50 a gallon) play into this, and perhaps high import prices for vehicles in general. Noting the hilly nature of Wellington, I suddenly get the urge to open a clutch repair shop.

WEATHER: It’s been rainy, clouy, and cool a good bit of the time here. The locals complain it about it commonly. It’s not hard to start a conversation down here, “You have a funny accent!” and it usually turns to the crappy weather at some point. According to our Geography professor, this is one of the effects of global warming. Counterintuitive, but I accept the explanation.

FOOD AND CULTURE: So far, I am rather disappointed with the New Zealand culture and food, in terms of uniqueness. It seems to borrow a lot from others, and hasn’t developed much into its own. Several factors probably play into this, including the relatively young age of the country as an industrialized nation, large colonial influences from the British, and the small population. The language borrows heavily from Australia and Britian, the food seems to be a mixture of British (fish and chips, meat pies), Indian (curry), Malaysian, and American (McDonalds), except lamb seems to be more readily available. Sheep outnumber humans 14:1 here, so this is no surprise.

Regardless, we still are in love with Kebobs and we are thrilled to find a nice variety of local restaurants and diners to dine at when we get tired of the dorm food. This afternoon, Kebob #3 falls victim to my stomach. These things are addictive.

LEFT AGAIN: I finally figured out why I was bumping into so many people in the city. Apparently you walk to the left side here as well. Figures. Now I know how to spot those damn tourists: simply look for the idiots walking on the right-hand side of the road. I feel like a local now.

HOLIDAY: In New Zealand, you don’t go on vacation, you’re “On Holiday”. From what we’re told, this city won’t really be inhabited again until the 5^th or so. Most of the local shops and restaurants are closed, leaving us to pick from chains and larger places. I start to get the feeling NZ is one of those semi-socialist countries.

TOILETS: Before I left for the Pacific, I made note of which way American toilets flushed, so I could test the age-old notion that Australian (and presumably New Zealand) toilets would be able to flush the other way. Unfortunately, at this time, I must say my results are inconclusive. The main reason is that they prefer a type of toilet here that flushes straight down. They all use a tank that’s always higher than the bowl itself, and most of them have two buttons on them, for a full flush and for a half flush. Very cool. The actual design of the toilet looks like it is very difficult to clog, which makes me think New Zealanders don’t like plunging toilets or their plumbers union isn’t very effective.

SUNK: Another things that really annoys is the New Zealand sink. Most of them have separate faucets for hot and cold water. I can’t figure out the logic behind this. To get warm water, you have to plug the sink and mix some water together to wash your face or something. I need to ask a local about this.

--P

Day 4 - Getting to know Wellington

Day 4 Sunday: 1-2-05 First real look at New Zealand

HI HO: This is our first full day in Wellington. We all wake up early, around 7AM local time, most of us on the earlier time schedule from the States. Breakfast is served. The food here at the dorm isn’t so great, but it gets the job done and makes a good conversation piece. So far, I’m coming up short in my quest to find NZ-specific cuisine. The closest we’ve gotten so far to local flavor is the numerous Kebob shops in the area, which are quite tasty.

After breakfast, an impromptu group of us goes downtown. We are staying at Weir House, a dorm of Victoria University that’s situated on the side of a hill. To get to it is rather annoying, but there’s a cable car that runs right by us that will drop you off right in town for $1 NZ. It’s quite interesting and reminds me of San Francisco. Part of it also reminds of a ski lift and I get a distant yearning for some crisp powder to carve up. I shake that off.

The hills and character of this city also add to the resemblance. While wandering downtown, someone in our group looks up, notices a mountain, and no one can think of a good reason why we shouldn’t climb it. Apparently there are busses that go to the top, but being a bunch of young restless (and reckless) college students, we go on foot.

Turns out, the mountain is called Victoria Mountain, and it is quite beautiful. We didn’t have a map, but using the logic of as long as we’re walking uphill, we’ll get to the top, we eventually get to the peak. We stop for food along the way, and hike up carrying various bits of sushi, French bread, sandwiches, wraps, grapes, and other goodies from the local New World, the NZ version of Kroger.

PEAK: The view from the top is amazing. You can see the entire city, the shoreline, and the bay. Wellington is situated kind of like San Fransisco, on a bay and also on the coast. NZ is composed of two islands, the North and Sound islands. The North island is the more populated one, probably because the south island gets pretty rough in the winters. From the summit, you can see NZ’s cricket stadium, a rugby field, tons of nice buildings, and much more. Someone finds the place we’re staying, which is when we realized we’ve covered quite a distance. I test out the panorama feature on the camera, and the results are quite pleasing.

BEACH: We descend the mountain on the other side and walk to NZ’s shoreline. I can’t recall being on a beach so close to a mountain before, but I imagine it is what Hawaii is like. The beach looks like artificial sand, but we can’t tell. The shoreline is very nice, lots of shops and people walking around, and best of all, not a lot of tourists. I was worried I had traveled 10,000 miles to end up at another Myrtle or Panama City Beach, but this is pretty sweet. The water in the bay is quite cold - we see a few people in the water wearing wetsuits, as well as some intrepid children who haven't learned what hyopthermia is yet.

When we get back, we realize we’re all really really sunburned. I think this is going to be one of the worst burns I’ve had.

That night, we start to get settled in, and I notice the refrigerator by our rooms isn’t working. On a whim, I swap it out with one downstairs, hoping nobody will notice. Some of the other guys take a hint from the swap and the next thing I know a ton of furniture has been rearranged to make things a bit more comfortable.

Exhuasted from the trip, we wander downstairs and watch Napolean Dynomite. This is the second time for me, and it gets funnier every time.

Off to bed with this wicked sunburn. I hope it doesn’t get worse.

Day 3 - Adventures to NZ, Part 2

Day 3: 1-1-05 Going to New Zealand, part 2. Auckland layover.
ARRIVAL: So we arrive in Auckland, New Zealand at 7AM in the morning. The first thing that struck me as odd was that it didn’t feel like 7AM, and the sun was completely out. The days in NZ are extremely long, the sun comes up at about 6-6:30AM, and doesn’t set until about 10PM. That’s right 18 hour days. Bonus time!

LAYOVER: We had a 6 hour layover to deal with. Somehow, me and a handful of others from the group got lucky and got our bags checked on the flight before the people stopped taking bags because the flight wasn’t for 6 hours. To kill the time, we decide to trek into downtown Auckland, a 25 minute ride from the airport. We took a bus, $22 in New Zealand cash.

I met an interesting bloke, Justin, who happens to be from Charlotte. Small world. Even weirder, his father built and owns Columbiana Grande, the theatre that is minutes from my house. He’s in some sort of mid-life crisis, between jobs, 31, and backpacking through NZ and Australia. I meet another guy on the same bus from LA who is just hanging out with random people. Those kind of trips must be luxury. I have a new life goal, and it's to be like these guys.

DOWNTOWN: We get downtown to Auckland, and the city is impressive. While not overly huge, in fact a smaller city, it has all the nice qualities of a good city: cleanliness, wide variety of shops, good scenery, etc. I am a little suspicious of the lack of bad neighborhoods we see – either the bus drivers are good at avoiding them, or in this quaint part of the world, they are few and far between. It’s the morning of New Years day, so needless to say the city is almost deserted, but we see a few random drunk people finishing their forays into the new year. Auckland has this great big space-needle-like tower, similar to the Stratosphere in Las Vegas, but not as tall nor as prone to take your money. We grab a ride to the top and snap some great photos around the perimeter. I think the tower only exists as a tourist attraction, but being a tourist I don’t mind.

SNAFU: At this point, my stomach twists itself into a firm sheepshank knot. I realize my carry-on bag has continued its journey on the bus without me. With our flight leaving in 3 hours, I seriously doubt I’ll see it again. Shoes, socks, and the majority of my underwear were in there, so I start making plans for washing my drawers in the sink every night and making my way around barefoot. I wonder if New Zealanders wander around barefoot like hobbits. After all, the movie was filmed there... Looking at the other half of the glass, I realize it will be one less thing to lug around, as I tell the other students when I recount the incident.

My strife takes a back seat when we spot a Kabob shop. For 9:30 AM on New Years day, this is indeed an unusual sight and our curiosity gets the better of us. We mostly order Lamb Kabobs, which consist of slabs of tender and deliciously fatty lamb piled on homemade bread so warm its hard to hold. They smother the whole deal with tasty hummus. I am in love. The things are amazing. This will not be the last kabob I eat, I decide. With the huge amount of sheep in NZ, it’s no surprise that Lamb is a staple meat here.

A NEW HOPE: The lost bag saga takes an interesting turn. As we get onto another bus to go back to the airport, I figure it wouldn’t hurt to ask about the estranged bag. The bus driver, a very kind native New Zealander, radios the other bus, and it turns out the driver had the sense to drop the bag off at the airport after he realizes it was left. I run and grab it, and quickly make my way to the flight and barely make it onto the plane. The security check guy tries to give me crap for my bag being too big, but with the plane boarding, there’s no time to check it. He reluctantly lets me go on, mumbling for me to “mind the bag” next time. I think he’s mad at me, but it doesn’t bother me. It’s really hard to take a mad Australian/New Zealander seriously, because their accents come off as quite funny when they’re agitated.

We land in Wellington, where will be staying for the next six weeks. We’re all excited at least on the inside. The exhaustion from traveling for over 30 hours is clearly taking its toll. Someone notices there is a giant statue of Gollum from Lord Of the Rings reaching for the ring on top of the airport terminal. I think NZ is proud of their movie (most of it was filmed here). At this point, my camera is really starting to prove its value; I’ve already taken over 100 photos.

The air quality contrast from Atlanta is simply amazing. Perhaps you can tell from the pictures -- the skies are crystal blue, the air crisp, and everything feels untainted. The only downside is the smog did a good job of blocking sunlight...

Interesting things about New Zealand:
As I observe interesting facets of New Zealand Culture and other tidbits, I'll throw them in at the bottom of my narratives. Enjoy. --P

MONEY: The exchange rate in New Zealand is quite favorable. $0.73 American gets you a shiny, slightly thicker and somewhat smaller in diameter NZ Dollar coin. NZ currency rocks. The smallest note is $5. The denominations are different sizes (for handling in the dark), and for security they have plastic windows in them which makes them virtually impossible to counterfeit. They are much more colorful and the texture is much different from the cloth bills we use. There are coins for $1 and $2, which are gold-colored. The silver coins are for cents. There is no NZ penny that I have seen yet, but it might just not be in heavy circulation. Either way, I don’t miss them.

TIPPING & TAX: You don’t tip here, unless you experience exceptional service. To make things even better, all sales tax is built into the price of the item. If a pair of shoes says $89.99, you will pay exactly $89.99 at the register for them. Brilliant.

For food and drinks, this works into almost a 50% discount. Basically, a meal here that is worth $15 NZ is the same amount of food and quality as a $15 US meal (Which actually costs you $20 for tax & tip), but in reality only costs you about $12 US after the conversion.

RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT: One thing we Americans take for granted is driving on the right hand side. NZ, like many countries colonized by the British, opts for the left-hand drive method. You would think this doesn’t really matter because we’re walking every where. However, when you look left, and start walking, and hear a bus honking at you as it swerves out of your way from the other side, you learn real quick which way traffic is coming from. Several people have had narrow misses already, and I suspect more are to come. So, while in America, you look left-right-left before going, here, you gotta look right-left-right, and then double check. NZ drivers tend to be jerks, according to the locals.

KIWI: A New Zealander calls himself/herself a "Kiwi", as in the endangered bird from the area. It rolls off your tounge much easier than "New Zealander". "Kiwi" is also what they call their dialect, an interesting modification of Australian/British dialects with a few catch phrases thrown in.They don't have any problem understanding American, as far as I can tell.

Kiwi Dictionary: Here are the interesting phrases/words I’ve seen so far:

• “Toilets” = Restrooms/bathrooms ("Where's the toilet?")
  
• “Give way” = Yield. Often seen on signs at intersections.
  
• “Do up” = Buckle or fasten. "Do up your seatbelt low and tight."
  
• “Brekkie” = Breakfast. "I could go for some brekkie right now"
  
• “Mozzie” = Mosquito.
  
• “Bugger” = I’m not quite sure on this one. Seen in the context of “No Buggery in the Hot Tub” but also in reference to annoying things. Possibly a universal word like “fuck”.
• “Cheers!” = the equivilant of good luck.
  
• “No Worries” = You’re welcome.
• "Aussie" = Used when referring to Australia. "Oh, you're going down to Aussie, eh?"
  
• More to come...