Kia Ora from NZ!
Trip Start
Feb 15, 2004
1
30
34
Trip End
Dec 18, 2004
Nelson,
New Zealand
Wednesday, December 1, 2004
After a wonderful birthday celebration in Sydney which involved a Korean dinner, drinks, and cake with about 20 of my former students and uni mates, I packed up my room (boy have I acculumated a lot of crap!) and headed to Christchurch. I spent the past week travelling around with my 2 Japanese friends Eri and Nobuko. It was definitely an interesting experience (and a bit exhausting since I was constantly repeating myself and explaining things to them). I found out that Eri gets very very car sick when she threw up all over the TranzAlpine train we took from Christchurch to Greymouth. Then she proceded to vommit on the bus we took right afterwards from Greymouth to Fox Glacier! I'm fairly useless in those situations, other than yelling at the driver to open the door so she could discard her plastic bag o' puke. The next day it rained all day long and was very very cold (spring in NZ is like winter in Sydney!) and we couldn't even see the supposedly spectacular mountains. But there was a beautiful rainbow over the tiny town at the end of the day, and the next day was gorgeous! We hiked to the glacier at 6 AM and had the whole amazing place to ourselves. The day after that, we took a bus to Queenstown and this time Nobuko puked! We joked that it would be my turn to get sick on the bus ride back to Christchurch, but thankfully I was fine. What happened instead was that the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere and we were stuck for 3 hours waiting for a new bus to come rescue us! So we didn't get back to Christchurch til 1 AM the next morning, and Eri & Nobuko had to leave for the airport 4 hours later! To top it all off, we got to walk in on 2 people having sex in our room when we arrived at our hostel!
Currently, I'm in the independent phase of my trip - the solo journey. I'm going back around the South Island for the next 2 weeks on the Magic Bus (a kind of backpacker hop on-hop off tour), hitting the places we didn't get to last week. So far I've been to Kaikoura, on the east coast. It was beautiful and sunny there, though it got so windy it literally blew my hat off my head (thankfully I grabbed it). I walked along the coast and while I was sitting on a beach, this cute little boy came over to me and gave me a pretty shiny shell he had found (as he put it, "It's got all rainbow things inside!"). Then I headed to Nelson, where I am now. Today I went sea kayaking all morning and then hiked all afternoon in Abel Tasman National Park. I was very lucky - after a few windy days that involved capsized kayak rescues, the weather was perfect today! Since my kayak tour consisted of 3 couples and me, I got to ride a double with our cool and crazy guide Tazzie (an Aussie from guess where). We kayaked right in between all these rocks and inside a cave that Tazzie told me was inhabited by flesh-eating penguins. While we were in the dark narrow cave, he hopped out of our kayak to help the others maneover their way out. I pleaded with him not to leave me alone because all I could think of was this Baywatch episode I'd seen where they got trapped in a very similar cave. But thankfully we made it out alive, without David Hasselhoff's assistance. :)
One of the best things about travelling is the random encounters you have. So far my path has crossed with that of my Breck buddies Julie and Julie (who have been travelling here for 3 months now) TWICE! The first time, they hunted me down in Fox Glacier and we caught up in my hostel room (my enormous wonderful room that we ended up in due to a booking mistake and they didn't even charge us extra!). Then the bus I was on happened to stop on a road in Wanaka at the exact moment they were walking down it! We were able to hang out for about 20 minutes before I had to get back on the bus. Hopefully we'll meet up again.
That's all I have time for now, but I'll try to write again before I leave NZ. Tomorrow I'm treating myself to a wine tour and then it's off to Greymouth before I go back to the glaciers again (Franz Josef this time).
