It is good to be back in New Zealand! It was way back in 2004 when Paul and I arrived to New Zealand for our iFSA-Butler Study Abroad semester. I cannot believe it has been just shy of seven years since I was last here. This country opened up so many doors for me!! I met my buddy Joe (after being arch-nemesis' for a week") who introduced me to many of my Boston friends who in turn introduced me to my San Francisco friends. What a crazy trip and how one experience can have such an influential effect on a specific path I've walked down for the past few years.
Initial impression thus far? Well there is no question that New Zealand is a beautiful country. This may sound sacrilege but it just barely edges out northern California on the beauty front. The sacrilege part is that I think I like northern California better. I never thought I'd say that though b/c in my head I have NZ on a pedestal from a younger time in my life. That may be a better way for me to look at what I'm experiencing since I've been here. Its a funny thing how your memory will build an experience up. This place is really beautiful but i'm realizing the great thing about my study abroad trip was the people I spent it with. The people are the glue that hold the puzzle together.
Thus far Paul and I have spent most of this trip in our camper-mini-van. The van is really beat-up. Its a 1998 Toyota Lucerne and it looks like a giant tampon advertisement. Paul and I bumped into some german guys in Sydney who had rented from the company "juicy rentals." They paint their vans purple and lime green and have this picture of a 1950's pin-up doll on the side. Needless to say we are screaming tourist right now. We were lucky when we got here b/c when we headed up to the bay of islands area the weather was perfect. We camped at MaiTai bay campground on our first night and stumbled upon as one fellow camper who had been camping there for fifteen years called it, "the number one best campsite in new zealand." Not a bad start. It was seriously out of a post-card and paul and I headed down to the beach to explore. Thankfully some kiwi's invited us to play a miniature version of bocce ball so we drank our beers and chatted with them for a while. They convinced us to head north to the second most northern part of New Zealand, the cape. We didn't want to spend the money on petrol to get up and back (3hrs) but decided that we'd like to be able to say we drove from the top of the north island to the bottom of the north island. And so we headed north. Of everything we've seen thus far in NZ it was the best.
After we hit the cape we came back down south through Auckland and over to Rotorua. The bummer is that it started raining on the way down and didn't stop raining until today. That was THREE long days of rain. Let me tell you how much it sucks when you're living in a mini-van and its pouring outside. This wasn't your average midwestern rain storm that blows through in an afternoon it was January rain from San Francisco where it just keeps coming and coming. Then you add the island effect winds and the whole van was shaking every ten or fifteen minutes. This kept waking Paul up during the night but I slept right through it.
Needless to say we lost a good chunk of the time we allotted for the north island to the rain. Rotorua was a wash, the national park was a wash and half of our day in Wellington was lost. We did the normal touristy things in Wellington by riding the cable car up to the top of the city, checking out the maritime museum and walking the main pier esplanade. We booked our ferry across the Cook Straight and were ready to get back to our roots in the south island where Paul and I studied.
The ferry was pretty uneventful but I cannot for the life of me understand how they make money on the crossing. The ship was cruise ship caliber but only 15 cars got on board and about another 15 trucks. It did cost paul and I about $200 to cross but that can't add up to the amount it costs for fuel and crew. Anyway, enough business analysis.
We're on the south island now and are headed down to Greymouth. I didn't get to see the pancake rocks the last time I was in NZ so we're hitting them up this afternoon. Then we'll hit a brewery tour / dinner and head south to find a campsite. We've already been stopped twice by sheep filling up the road and have watched sheep dogs do their work. Very impressive.
The itinerary takes us down the west coast and then up the central valley to Christ Church. It will be really cool to be back in our old city and see our old university. We have already lined up our favorite bars and restaurants we want to go back to. Since CHCH was hit hard by an earthquake in the past few months it will be interesting to see how they're recovering. Many store fronts fell down and a lot of the town was in wreckage.
Thats all for now.
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