pics from NZ

Paul and I on our way to the cape!

Yup thats the moon.

decent break

thank god for monteiths!

sunset!

New Zealand Update #1

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.

pics from Cairns

The BOOZE crew! Good work Dawn & Chris our livers thank you!

BUFFALO fish... no idea what they were but they were as big as I am! Maybe they should be called brown bear fish!?

Riding the E.A.C. dude!

Under-water cameras are KOOL!

Blue Star Fish. Yup. Thats. It.

Cairns

So following our impressive trip to Magnetic Island we boarded our greyhound bus and headed north one more time up to Cairns. Cairns is the mecca for great barrier reef trips and we arrived to a small town with one focus… get to the reef. Thankfully we had booked ourselves at the YHA Cairns and the place was significantly more magnificent than Maggie Island. This was our first YHA experience and we couldn't have been more thrilled. Clean rooms, a pool w/ COLD bubbling tub (genius), movie/game room, HUGE kitchen and the most important thing…. A/C! Again it was funny to see how the windows have no screens (even though there are billions of bugs in Oz) and that the windows were split. I don't really know how to describe this but they were tiered so you could open them, individual five inch high by twenty inch wide panes that opened and closed like a shutter. So thus it wasn't air tight but we ran that A/C like there was no tomorrow.

We were greeted at the Cairns bus station by Dawn and Chris who were eager to show us what they had leaned about the town. They were really nice and took into account the budget that Paul and I are on to bring us to the "night market." This market was pretty cheap and filled with asian food. Paul wasn't having it as it was friend and buffet style. (this became a running joke for the four of us that Paul can't live down). So we headed to the liquor store to pick up our customary case of beer for the night. We ended up at a backpacker friendly restaurant with good cheap food deals. Again our waiter was from the UK.

The next morning we headed out at 7am for our reef dive. Paul and I did one guided scuba trip and then snorkeled for the rest of the day. The boat included lunch, coffee and snacks but the dives were extra. On our Whitsundays trip one of the instructors jokingly said that the downfall of a vacation budget is begin scuba certified and I think he's right. You really want to go diving but it ends up adding up really quickly! Never the less diving the great barrier reef was one of my "must-do's" for the trip so I plopped down my visa and we were underwater.

The wildlife was really beautiful up near Cairns. Not that the whitsundays weren't impressive, they were but we saw so much more up in Ciarns. Sea turtles, sting rays, nemo's, sharks, hundreds of fish, a HUGE lobster, shrimp… the list goes on and on! Probably the most memorable experiences from this reef trip both come from when we were snorkeling in the afternoon. Paul and I joined a guided snorkel group and we ran into the largest and ugliest fish I've ever seen. A huge school of Buffalo Reef Trout (not exactly sure on the name but the Buffalo is definitely correct). Anyway these fish must have each weighed more than 200 lbs. They were almost as long as me and there must have been thirty of them together. Their heads are flat and look like a buffalo. The bigger the fish the more interested I was in the water. I'm not sure why but it was so impressive to see these beasts, we swam after them for a while and when the group of snorkelers closed in from most angles they fled under me! I must have been a foot from one of them!

The second memorable moment was when Paul and I broke off from the group and headed for a sandbar to chill for a while. On our way there we kept running into pockets of sting rays. I was leading b/c Paul had some blisters on his feet and was swimming without fins. I came upon a bull sting ray. IT. WAS. HUGE. I only had a moment to look at it before it rose from the sand and started to swim away. I popped my head above wanter and yelled to Paul to come over and check it out but before he got there the ray was gone. It must have been 5-7 feet wide and all it took was two flaps of its wings before it was gone. These Bull Sting Rays are pretty well known now because they're the ones that killed Steve Irwin. They're actually really harmless unless they feel trapped in and as the have heard time and time again that is what happened with Mr. Irwin. Everyone talks about that story here. I guess when they were filming the camera man and Steve were coming at the ray from opposite directions. Steve from behind the ray and as the ray was about to turn to swim away he spotted Steve. He put his barb up and stuck steve in the heart. Apparently (correct me if I'm wrong) Steve could have lived if he didn't pull the barb out of his heart. Moral of the story is if I get stuck in the heart by a bull ray I'll leave the barb in. No, actually the moral of the story is that this is a wild planet we're exploring and we need to be cautious but respect the wildlife we're observing.

I'm off my soapbox now.

So we were lucky b/c (not for them) Dawn and Chris' boat got cancelled due to not enough people booking on it so they booked onto ours. It was a great day as a group of four. That night we headed back to the package store to pick up yet another case of beer and hit the hot 'cold' tub. The four of us must have been in that tub for over five hours together drinking and talking. Chris and I had some great conversations about history that have been in my head ever since. He told me that Stalin didn't even tell his top commanders of the russian army that Hitler was dead. Or even that they had his body. It was amazing hearing about the end of WWII as Chris had just finished a book about the rush to Berlin at the close of the EU theater.

You can really make good friends quickly on a trip like this. You don't have anything keeping you from continuing to develop your friendship. There are no other strings pulling on your time so you just order another couple beers and keep chatting. This is how I feel about Dawn & Chris. We were lucky to have met them. I'd go ahead and assume we filled a need for each other pretty well. They had been traveling as a couple for three weeks when they met us and Paul and I had been together for three weeks as well. It was nice to have other people to converse with and get to know. I think Paul and I would both agree the week we spent with them was the best of the trip thus far.

The following morning we woke up a bit early to get breakfast with them one more time before they headed to the airport. It was bitter sweet as we said goodbye. Paul and I will meet back up with them in England when we get to Europe in July. We'll get to see their homes and hopefully be able to travel to Ireland with them as well. Paul and I have also opened up our homes to them when we get back to the states so hopefully they'll take us up on a trip to the US in 2012.

Onto to NZ…

pics from maggie island

old wwII outpost on the island
beautiful bay! EXCEPT its FULL of STINGERS!!! NO SWIMMING!!

Paul showing his guns at the gun battery

seriously we were just walking along the track and someone wrote on in the gravel --> KOALA... we look up? and YES this little guy was having a bit of a sleepy (thats a nap in oz)

thank god we have the surf rescue in the jelly netted off beach!

Magnetic Island

What can I say about Magnetic "Maggie" Island? I have mixed feelings about the place. First off, we got swindled. So a "swindled" undercurrent was running through my brain most of the time I was on the island. When Paul and I decided to get a bit aggressive with our bookings in Australia we headed to a "backpackers booking agency" in Coogee beach called Base X Backpackers. We met Sarah who was very sweet and did a good job of helping us outline our itinerary. After all of Paul and my own back and forth about where to go, what to do, how much to spend, and on and on and on… (yes it can only be compared to being married) we FINALLY decided to pull the trigger on the before blogged about Whitsunday trip. Along the way we were swindled, YES SWINDLED into a nice three night stopover on Maggie Island off the coast of Townsville. Sarah "hooked" us up with three wonderful nights at Base X backpackers which included (yes this was the kicker that we fell for) one FREE dinner, one FREE breakfast, free snorkel hire and a free evening drink.

So what actually happened when we got there? First of all we're a bit thick b/c we didn't really do our own research to find out that this beautiful tropical island that looks so enticing for snorkeling, surfing and sunbathing happens to be unable to handle any of the above fun actives in the season we went. You see… at this time of the year it is 90+ degrees Fahrenheit with 87% + humidity. As many of you know my body is built as a grizzly bear ready for hibernation so this was a bit tough for me. But WAIT it gets better. The hostel we booked into is the only hostel on the island WITHOUT A/C!! Yup, imagine that as I'm sleeping in a pool of sweat my first night! THEN to make it worse the bugs are horrible and it is STINGER SEASON in the north so you can't even swim in the ocean! Dawn, Chris, Paul and I decided to do what any reasonable backpacker would do in this situation. IMPROVISE! (have you had enough caps lock yet?)

And thus we all put on our board shorts and walked 20 mins down the road to the local liqueur store. Upon arrival we spent about 15 minutes in the cooler section debating which beer to drink. This was part b/c we couldn't decided but mostly b/c we didn't want to get out of the huge refrigerator. We all came out of the refrigerator with big smiles on our face and rock hard nipples. (TMI but it was hilarious at the moment).

The guy at the counter suggested we go steal an esky which is what Brits call a cooler. We headed to the back of the supermarket and found the left over coolers from veggies being shipped from the main land. This was our saving grace as we filled it with ice ($5!! what a rip!) and beer ($50 for 24 bottle - SERIOUSLY!). Our luck continued as we walked past the only real restaurant near our hostel and it happened to be open that night. They served pizza or pasta so choice was limited and the BYOB fee was $3 per person! Can you see how we're getting screwed at every angle on this excursion?

Never-the-less we forged on and split four large pizzas over the next six hours and each drank a six-pack. It was one of the most fun, sweaty, humid and hilarious nights I've had in a long time. We were so keen on our esky that I decided to carry it all the way back to the hostel on the side of the road. What a sight!

The second day we rented a car. She was a 4x4. Our "Suzuiki Jimmy" 4x4 was our escape to go explore the island as a foursome. Thankfully this was the part of the trip where things got a bit better. We had A/C in the car and the weather broke slightly, down to about 85 degrees. That day we headed around the island from beach to beach and did some walking to explore.

That night we went back for our "free dinner" and of course found it to be a burger. The free drink was "jungle juice." Of course I have a lot of past experiences with vats of jungle juice so I passed my free drink onto Dawn who most humbly accepted. The snorkel hire was for about four hours so we skipped it all together and upon sleeping in pure humidity for one more night we all promptly declared the next morning we needed to get off the island ASAP. That morning we did a hike up to an old WWII look-out post and along the way saw two koalas. The two koalas were definitely a highlight for us even if I did sweat out about two gallons of beer/water mixture on the hike.

Its interesting to view WWII from Australias vantage point. After supporting mother england (even though they were independent nations) through WWI the ANZAC (Australia & NZ forces) all went to fight for her again in WWII. The forces ended up fighting in Gallipoli. It was really fun discussing this history with Chris who is from the UK. Each country really does have its own way of painting a war and its outcome. The NZ & Australians got their butts kicked but back home the message was that the Aussie and Kiwi troops had fought very gallantly and held their own.