Melbourne

Melbourne is the first city on this trip that I've found myself repeatedly saying, "I could live here! I could SERIOUSLY live here!" It is a good medium size city that is zig-zagged with trolly lines. It has a decent beach, an awesome china town and the victoria markets. We were suggested to check out the victoria markets up on arriving at the YHA and I couldn't have been more impressed. They are like many other markets around the world but they happen to be very authentic feeling and in a major metropolitan western city. Its a big outdoor marketspace smack dab in the middle of the city. We're talking the size of a state fair ground - yup think sandwich fairgrounds but EVERY WEEK!!! They had every kind of food you could ever want!! Indian, Vietnamese, Nepalese, French, Spanish, BBQ, Pizza, fresh squeezed lemonade, sangria, livestock, tourist trap crap… EVERYTHING a young man could possibly want. I of course opted for the indian food and dug deep into some butter chicken. It was as good as tandoori palace next to Uni x 10!! Paul hit up some european burrito looking things and we both plopped down to listen to the band playing.

The next day we walked around the city; hit china town and took a really nice free tour of the Victoria State Building. The state building was really interesting since I have some experience with working at the commonwealth of Massachusetts building and the Indiana State House. This building was built back in the mid 1800's and has seen three different governments!! THREE since its building! It had the commonwealth government from england, plus a stint as the new independent australian federal government and now the state of victoria government. It was really amazing how ornate the building was since it was built by knights of the templar?? The symbolism in the building was so amazing and every detail was taken to instill what I think of as "good governing vibes." Colors, symbols, statues, patterns - everything! Lots of acorns (I must look up what that means…)

That night paul and I set out on an epic quest to take on the Bogan Burger (pics on FB).

The following day was a well needed day of rest. That included sleeping. reading, watching a bit of TV and just walking around to take care of a few tasks (copies, printing travel docs, etc). We're still planning for our Western Australia tours and our Bali trip. We leave for Bali in 16 days! Woooo whooooo!!! Since it was the travel expo in Melbourne this past weekend Paul and I headed to the expo to see what deals they have for Thailand and Bali. It was strange to be back in a modern exposition center since I've spent so much time in them over the past four years with DuraSeal. I was strangely comfortable there… We chatted up a bunch of tour groups and in the end didn't make any decisions. It was good to gather more information of where to stay, what to do and how much to expect to pay. Always helpful information when you haven't been somewhere. Since it was also the Chinese new year we headed down to the festivities on the river to grab a bite on our way to the tomb of the unknown soldier.

The WWI and WWII memorial were really amazing in the gardens of Melbourne. This is the second war memorial we've been to in Australia and it was definitely the bigger one. Many people don't know that Australia is the ONLY country to go to every war we went to in the 1900's and 2000's. Yup they went to Korea and Vietnam too and YUP they're in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. Americans often look to the UK for their most true ally when in reality its the Aussies that have stuck by our side. Now to be honest it might be that they're a country in the pacific and have had a bit more at stake for Korea or Vietnam but none-the-less.

I've really been touched by their memorials to their fallen soldiers. I never really knew the pacific theater story as told by Australians. It isn't drastically different from the american side but it definitely has its own flavor. One thing I had no clue about was the fear Australia had during WWII from invasion by the Japanese. They were so close to the Japanese and subs were even spotted in Sydney Harbor! Also they had crazy POW action in south east asia. I had no idea how many Australia POWs there were until the American forces were able to end the war with the atomic bomb. American planes had to drop flyers in Japanese to all of the POW camps informing them the war had been over. The Australian soldiers coming out of the POW camps looked exactly like the Jews coming out of the gas camps in Europe. They were horribly mis-treated and malnutrition. Australians are very proud people and I really enjoy seeing their dedication to their military families. The interesting component to the Australian military is that it was tied to the Queen for so long so their insignia is still so brutally British. After finishing our tour of the WWI and WWII memorials Paul and I headed back to the YHA in Melbourne for one more night before we hopped our flight down to Tasmania.

Today we landed in Tasmania! One fun fact I learned today was if you flattened out all of the mountains in tasmania the land mass would be as large as all of Australia. To put that in perspective for the folks back home it would be as large as the USA! Paul and I have booked three day tours that depart from Hobart each day and return to hobart each day. Its nice to be back on a schedule with tours for a few days. We did however fit some time in today to hit up a wildlife sanctuary. This was high on my list as I hadn't see any Kangaroos yet and heard you could feed them at this sanctuary. The sanctuary takes in any hurt animals all over tasmania 24/7 and helps rehabilitate them and rerelease them into the wild. The tour was excellent with the lead animal worker taking us to see the famous Tasmania Devils. Back in the day the Tasmanian devil was all over Tassie and the mainland of Australia. Once their main source of food was destroyed by humans they started dwindling in population. They were thought to be wiped off the planet back in the 50's and 60's but came back strong in the 70's. Now they're going through another tough time as a cancerous virus keep spreading which causes tumors to grow on their faces and eventually keep them from having any eye-sight. Its a bit sad. Ultimately the facts I learned today were that they have the strongest jaws on the planet (five times the strength of an american pit-bull) but are not aggressive at all. They're actually total bottom feeders (looneytoons got it WAY wrong). They look like super mini-black bears and take the pickings of left over carcasses. The strong jaws are not for killing as they never attack they're for breaking down bones to help them digest them. We were able to pet a wombat, pet a Koala and feed a boat load of Kangaroos. I am not quite sure why but I seem to be obsessed with Kangaroos. I must have taken well over one hundred photos today of Kangaroos. They are so interesting to me since they are only native to Australia and its unique environment. Standing in the middle of a group of them today was a bit nerve-racking at first but worked out to be an amazing experience. They are quite loving and eat out of your hand like a horse would with a carrot. The lead animal care taker even told us to pet them on the neck and they'll start kicking like a dog. It worked too!! I have mixed feelings about interacting with animals in this way as it takes away from their natural instincts but in the end it felt good to be financially supporting a good animal rehab cause. The lead care-taker gets call phone calls at all hours of the night and actually responds to them to save hundreds of animals.

Thats all I have for now. I had Scallops tonight for dinner and was thankful to have good sea-food! I'll try to update after we get to Perth about the rest of my Tasmanian adventures.

South Island Recap…

I'm finally on my way out of New Zealand! Why, "finally?" Well because I feel like the way we organized our tour was a bit over zealous and I'm ready to move onto the next adventure. I guess that's one of the luxuries of a trip like this. As soon as you feel like you've been in one place too long or spent enough time in one place you're able to just move on. We bumped into a fellow backpacker along the way and she mentioned the only luxury you have from backpacking is the luxury of time. I thought that was pretty truthful.

Recap of what we did in the south island:

Marlborough Region - we were able to squeeze in a quick stop to the Cloudy Bay vineyard while we were at the top of the north island. We had to make our way down to the west coast to do a glacier hike but thankfully I was able to do a little wine tasting. This is definitely something foreign to Paul but something that feels more at "home" for me since I moved to Northern California. It was really strange to return to the northern vineyards of the south island after seven years of life between visits. When I was last here my idea of a good bottle of wine came from the discount racks at the local grocery store where the soon to be expired box wines had been taken out of the box and written in sharpie on the bladder what measly payment you had to shell out to get the worst hang over of your life. This is how I began my luxurious encounters with the fruit of the vine down under. I have vivid memories of our NZ Crew walking down to Pack n'Save to scour the discount racks. As a hilarious side note, today Paul and I had to walk to a Countdown grocery store to fill up on a few needed toiletries and while there I stumbled upon this discount rack. HILARIOUS to see that they're doing the same thing still… .50 individual cans of VB, Canterbury Draught and whatever else was soon to be expired. Joe, Paul and I used to fill up a shopping cart with these and completely thought we had the best deal going in town! AH to be 19 again.

Forgive me if I reminisce about being nineteen a bit here b/c I just revisited a country where I spent some of the best months of my college career. Once we hit the south island our van was full of, "remember when Joe did this… remember when you wore that trash-bag and tried to slip n'slide on the grass or remember PuPu springs!!!" Yup, after our disaster of a north island trip our spirits were lifted by simply knowing our way around the south island (that was a huge relief as it gets tiring constantly trying to figure out where you are and where you should be going).

I digress. So we headed down to the pancake rocks, this was a bit uneventful and we treated this stop like Japanese tourists. I.e. we parked, got out of the car, walked the marked trail out to the rocks, took some photos and then hopped back in the car to get down to the glaciers. I was glad to see them as Andrew (other Uni friend) and Paul raved about then from their trans-alpine train ride while I was procrastinating at the library back at Uni on my history of "music from the renaissance to today" project. Yeah, let me tell you how much fun that was when you were getting texts from your best friend about how COOL the west coast is!

So the pancake rocks are pretty sweet! They literally look like rocks shaped like pancakes from large all the way up to silver-dollar size (pita! he he). They are constantly being eroded by the sea and have these sick blow-holes that make loud booms when the waves come through.

After the stop in Greymouth to see our favorite Brewery! MONTEITHS (I know my old NZ crew will be jealous). The brewery tour was a bust as the guy leading it has the same amount of personality as the pancake rocks. Never-the-less the final stop was in the pub and we at least go tour moneys worth with beer. My new favorite is Monteiths Black which is a stout but tastes like Guinness mixed with a chocolate chip cookie! We were also able to pour own own schooner (yup not a pint but a MINI-pint). I was pretty horrible at it and ended up with tons of foam but they let me practice! SWEET! By the end of nearly a dozen pours I was an expert!

We trudged south down to the Franz-Joseph Glacier area immediately as we thought the weather was good. Little did we know it was going to start raining JUST as we got there. The glacier walk was really impressive. It was one of the "splurges" of our NZ adventure. Lets just say I had never been on a glacier before and didn't quite know what to expect. I had seen pictures of friends on glaciers from our last NZ trip and had heard from Paul about his glacier experience up in Alaska. Once I stepped foot on the ice I finally figured out what all the fuss was about. It was this surreal experience where you're having this cool adventure but you find yourself looking around and realizing how massive this planet is. I'd be hiking with my crampons on and look up to see where the glacier used to be back in the early 1900's and think to myself, "if that was in the early 1900's, what did this thing look like 500 or 1000 years ago!?" The answer is MASSIVE!!! The thing was massive as it stands today but seeing how it carved the mountains straight out of the ground was seriously impressive. I guess New Zealand is known for those types of moments. Or maybe I should say I recall having those moments in the past in New Zealand. I call them "Jurassic park" moments. Its as if a pterodactyl could swoop down at any moment and you'd have to run for your life.

So needless to say I enjoyed myself on the Fox Glacier. That afternoon we piled ourselves back into the Jucy Cruza and headed east to Lake Wanaka.

This post is WAY overdue so most of you have probably already seen my pictures on Facebook from my hike up Mt. Roy. Pretty impressive, eh?! Well let me tell you the story of that hike. Paul and I rolled into Wanaka that night and swung by the "iSite."

Side note: how awesome is it that in every major city in NZ/AUS there are iSites that are FREE with TONS of information about what to do in the local area. Where are these in the US!? Maybe I don't look for them b/c I'm a tourist but it would be really helpful and set a better tone for people visiting our cities!

After figuring out where we'd be crashing that night we decided to do what we do best in our Jucy Cruza, crash a YHA hostel and use there facilities for free. I came up with this idea back on the north island. The YHAs are such big hostels that you can walk into any of them and just use whatever you want without anyone having any idea if you're staying there or not? Genius, right? So we go in an use there massive kitchens, refrigerators, Internet, showers, laundry and anything else we could get our hands on. After just shy of two weeks in a mini-van anything in a YHA feels like a luxury!

We camped that night in this awesome site next to a river (pic on FB). The river had a rope swing AND a trampoline that jumped right into the river. Too bad the river was glacier run off water and it was rainy and cold or I'd have stayed a lifetime! The one thing I wanted to do in Wanaka was go for an epic hike to see the lakes from a higher view. We heard from some of the YHA staff (he he) about Mt. Roy. Everyone seemed to say it was a "good hike" and to expect between 3-4 hours to get to the top and about 2-3 to get back down. We agreed this would be a good opportunity to stretch our legs and set out early the next morning. Of course the hike starts with walking over private land through sheep grazing territory so we had the opportunity to hang with some "wild-life." What the YHA folks didn't exactly spell out for us is that the hike is straight up hill. Paul compared the hike to hiking a 14'er in Colorado and I honestly don't have anything to compare it to… it was seriously over a forty-five degree angle the entire time. At about the two hour point of the hike my quads had burnt out and I had to massage them into keeping a forward momentum. It was a good test for my rehabilitated knee and thankfully I made it up and down without any issues. I was completely sore at the end of the hike and had developed some major blisters. We met this awesome girl Becca on our way up who's going to be starting a masters program in San Francisco next year and ended up hiking with her the whole way up and back. She's been tramping all around New Zealand and really put both of us to shame on this hike. So Wanaka was a great success and we packed up to move onward to Mt. Cook.

Mt. Cook is the tallest mountain peak in all of Australiasia. That's all of Australia + Asia. Driving up toward our camp site at the base of it was completely stunning. Its covered in snow in the middle of their summer and has huge winds and clouds pouring over it. Paul had been really looking forward to seeing Mt. Cook since we studied at uni. Unfortunately the next morning when we were going to do a little walk to get a better view it started raining and turned REALLY cold. So we headed on to Lake Tekapo and back up to Christchurch.

This is when the trip got a bit shaky for me. I am not 100% sure where I ran afoul but I drank/ate something bad. I ate something so bad that it gave me Bali-Belly or Indian-Belly. Any traveler who has had this can attest to how completely awful it feels but then add in that you're stuck in a mini-van and have to search for public restrooms! It was a bit uncomfortable but Paul was a trooper. He parked me in the middle of the botanical gardens in Christchurch and let me sleep it off for an entire day while he went back to explore our old city.

The following day after returning the Jucy to the airport we caught a shuttle back to central Christchurch and checked into the YHA down near the arts center. This was a great launching point for us to get around the entire city. We set out to see all of our old stomping grounds from uni at University of Canterbury. One thing that really struck me from this trip back to Christchurch was how small the city was. At the time I studied abroad I had very little large city experience. I had grown up in a suburb of Chicago but my experience with the city was limited to field trips as a kid downtown. I went to college in Indianapolis, which to my college friends chagrin, doesn't count as a big city. Yup, not matter where you're from in Indiana folks! So when I got to Christchurch in college it seemed a bit bigger, in fact everything seemed a lot bigger. It must have been that I was in a strange place really far away from home and didn't have any perspective. Now, after living in Boston and San Francisco it seems ity-bity.

So we hit up Dimitri's greek slouvaki's (epic!), Mickey Finns Irish Pub, back to the University of Canterbury, Ilam Flats, The Holy Grail Sports Bar and just about everything else I wanted to see. We didn't get back out to New Brighton beach where we learned to surf but it was chilly so we didn't want to get in the water anyway. I am really thankful for that time in my life. Not only did it give me my first taste of the "travel bug" but it introduced me to a chain of events that has formed the basis for many of my closest connections as a young adult. I met my friend Joe in New Zealand. Joe introduced me to Ariana and Betsy in Boston after I graduated from Butler. After I moved from Boston to San Francisco I moved in with Ariana. Joe, Betsy and Ariana are some of my closest friends and I'm so thankful to have them in my life. This wouldn't have happened if I didn't take that one step toward a study abroad experience.

So the New Zealand chapter came to an end. If I were to do it all over again I'd just fly into Christchurch and do a circle of the south island again but I'm glad to have seen the north island. I'd like to come back and spend more time in the south island. I didn't get to do enough hiking (seriously this island is crisscrossed with hiking tracks) and I"d like to do more wine tasting.