Sunset in Bunbury!
The Hyundi Getz! Great savings on Petrol!
The mighty Karri Tree! 
Hamelin Bay! The word that keeps coming into my brain over the past day or two is, "perspective." I've been in Bali now for about eight days. This is the first place on the trip that I haven't previously been to. It is also the first non-colony country. Seriously how did such a small country rule so many people at one time!?
More notably Indonesia is the first country with a majority religious preference of non-Christians. The Balinese are traditionally Hindu yet Sumatra, Java and the other islands are majority Muslim. I was surprised by how Hindu Bali really is. Its not that people are all that different. Physically I'm truly a giant here. Most people seem we see who are Javanese or Balinese are of a smaller stature than Aussies or Americans. Its interesting to observe the people and their normal everyday habits.
We've spent our first five nights in a lower budget accommodation in Legian. I cannot be more thankful to have had that experience. We were able to get our feet on the ground and really figure out how the structure of the country works. What costs what? Where is what? The whys? Wheres? Hows? All of these things were so needed since we don't speak the language and are in a country we're unfamiliar with.
I keep coming back to this with Paul about how excited I am about the sense of familiarity I'll have with so many places after this trip. I can already see that Bali is a place I'd be interested in bringing my family or significant other to in the future. Now that I have a lay of the land, understand the culture a bit and just get how the tourist culture works here I'd be much more interested in returning. Actually I can already see how much I'm going to want to come back to Indonesia.
Did anyone out there know that Indonesia has over 200+ million people? I didn't! We met up with this sweet American Coloradan yesterday who is living here permanently working for a pearl farm on the non-tourist north coast of Bali. He did a stint in Indonesia a few years ago and has picked up the Balinese and Indonesian languages. It was really great to be out with an American who could converse and more importantly negotiate with the local Balinese. Anyway he was telling us a bit about his perspective of Bali before he got here. It was something like "yeah its this island nation below Thailand and China and has some sweet beaches and is known for resorts…" Honestly my impression of Bali was probably worse than his. For whatever reason I was thinking Bali would be like Fiji. I couldn't even have imagined how large of a country Indonesia was before I got here. I didn't even get it until earlier today when I was finally looking at a map of all of Indonesia and not just Bali. GOOD GOD there are a TON of people and a TON of islands in this country!
So we've been tooling round with our local Coloradan Balinese guide and I can't help but just keep thinking about the word, perspective. This trip to Bali has really put my trip into an entirely different perspective for me. It has put my life and the decisions I've made into a new perspective. I've been able to think outside of the box about lifestyles I hadn't encountered, situations I hadn't thought of, points of view I wouldn't have been able to begin to understand. I guess spending time with an American in Bali has been good because it helped me put myself in his shoes. Could I work abroad? Am I interested in really immersing myself in a culture for a few years? Could I live this far away from home? Would it be lonely?
I've thought about working internationally for the past few years and actually being here and spending time with someone who is doing it has been able to help me understand some of the good and the bad. The verdict is still out but it has been really great to begin processing a bit of this.
A week or two ago on a Skype or FaceTime call with my brother Mike I was asked the question, "are you bored?" What an insanely accurate question!? Close to what my true feelings were yet I felt guilt in the fact that I could be bored of travel? Who gets bored of travel? Isn't travel the all encompassing one way street to nirvana? I can tell you I had been bored in the past of travel but that was for work. After flying 130+ flights in 2009 and 75+ in 2010 I had my fair share of time in the skies. I didn't rival Clooney in "Up in the Air" but when you watch that movie and can completely personally relate to a lot of the crazy things he did for "points" or "fun" on his business trip… well… lets just say it was a bit of a wake up call. Then again I loved my job before I left! I loved the role I had, the people I worked with and the environment I was surrounded with. Medical was extremely good to me and I feel humbled by the opportunity I had to learn and grow with Covidien/Confluent.
So yeah, I was a bit tired of Australia? Not bored, just ready to move on? Now that I'm writing this blog post in retrospect from a hotel bar in Bali things look a bit different. Prior to coming on this trip I was MOST excited about Australia and second Thailand. I cannot even begin to figure out where these obsessions came from. Hilariously enough Paul said that to me the other day when I was talking about my obnoxious interest in these two countries. He plainly asked, where the hell did I get these ideas from? I honestly don't know. Part of me thinks its rooted in the last time I was in the Asia-Pacific area. That was… no… it can't be… SEVEN years ago! How can it be SEVEN years ago I was meeting Joe and tooling around New Zealand in an RV… At the end of my study abroad semester I had convinced myself I needed to spend $4000 on a trip to Thailand. I felt it was the best thing I could possibly do because I'm in New Zealand and its SO close to Thailand that if I didn't do it then it would be a LONG time until I'd get the opportunity. I guess I was right since it took me seven years to grow the balls and save the cash.
I called both of my brothers and a few friends back home at the time to talk with them about the idea of extending my study abroad experience another five or six weeks. I'd miss thanks-giving but think of the experiences I'd have!? Looking back I do wish I had done it. $4000 was a TON of cash to a kid who was still in college and working at J.Crew for $10 an hour. I came out of college with a bit too much debt and it took me a long time to recover but I still think leaving a pro-western country like NZ and heading to a truly asian country like Thailand would have done me a lot of good. Not that I didn't have a great experience in New Zealand.
So I guess my "reading break" trip to Byron Bay and Fraiser island that semester together with my failed trip to Thailand in 2004 were still lingering as Paul and I planned our itinerary. So why am I going ON and ON about Thailand and Australia today? Well because they are cool but I now expect to have completely more amazing experiences in other parts of the world. I have changed my enthusiasm from Thailand and Oz to Vietnam, Nepal, Africa and South America. In my head my stream of thoughts went like this, "first I go to OZ then we make it to Thailand! Yeah! My most wanted is out of the way! Everything else will be cool too…"
Australia was completely awesome! It was also completely expensive. Could I dare even say over-priced? Using that term seems sacrilege because I consistently tell myself that I'm paying for the opportunity to have new experiences. Just like I say the high tax rates in California give me access to incredible weather and unbelievable natural surroundings. Even when I say these things it can be hard to swallow them. So after spending over forty days in Australia and seeing many of its most revered land marks I was getting a bit sore of the same rub.
Hopefully my comments above don't fall on deaf ears. I can picture many of my friends and family back home thinking to themselves, "hmm I wouldn't mind being in Australia right now…" I'm just trying to convey what a long period of time in one place can do to a traveler.
Its also a bit hilarious that I'm talking about two months as being too long of a time to spend in Oz. Most of the other backpacker travelers we met along the way would be on a six to twelve month journey around Oz. Most of them would be working part of the time but still it puts things in perspective. We flew in, hit the major spots: sydney (coogee, kings cross, bond, royal national park), whitsunday islands, cairns/great barrier reef, melbourne, tasmania and then finally perth. That took us 40 days!! It was a lot of ground to cover.
Okay Andrew, move on. You've already killed this subject.
So we had a lovely time in Western Australia. Paul and I debated back and forth about how to get around on the west coast prior to arriving. We talked with a lot of travelers and they all pointed us toward a cheap rental car. And thus we decided to give it a go. We rented a Hyundai Getz. It was a nice little four door hatch-type car that felt more like a go-kart than a car but also got 35ish mpg. We also leaned toward this as all of the hostels in Perth were fully booked up when we arrived and we figured if we drove an hour or two south the options would open up.
Thankfully that was true but we also found out that the temperature was significantly cooler in south western australia. We spent the night in a YHA in Bunbury before heading down to Augusta. This is called the "margaret river" area of SWA. Margaret river feels as if Napa was picked up and dropped down in Pleasanton or even Vegas. Its really a dry arid climate but they use lots of water for their recently discovered vineyard capabilities. Margaret river has only been in the process of making wine for the past few decades but it is recognized as some of the best to come out of Oz. We cruised down to Augusta on one of the farthest south points of Australia. We hit up the light house (thanks for instilling this tradition in me MOM!) and made our way over to the beach. We heard from a great british couple about a beach nearby where you could feed live sting rays. (this is my mothers worst nightmare - she's probably flinching just reading this). What were to mature young lad to do after being told GIANT SEA MONSTERS were right there at our feet for the feeding!?
We hit the beach and were not disappointed! These animals were so incredible! I'm not joking when I say they were at least three to five feet wide. Their eyes were the size of baseballs and their tails must have been another three feet long. It took me a few minutes of watching a tiny ten or twelve year old australian girl feed the things before I put one toe in the water near them. It was majestic!! They would come right up to your feed and kind of "sniff" around to see if you had any fish. A family of australian fishermen were up the beach cutting up bait fish for them and the little girl boldly went around throwing fish at them. The real feat was the fisherman father who came down and put his hand under the beasts to make sure the fish got all the way in! I think the rays had a good idea of what they were doing buddy but thanks for making me feel like a total wimp!?
It was an amazingly beautiful day at Hamelin Bay. Paul and I headed a bit down the beach to set up shop with our books and read for a while. We threw the frisbee that we had bought in Christchurch (more on the disaster later). It was simply a low key day of feeding sea monsters, playing frisbee and to our surprise topless mothers?! Yeah I went there. Where do these women get off taking their tops off? Literally twenty yards off of Pauls left shoulder was a mom feeding four kids sandwiches with no top on? It turned out she wasn't Australian, she was French. That made me feel more comfortable - at least for her children.
I'm sort of laughing to myself right now thinking back on this. Could you imaging the little boy when he invites his buddy to hit the surf with him when he's in middle school and when he and his mate come up for lunch his buddy gets a topless sandwich from mommy dear!? Simply hilarious.
We headed down to Pemberton where we were sure the mothers were well covered. Pemberton really smacked me in the face. This was a fruit picking / farming town and it really started to feel like western australia. I felt like we were getting closer to crocodile dundees hood. Where men were men and crocs killed men. We were out of luck when we took our first gander at the YHA. It was full of smelly fruit pickers and the windows were open (no A/C). Not that we HAVE to have AC but the farther away from the ocean we got the warmer it was. So we opted for a budget hotel and splurged for a real mattress and sky tv. We dropped $77 that night so thus dinner was light. Anyway we were able to climb some Karri trees the next day and go for a sweet 10k walk through the giants. It was really cool being in this forrest setting as I had just been up to see the Redwoods five hours north of SF before I left. Thankfully America wins again. The Karri trees grow to 90 meters and redwoods grow to 100! Take that Australia!
So of course we had heard you could climb these trees. Yup, leave it to the Aussies to allow tourists in a FEDERAL park to climb up metal spikes hammered into the sides of a 90 meter tree. No fear of lawsuits will really let you do a lot! We polished the laminate off of our travel insurance policies and headed up the tree. Funny enough our manly image was shot down as four Chinese girls scaled the behemoth in front of us and giggled the whole way up. We climbed to the top in complete silence and concentration. At one point I could hear Paul breathing heavily and thankfully it was just heavy concentration breath and not a freak out coming on… We made it to the top and from around 140 feet up we could see for miles. It was a bit of a let down because you can't see the floor below you because the branches block it. You almost don't even feel that high up. The trees were formerly used as fire watches by the national fire program in Australia until they discovered planes could do the same thing. Then while one of the planes was being serviced a fire broke out and due to the delay it burned quite a bit longer than necessary. Thus in the mid-1990's the trees were reactivated (think Lord of the Rings!) and are now used again.
It was quite a day. We headed back to Augusta to our comfy YHA for one more night before we headed back up to Perth. We had booked ourselves into Fremantle for a few nights. Fremantle is supposed to be a nice little surf town south west of Perth. I don't know much about it because the only hostel that would take us in let me to have a mini-heart attack. We made it to Fremantle around 5pm and it must have been 90% humidity and 100 degrees outside. We took one look at the six man rooms with no AC, no fan and no windows we'd be baking in all night and decided to try somewhere else.
Side note here on weather patterns. Clearly I don't have much of a historical point of view when it comes to Australia but we managed to miss some of the "largest" natural disasters in recent history everywhere we went on this trip.
Sydney - excessive heat after we left
Cairns - Cyclone Yasi hit it dead on!
Brisbane - crazy floods bigger that took the entire city out
Christchurch - earth quake in December and now another one yesterday!
Melbourne - huge floods shut down the city for a few days
Tasmania - thankfully NOTHING happened there. Whew!
Perth - cyclone on its way when we booked it to Bali.
click the links above to learn more about the weather!
Either a. we brought the bad weather (lets hope not!) or b. there are some crazy things going on in this world. Interestingly enough on a TV News Poll in Australia I noticed that 70% of the country doesn't believe in climate change. Wether you believe in global climate change or not I can't help but feel lucky to have missed each of these disasters.
So after booking it out of Fremantle and changing my t-shirt for the second or third time (who's counting) we made it to the governors hostel in Perth. They took us in but only had openings for one night. Every other hostel in Perth and Fremantle was sold out for the next three days and that would mean we'd need to head out of the city at least 40k to find a cheap place to sleep. Hotels stared at $200 a night. All tours north were canceled due to two cyclones coming in off the coast so all travelers were staying in town.
Paul and I debated what to do and finally came up with the idea of just calling it quits on Western Australia and heading to Bali. We felt we had given Australia a good run and were ready for a new experience in a new culture. The flight change ended up costing us a good chunk of change but since we've been here we've saved BOATLOADS of cash every day.
I have limited internet in our new posh luxury hotel so I'll try to write up some thoughts on Bali and get them uploaded in the next week or two. We stayed for the first five nights at the Three Brothers Bungalows in Legian - we've now moved onto the Grand Balisani Suites in Seminyak.
Tomorrow we're heading up to Ubud to check out the monkey forest!
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.
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.
