Living in New Zealand for Six Months? Hill Yiss.

After traveling around the north island, I hopped on a flight to Christchurch to meet with Andre, a friend of my metal smithing teacher from St. Louis. I’d talked to him a few times before coming down to New Zealand, and was really excited to meet him. I had some spotty texting conversations with him, so I was hoping he’d be at the airport to pick me up.

On the way to the South Island!

Fortunately, Andre was there waiting for me! It was great to finally meet him. He took me to his partner,Chris,  and his house, which is amaaaazing. Super modern, with a great garden out front.  After settling in, Andre drove me around Christchurch, showing me some of the heavily damaged places that have personal significance to him.

I was excited to drive around Christchurch- the wreckage from the 2011 earthquakes is something you always heard about on TV, but I was interested to see it first hand. Having Andre there to explain what I was looking at was great too- it was nice to get information from a first hand perspective. You could tell he felt very strongly for Christchurch and all that had happened, which is something most people probably wouldn’t get from just seeing or hearing about the destruction.

This is a cathedral and Andre and his partner used to frequent.  Much of the roof has fallen off (it actually extended much higher than the two angels you can see in the front) as well as several portions of the walls. There were shipping containers used to support the sides of the cathedral from further crumbling.

After driving around the city, Andre took me up the coast line where an entire hill of houses had been determined to be too unstable to live in.  This was several thousand homes.  Multiple faces of the hill had collapsed, leaving houses literally hanging off the edge. Again, shipping containers were being used to support the walls.

One inspiring thing was the container mall. This was an area created entirely out of shipping cargo containers, painted up and converted into a shopping area. It was nice to see that Christchurch wasn’t completely lost, and had what looked like a colorful, fun area of the city. It was bustling with people, which was great to see!

They even had a two story coffee shop with a balcony!

Once we were done driving around Christchurch, Andre took me back to my place where we ate some amazing spaghetti, with olives, capers, and some other delicious goodies. We drank wine, and went through their India photos, which they had just recently returned from. I had a great time with Andre and Chris, and was really glad to be able to meet up with them! The next morning I got a ride to the airport, where I was supposed to meet my parents!

I hung around the airport for a few minutes, trying to figure out where I was supposed to be when I ran into mom! She took me to where dad was supposed to be sitting around, but we couldn’t find him. All of a sudden, this hairy man with dreadlocks came rushing up to me. I was taken aback for a second, before realizing it was my dad with a wig on! It was great to see my parents after so long, and after a hug-filled hello we waited around for our ACTIVE tour guides to show up.

We met the rest of the tour group, and our awesome guides, Jaquelin (or Jacs) and Mike. After loading up the van, we headed off to Kaikoura for some snorkeling, and seal watching! We donned our wetsuits, hiked about twenty minutes across some rocky cliff faces, and jumped in! The water was freezing, but the wetsuits helped a lot. We ended up only seeing one seal, which was curious but a little shy.  Our snorkeling guides snagged some Paua, a type of abalone, and a sea urchin whose name escapes me. We ate them raw, which was pretty neat- fresh sushi! After that we piled back into the van, stripped off our freezing wetsuits, and jumped into some hot showers at the place we were doing a homestay at.

We stayed at a couple’s cozy home, where they fed us beer and wine and some amaaazing food. Tony and Yvette seemed like really nice people, and we got to meet their dog, Molly, and their bird Creighton, who was quite the talker! He was pretty hilarious.  We spent the night there, then headed off to our next destination- Nelson Lakes National Park!

They had this awesome little creek behind their house, filled with gigantic eels!

On the way there, someone asked what all the yellow flowers covering much of the country side.  Pretty, yes, but these little yellow devils are a type of grouse that has become an incredibly invasive species across New Zealand. The DOC is undergoing a ten year project to remove as much of it as possible.

On the way to Nelson, we stopped by a little freshwater waterfall that was beautiful! Get this- it serves as a sort of daycare for seal pups! Their mothers lead them up a creek flowing into the ocean to hang out and play during the day while they go out to hunt for food. There were probably twenty seal pups in here, just splashing around and being cute and stuff.

After the seal adventure, we drove up to Blenheim, aka wine country! We stopped at the Forrest Estate Winery, where we took a tour through their vineyard, sampled some wines, and ate some delicious lunch prepared by our lovely guides!

The Vineyard

Some cool old bike at the vineyard.  After our tour, four of our teammates departed to go sea kayaking, one of the options other than backpacking.  The rest of us loaded back into the van, and drove to Nelson Lakes to start trekkin!

Nelson Lake! Surrounded by mountains, it was a bit chilly! The day we got there, the weather was great.  Pretty sunny, and there were baby ducks out!

The sandflies out here were terrible, and everyone was getting bit up the second we left the van. Fortunately for us, the ducklings were snapping up every fly they could! Get it!

After prepping all our gear, we started out on the hike. I noticed that all the trees and bushes looked burned, yet were still blooming/leaf-ing, whatever the term is for that. I asked Jacs what the deal was, and she told me it was actually some kind of moss! It seemed to grow sporadically on sections of the trail, covering everything in its path!

The trail itself was great. Not very hilly, and it went along the lake front the entire time, offering some pretty grand views.

We had a few river crossings, but nothing too deep- I just wanted to keep my feet dry since I didn’t have water proof boots! This eventually became a rather uncomfortable problem later on in the trip…

After about three and a half hours, we came upon our DOC hut! Nothing too extravagant, but there were bunk beds, a fireplace, and a kitchen- everything you need!

The inside of the hut.

Once we got moved in, everyone was pretty beat. The Mike and Jacs cooked us an AMAZING dinner with fresh veggies, some sausage, and tea, as well as crackers and cheese! I couldn’t believe they hiked all the food up there by themselves- we had quite the feast! Definitely the best food I’ve ever had camping/backpacking.

After stuffing our faces, we hit the sack. We had a big hike ahead of us the next day! I snuck outside to take some shots of the surrounding area, this is the view from the front door of our hut!

We were originally supposed to hike the Angelus Circuit, which would take us up to the peak of one of the surrounding mountains, to another hut.  The weather, however, was less than hospitable, as part of the track was covered in snow and it was pouring rain all day. Mike and Jacs decided we should just hike up as far as we felt like, then turn back and spend another night in the same hut.

I was a little worried about staying dry- my jacket wasn’t waterroof, and my hiking boots were pretty meshy.

The track, albeit incredibly wet, was pretty neat. We went through the woods, across thin, rocky paths facing a river, and into some swampy areas. There were few birds out, but we did manage to see a black fantail, something I didn’t even know existed! Usually they’re green and white, so it was kind of neat to see another variety.

After about two hours, we came across an enormous swing bridge that stretched across the river. We went across one at a time, then stopped to devour some sandwiches.  By this point, even those of the team with rain jackets were soaked.  A few of us decided to turn back, realizing that we had another two hours’ return. The rest of the group continued on, intending to go for another three hours or so. I ran back ahead of the group to start a fire, which was much needed. 

Unfortunately, the chimney/stove was a little confusing, and I ended up smoking out the hut for a few minutes…

After Jacs and the rest of the rest of the group got back, we started making dinner, as well as…

A cheesecake for our guide Mike’s birthday! He turned 38 that day, what a champ!

That night, who decided to show up but about TWENTY soaking wet 14 year old girls, on a school trip. They were supposed to camp outside, but due to the rain decided to take over our hut.

Stuff was everywhere! Everyone’s drying clothing/gear/etc was so steamy that it fogged up my lenses a bit.

That night I went outside to cool off and take a couple of long exposure shots, playing around with my headlamp:

For Lake Nelson!

My attempt at some mountains and a river…

The next morning the weather had cleared up, and we packed our gear and headed back down the trail to the van for our next adventure! The water was still enough to get some decent reflection shots off the lake.

Family photo!

After all the rain the day before, the amount of water on the trail had risen significantly! Those of us hoping to escape Nelson with dry feet were quickly proven otherwise.

After reaching our van, we drove off to Punakaiki, a small town with awesome food and a strange surprise…

On the way there we stopped at this awesome little beach, with great lighting! This is one of my favorite shots :)

There were also a bunch of dead things. Gross, but another one of my favorite photos.

On the way to Punakaiki, we drove passed who other but the great Maggie Brockway! She was backpacking around the South Island, working at farms and the like for room and board. What a surprise! We pulled over at an outlook and gave her a ride to her hostel. Hizzah!

Once in Punakaiki, we got some dinner at a delicious pub and then headed off to see the strange “Pancake Rocks,” layers of limestone that had formed into columns resembling stacks on pancakes. As the tide came in and out, huge geysers of water would shoot up between the rocks! Awesome!

Woah! Sweet!

After spending the night in Punakaiki, we headed off for a short hike on the Pororari River Trail on the way to Hokitika, which is in fact as fun to say as it looks. We snagged some last minute supplies, then went to the great Okarito!

aahh dizzying! a Crown Fern (Blechnum discolor)

Another thing I failed to identify! But it’s a fern, promise.

Hokitika! A small town with lots of fun shops and a cool clock tower.

Yum! Candy!

Hokitika Museum! Cool looking building.

After getting the rest of our provisions, and some shopping just for fun, we hopped back on the ACTIVE bus and headed for Okarito, population 33! And that’s only because two babies were born recently.

The rest of my time at Massey U. consisted mostly of preparing for my final exams. I had Biological Evolution, then Biostatistics, and then New Zealand Environments.  We had a couple of free weekends before finals started in early November, so everyone got ready for a big Halloween bash.

I was having some trouble deciding what to do for my costume, which was kind of a rare occurrence- I’ve usually got it planned out since the summer. I felt like the dreadlocks somewhat hindered my options, and after much debate (I was considering going blackface and being Bob Marley…) I settled on being a Maori, complete with a full-faced Tā moko, the carving and tattooing of the face used to represent high-class stature as well as making a “wearer” more attractive. I based my design on a photo I found online, that I thought would be fairly easy to do. Aysha painted the design, and the end result was pretty amazing!

Aysha also hand-weaved me a grass skirt out of the leaves of a downed tree we found on campus- it was a pretty swell costume! I ended up getting a lot of compliments when we went out, which was better than I was expecting. Apparently it’s actually kind of an insult to falsify a moko, and I was afraid some Maori would get more than a little upset with me… all was well, so it must have been a good paintjob!

We also threw an impromptu Thanksgiving dinner with all our international friends, which was a blast! Everyone cooked some delicious food, and heaps of desserts. I think everyone had a great time, and it was about as good as a thanksgiving away from home could get!

After some intense cramming for all my finals, which were fortunately fairly well spaced out, giving me a lot of time to review, I finished up my semester feeling pretty confident in my exams. As it turns out, I got an A and two B’s in my courses- not bad!

We had a few fairwells to people who left after finals, which was really sad. I probably won’t be seeing a lot of these people for a long, long time, if ever again. For Jha’s last night, we went to Cafe Eminem for some hookah before hitting the bars and playing some pool.

Here’s Jha cleaning up on the pool table! Fun fact, he’s an equestrian, and the poster boy for his club!

After bidding our farewells, Meg, Kelly, Jim and I got ready for a post-semester trip- we were going to once again travel around the north island, but this time hitting several places we hadn’t yet been to! First stop, Waitomo!

On the way up, we drove past these awesome sheet metal sculptures of a sheep and sheepdog! Strange, but cool!

After a pretty good drive up to Ngahinapouri, we once again stayed at Carl Cunningham’s house for the night. We got to meet his girlfriend from Coromandel, who was also a dairy farmer! She, if I remember correctly, raised calves to the point where they could then be transferred to farms built for adult cattle. It was really great to stay at Carl’s again, he’s a great guy!

Ngahinapouri may be full of cows, but damn is it a beautiful place.

The next day we left Carl’s to drive out to Waitomo, which is about 40 minutes away. We got there a bit early for our caving tour, so we went on a short tramp through the woods to another, above ground cave system. The walk was really nice, and the little caves here and there were neat!

More cave

Jimbo about to explore some caves

After tramping around the park for a while, we drove to Waitomo Adventures for our TumuTumu TOObing trip. Despite the silly name, this was an amazing adventure.  Kelly had found some discounted tickets online, so we snatched ‘em up a couple of weeks beforehand.  Once we arrived to Waitomo Adventures, we were introduced to our guides, Chris and Alan.  Chris had some pretty awesome dreadlocks, and Alan was a burly Scotsman with a huge mustache.  The tours are usually broken up into six people per guide, so Kelly, Meg, Jim, another woman whose name I am currently forgetting, and I joined up with Alan. We packed into a van, and drove off towards the departure site!

The caves we were about to be going into were actually leased from a farmer, as property owners in New Zedland own the ground under the surface, as well.  After we got all dressed up in wet suits, helmets with headlamps, and gumboots, we started the trek across the farmland to the beginning of the cave system.  Unfortunately I couldn’t take any pictures throughout the tour, since the cave was incredibly wet (there were parts we had to swim through!) and I didn’t have a water proof camera.  Alan explained to us how most of the cave systems are limestone, and a good way of finding caves is to look for numerous sinkholes in the ground. Cool stuff!

After about ten minutes of walking around, we came to a small hole in the ground with a ladder descending into it.  It was a tight squeeze, but we all managed to fit. The tour itself was really great. Alan was a hilarious, and well informed guide, explaining to us how the different cave formations came to be. 

We found a small eel in the water, a bunch of cave wetas, and a few other small bugs and such. Kelly and the other guide, Chris, started having a dunking/splashing feud at one point, so later on Alan took us above the usual route to an opening with a few sinkholes that let us see the path, and other tour group, below us.  We all filled our gumboots with cave water, and soaked the other team as they waded through the water below us! Then Chris stole Kelly’s gumboot for the rest of the tour… we’re still not quite sure where it went.

Throughout the cave were dispersed what to me was the main attraction: Glow worms! Alan explained to us that technically, they’re maggots, as they are fly larvae (Family: Keroplatidae).  Adults lay huge quantities of eggs on cave walls, where they hatch and remain for about ninety days, glowing to attract prey. They also hang mucus-laden threads down from their mucus cocoons (they’re actually pretty gross and slimey once you know more about them!) to catch prey, which includes the soon-to-die adult flies.

I was interested in the glow worms after watching BBC’s Planet Earth series of documentaries, so here’s a short clip with Sir David Attenborough, naturalist extraordinaire, giving some detail (and awesoem macro footage) of the worms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBIEmjaoE5w

In all, the tour was about two to two and a half hours long, and one of my favorite things I did in New Zealand. A little touristy, yes, but the guides were very knowledgeable, and really fun.  The cave itself was nothing like I expected- with a name like TumuTumu TOObing, I thought most of it would be spent floating around lazy river style on an innertube. Most of it was actually trekking through, the cave, with some good swimming and climbing mixed in. After finishing our tour, we took some much needed hot showers, got dressed, and bid farewell to our awesome guides before heading back to Carl’s for the night!

Here’s our awesome tour group, with Alan the guide in teh back! Check out that stache!

The next day we left Carl’s, and headed to Stephen Smith’s house in Hamilton. I’ve never met Stephen before, but he seemed like a really relaxed, happy, and awesomely-bearded dude.  He was also in the NZ Army! After picking him up, we drove to our next stop, Thames, kind of a midpoint between Ngahinapouri and Coromandel, our ultimate destination for the trip.

Stephen Smith and his beard.

Halfway to Thames, we stopped in Paeroa, famous for being the birthplace of the NZ-famous soda, L&P. L&P is special due to the use of underground spring water found in Paeora, which is rich in minerals and known for its supposed medicinal properties.  The Paeroa Natural Mineral Water Company began bottling the water in 1907, and eventually started adding a lemon flavoring to the drink. Thus began L&P, or Lemon & Paeroa, a kiwi favorite.

There was a giant L&P bottle in the park we stopped at, which was pretty fun!

After a quick nap in the sun, we jumped back in the car and made it the rest of the way to Thames- we took a quick Pak n Save stop before hitting our camp site, and then headed to our DOC site! The campground was pretty basic, more or less an open field surrounded by trees. There was a great little creek flowing behind one of the ridges.

We set up camp, and had to buy some firewood since the DOC restricted the use of brush in this area, which was unfortunate but made sense for the sake of the environment.  While some of the group was out buying wood, we metone of our other neighbors, a 22(?) year old Israeli kid named Tal. He was fresh out of the military, and was traveling around New Zealand to spend some money. Sounds like a great way to spend that military cash if you ask me! We threw a disc around for a while, and we were fortunately pretty evenly matched. The crazy sumbitch was actually planning on backpacking across the mountains (which you’ll see in a minute) to get to the Coromandel side of the peninsula!

Jim brought his slack line, and started teaching me how to use it- it’s incredibly difficult! As soon as you stand up, the line and your foot start wobbling from left to right which makes it hard to focus. If you keep your core and head centered, it really helps. The most I could do was take about four steps, and I think I did that once.  Jim could sit down turn around, and all sorts of stuff. They’re super fun!

That night we cooked some delicious steak sandwhiches for dinner, and I took a few long exposure shots with Meg before going to bed.

Thames!

Meg also had a glow in the dark Nalgene bottle, which actually made for some neat pictures!

The next day we went to the Kauaeranga Kauri Trail, for the Pinnacles Hut hike, about four hours up.

We found some really neat ferns, and the trail had some amazing views. Stream crossings, big rocky mars-looking areas, and of course, ferny rainforest!

One particular stream crossing, meg found this awesome little whirlpool! It was still going on the way down from the hike, several hours later!

For scale, here’s a shot of the path we took to the top. That little squiggly white line was the Stairway to Luncheon. Not quite heaven, but after a four hour hike, lunch was sounding pretty darn good.  This portion alone was, oh, forty minutes to an hour of ascending!

Once we started getting a little higher up,  we were treated with some absolutely stunning views. Here you can see across the ranges and into the ocean!

I don’t know why, but I think that being able to see the entire shadow of a cloud is really amazing.

Here’s a shot with Stephen for some scale reference!

After a nice lunch break, we headed back down the mountain.

On the way down, we spotted this AMAZING dragonfly, drying its wings out on a rock in the middle of the path. It just sat there as we took pictures of it, and I hope it got up and flying before anyone else came along without seeing it!

So cooool!!

The way down was very steep, and pretty hard on the knees- I think that by the end of it we were all glad to be done. The trail itself was gorgeous, with countless ferns and the remains of an old railroad track that used to cross the mountain range. After returning to camp we ate, set up for another night, and passed out after hanging out with our neighbor campers for a couple hours. 

The next morning it was starting to rain, so we packed up and got the hell out of there. We drove to campsite #2, which was a little closer to Coromandel. Once we checked in and found the campground, we all thought it was pretty unexciting, save for the nearby beach.  We opted not to camp but instead just drive straight to Kaikoura after hanging out at the beach for an hour or two. Turns out, the beach is freakin gorgeous!

We even saw a variable oystercatcher there, diggin around for things to eat!  These little dudes are endemic to New Zealand, and usually mate for life. The way they eat shellfish is interesting- they either pry the shell apart with their beak, or HAMMER A HOLE THROUGH IT WITH THEIR BEAK and pull out whatever unfortunate critter is inside. That’s pretty cool!

After hanging around at the beach, we hopped back into the car to drive to Kaikoura. Nice view along some windey roads.

After checking into our hostel, we drove over to the hot water beach to see what it was all about. The place was coated in tourists, but was still pretty fun. Basically you get a shovel, and dig into the sand a foot or so near the water’s edge. Hot spring water (and I mean HOT!) bubbles up, mixes with the cool sea water, and creates a nice little hot tub!

Stephen at ze beach!

The next morning we woke up around 0430 to drive out to Cathedral Cove to watch the sunrise. Although I was a bit grumpy (I am not a morning person, if I haven’t mentioned this already), it was well worth it. We got to watch the entire sunrise, which was beautiful.

After parking our car in the lot, we had about a forty minute walk along some nice paths to get to Cathedral Cove. We hurried along so we didn’t miss any of the sunset!

The sand had some really strange patterns worn into it, I guess just from the tide?

Seagull!

Aaaand the sun finally started peaking up!

Hizzah!

After taking about sixty photos of the sunrise, I noticed the tide was starting to come in. The clear water made for some really neat under-the-wave shots, which I tried to capture. It was neat to be able to look THROUGH the wave, and see the water tumbling around on the underside.

There were also some really awesome rocks just jutting out of the water. sweet!

And now.. Cathedral Cove! We weren’t supposed to walk through it due to falling rocks, but hey, what the hell. It was super well lit up from the sunrise, I had to!

After hanging out at the cove for an hour or two, we got back in the car to drive alllll the way back to Palmy. The ride was long, but easy. It was nice to be going back, but a little sad at the same time- as we approached Palmerston, you could see the wall of clouds that permanently surround that city.

On the way back, we stopped at the memorial site for the Tangiwai disaster. This was New Zealand’s worst train wreck, on December 24th 1953. 151 people were killed, due to an increase in water level damaging the bridge the train tracks went across.

Back in Palmerston, I spent the night at Wisco’s before helping Dion, Brian, Vick, and Aysha move into their new flat off campus.  Max was leaving the next day, so we made sure to have one last hurrah before sending him off. The next morning, Max and I went to the airport. He was flying home, and I was flying down to the south island to meet a mutual friend of my metal smithing teacher, and then my parents for a two-week exploration-filled adventure!

From Palmerston to Christchurch!

Next up: South Island Adventures with ACTIVE New Zealand! Here are some teasers for next time.

On the way up from dinner one particularly rainy day in Palmy, I saw Ariel taking some pictures of the flowers on the walkway up to our hill. I thought that was a pretty sweet idea, like the purple flowers I snapped at Himatangi a few weeks ago. I proceeded to steal her idea, and as usual took way too many pictures. I figured I might as well take advantage of a cruddy rainy day- there are always photo opportunities to be had!

Later on I got Mauren to loan me her super awesome Nikon + Macro lense, and Got some really neat shots!

Wahoo! one day, I shall get a macro lense… $2k later..

Hello readers! I know it’s been a while. A long while. But I’ve been up to some amazing things the last couple of months! I apologize for not writing sooner, but I’ve been caught up with adventuring, final exams, and traveling across the south island! First things first, here are some experimental long exposure shots with glow sticks that Wisco bought!

Before we started playing with glow sticks, we burned some incense that Becca had won in a club she was in… One of them was almond scented, and for some reason she thought it was food and tried to eat it! I took a couple second exposure of some of the incense we stuck in the ground, kinda neat!

We decided to go shoot at the creek behind campus, where there are some nice open fields and, you guessed it, a creek running through it! Our lovely security guard Aaron stopped by to make sure we weren’t up to anything stupid, and chatted with us for a little while before letting us off the hook.

After playing around with some camera settings and the glow sticks, we started shooting!

“Portal.” I named this one after one of my all-time favorite video games, which is an incredibly creative and challenging puzzle game that makes use of a portal-firing gun, which creates blue and orange portals that lead into each other. 

One of my favorites- Wisco had two green glow sticks, and spun them around in a crazy rave pattern. Nuts!

Here Wisco and Callum had a glow stick fight!

“The Archer” I”m not entirely sure how this happened, but the result was pretty neat!

The team started climbing trees once we were done playing with the glow sticks. I thought the orange lighting from campus was kinda neat!

What is this, Pandora? Nope, just New Zealand! Broken glow stick on a tree trunk.

Starz!

I broke a glow stick open on my foot, which made some really amazing patterns! It almost looked like a nebula, but less intense. Sadly I didn’t have time to snap a great shot of it, but this will have to do!

After exploring the creek area, the team decided to go streaking across the rugby fields. It was cold as hell, but no one really seemed to mind. As we ran around hoopin and hollerin, a campus security truck pulled into the parking lot.  Everyone threw whatever clothes they could reach on in a frenzy, and were fortunately mostly dressed by the time he walked up to us.  “I see you guys aren’t drinking…” he said, “but keep it down a little bit!” he ended up chatting with us for a while about being abroad students, how did we like New Zealand, etc. before driving off. Close call!

As the night winded down, we watched Into the Wild in the Egmont commons. If you haven’t seen it, ITW is a fantastic movie based off a book of the same title, about a boy who decides to live in the wilderness that is Alaska. When we decided to hit the hay, we went up to Shayna’s room to grab our things. Much to our surprise…

Rush and Becca had newspapered Shayna’s room! EVERYTHING was covered. Tissue boxes, bottles of wine, her bed and pillow, there was even newspaper hanging from the ceiling lights! I don’t know how the two of them managed to pull that off, but it was hilariously impressive. After that we all went to our respective rooms to catch some sleep. I had a big packing day tomorrow, and a trip to prepare for!

After packing and repacking, and packing again, I was finally ready for Mount Taranaki the next day. We dubbed it mount Teriyaki after a few mishearings, and it kinda stuck.  I met Kelly Hamilton and Jen Hillam at the Palmerston bus stop, and we hopped on a bus to New Plymouth. It was a short ride, and it turned out that Mauren was in town! We hung out with her, met her parents, and then took a stroll along the 7km coastal walkway (we didn’t do the whole thing) which, despite the weather, was a very pretty walk along the beach.

Old as railroad tracks!

Along the way was the Wind Wand, a kinetic sculpture created by Len Lye. Forty-five meters tall, and 200mm in diameter, it was an odd but cool sight to see! The rest of the walk took us along some cliff faces, and by some really neat flowers. We hit Pak n Save, met up with Mauren for a few drinks at an Irish pub (and the only pub open by the looks of it) before heading in for the night. Tomorrow was going to be a big day!

We got picked up at our hostel by two awesome drivers, Tom and Darren, who ferried us over to Mount Taranaki. It was a clear day, and things were looking great. “If you can’t see the mountain, it’s raining. …And if you can, it’s about to rain.” We checked into the visitor’s center, refilled our water bottles and hydration bladders, and took off on the Pouakai Circuit, deciding to do it backwards to get the longest stretch of the tramp done first.

Here’s a map of our planned route. On Day 1 we left the visitor’s center, and followed that dotted read line to Henry Peak for a short break before stopping for the night at Pouakai Hut!

Our first day was blessed with good weather, and a fantastic view of Taranaki. This leg of the trip was the most interesting in terms of varying landscapes. We traversed through the forest, crossed streams and bridges, and climbed up a few small peaks to get a view of the mountain!

We crossed a few amazing swing bridges!

It’s a long drop!

Stream Crossing!

After a couple of hours, we came to this really amazing clearing. It’s hard to tell the scale of it, but it was beautiful. You can see Kelly and Jen’s heads at the bottom of this picture, which might give you some sense of scale. After a quick look around and some soaking up of the sun, we continued along the track, which started getting a lot steeper. It was less of a hiking trail and more of a climb/pull/scratch your way up via wet, moss covered roots… awesome!

We had a fantastic view of Taranaki that day, with mostly clear skies! Fun fact, Mt. Taranaki is often used in films as a substitute for Mount Fuji, like in Ed Zwicks’ The Last Samurai!

Here’s the iconic and stereotypical picture of Taranaki. It’s in about every bit of info you can find about the mountain, but I can’t deny it being an amazing shot! It’s too bad the wind kicked up the pond a bit, I would’ve killed for a still reflection!

After a grueling six-ish hours of hiking, climbing, and sweating, we reached Henry’s Peak! It offered an amazing view of Taranaki as well as the impending weather.  I took the opportunity to take my first and only planking picture!

We hung out here for about forty minutes before continuing on to our hut, which was maybe another hour off. By this time I was getting pretty damn tired, I’ve never hiked for over six hours at a time, and especially not with forty-plus pounds of gear on my back!

Finally- our first hut, Pouakai Hut! It was a nice little wooden hut with two rooms chock full of bunk beds, along with a kitchen and fireplace, and outhouses. They even had running water out here! Not too shabby, all things considered. We set up our tent before the wind picked up too much, and settled in before starting dinner.

As we prepared our dinner of canned butter chicken, guacamole, and hot(!) tea, we watched the clouds slowly but surely rolling in. That’s our little tent we attempted to stay the night in, loaned to us by Martyna!

After stuffing our faces with whatever hot food we could make, we made our way into the tent for the night. It was getting pretty cold by this point, since we weren’t hiking and working up a sweat. I was a tad bit unprepared for this, bringing only a fleece blanket and the clothes in my pack for warmth, as I didn’t have a proper sleeping bag. 

Around two ( I think ) a.m. I was fed up with trying to get warm enough to fall asleep, so I headed into the hut to make a little fire and try to eat something. Jen and Kelly came in a few minutes later and warmed up before heading back out into the arctic tundra.

After what felt like hours of tossing and turning, we all finally fell asleep for at least a couple of hours at a time. I woke up every now and then, but at least I wasn’t up all night…

The next morning we woke up to this. I can’t wait to go hiking! We ate a quick breakfast, packed up our gear, and as we were heading out saw our first other tramper, a spanish? guy with some crazy dreadlocks. We got him to take our picture, then bid farewell and headed off for the next leg of our journey.

This was about as clear as it ever got our second day on Taranaki. It was kind of neat at times, as you could see the clouds rolling in and blowing over the different peaks. It was about this time that I realized I packed probably 10-15 lbs of clothing and gear more than I should have, and my back was really starting to get unbearably sore. I did some minor adjustments to my waist belt, which once properly set takes an enormous amount of weight off your back!

This is the valley we had to hike down into (along that ridge to the left). You can just barely make out Hut #2, Holly Hut, on the left hand side- it’s that little white rectangle near where the river meets the mountain. A long ways off!

Here’s a panoramic shot of the valley once we got down there! It’s amazing how drastically and quickly the New Zealand landscape can change. One minute you’re in the rainforest, the next on top of a snow covered mountain, and after that a prairie!

I forgot to mention- Along the trail, every 100 meters or so, was a stoat/rat trap! They basically consist of a small wooden box, with a poisoned egg and one end, and a giant level-type mouse trap or two in the entrance. The pests either get crushed in the traps, or eat the poison eggs and wander off somewhere to croak. It sounds a little harsh, but stoats and rats (not to mention possums) create such a problem in New Zealand that they’re doing whatever they can to get rid of them. They eat native plants, don’t eat invasive plants, as well as frequently eat local juvenile birds and insects who are becoming increasingly rare.

After eating some lunch in Holly Hut, we took a short trip down to Bells Falls, which was a nice little tramp through some pretty dense rainforest and into this neat little rocky clearing you can see before you!

Since we got to Holly Hut so early in the day, we decided to make it through the next leg of our tramp. We were originally supposed to finish up after Holly Hut, and make it back to the visitor’s center, but added Maketawa Hut to our travels. This seemed like a good plan at the time, but little did we know we were going to be doing a LOT of ascending on barren, windy, foggy cliff faces. Yikes.

The first dubious portion of our third leg occurred when we came upon this slip. It’s hard to tell how steep it was from this picutre, but we were all a little bit worried about it. Steep, rocky, and to top that off the wind was picking up… having a 50L bag on your back kind of acts like a sail at that point. The shoddily painted “Don’t kill yourself” sign wasn’t incredibly encouraging, either…

Here’s a pano shot of the slip! Somehow we all made it across safely. We sent Jen first.

The fog really started coming in, and the temperature and sunlight were rapidly decreasing. There aren’t many photos from the rest of the trek today, as we (meaning Kelly and I) were getting pretty exhausted- I had reached my limit about four hours ago, and was pretty much just dragging my feet at this point.  I don’t know how she did it, but Jen was just truckin along the whole way. She really pushed us to keep going, and without her we probably would’ve just set our tent up at the first sight of flat ground.

Sadly, the last 2-3 hours of our trek was on a very thin trail, sometimes crossing snow covered portions of the mountain face. The only way to get across these was to locate other hikers’ footprints and follow those across the slip to the next portion of marked trail.  A little iffy, if you ask me. We finally stumbled into Maketawa Hut, drenched and freezing. We peeled off our wet clothes, sat in front of the fire, and ate every hot thing we could. Canned tuna, canned ravioli, anything went. Jen and Kelly for some reason decided to sleep outside again, this time UNDER the hut as it was still pouring rain. I caved and pulled a sleeping mat from the hut into the kitchen/fireplace and was for once in the last three days, WARM.

The next day we put on our sopping wet clothes, packed our gear, and headed home!

WAHOO! We survived Taranaki!

We stumbled back into the visitor’s center at about 1130, and Kelly and I were quite relieved. I think Jen could’ve done the whole thing again. This model shows Taranaki- the Pouakai Circuit is that black outline!

We explored their little mini museum for a bit, and I ordered some much needed…

…NACHOS AND BEER

Darren picked us up promptly at 1200, and drove us back to New Plymouth. He was actually a very interesting man, and since we had some time to kill before our bus home he drove us around New Plymouth, showing us some different sights, the fishing docks, and explained a bit of Maori beliefs to us. For instance, when we asked him if he had every trekked through Taranaki, he said the Maori do not feel the need to. They feel respect for the mountain, and really have no desire to walk all over it.

To be honest, the trip was pretty grueling.  It was definitely the most physically challenging thing I have ever done. There were times on the mountain that I was rethinking the whole trip, but in the end it was incredibly rewarding. A large portion of the struggle was due to my over packing- like I said, I probably had probably 10lbs too much in my pack.  The lack of proper gear was another problem, so all in all it was actually a great learning experience. I now know that I can get by with about a third of the thing I brought, which is an incredibly relieving feeling.

And thus concludes my trip to Mount Taranaki!

This is sadly my second attempt at writing about the past four weeks or so. Last night I had about 90% of my post finished before my computer decided to restart itself and erase everything I had written, pictures and all. Sigh. Anyway, here we go!

The last few weeks since break have been an interesting few! I haven’t been writing much until now since recapping the majority of mid semester break was a daunting task, to say the least.  I’ve gotten a lot of opportunities to try out some new styles of pictures, like reflection shots, animals, and tilt-shift photos, which I’ll get into in a bit. 

I started climbing a lot more often, either between classes or with the Alpine Club on Tuesday/Thursday nights. The wall isn’t as nice as Hendrix’s, but it’s bouldering-only which is pretty neat.

There’s an awesome cave area (shown here) where you can do some horizontal climbing- which is tough. I tried to take some self shots with a timer while the weather was crappy and not much was going on outside!

Lake Shots

After a few days of the usual gloomy Palmy weather, the skies cleared up and took a turn for the better. I took advantage of this rarity, and spent about an hour and a half taking shots around the lake- I’ve been wanting to take some reflection shots, and now was the perfect time! Sunny, nice clouds, and low wind (thus, still water surfaces, which provide  a better mirror surface).

Here’s a handful of shots I took around the campus lake!

This is one of my favorites. I like that the reflection as well as the bottom of the lake are visible.

Another one of my favorites! I think the colors are really nice.

Reflection shots are a really neat way to show two sides of the same object(s).  You get the normal view, coupled with a nice underbelly view that you wouldn’t normally see unless you were actually in the (very cold, and very dirty) water.

Waterfowl!

I found a little huddle of about ten ducklings, sans mama duck. I took the opportunity to grab some shots of them as well, which was quite fun. I went prone, slowly crawling towards them, careful not to scare them off. I managed to get pretty close after about ten or fifteen minutes!

This is an older duckling I saw earlier- they were a bit more inquisitive and didn’t mind getting close to the camera!

Baby ducks are probably the cutest thing to ever walk the earth.

Mama duck + some came back after a few minutes, a-hoopin’ an a-hollerin’ at me, so I decided to jet. I didn’t feel like getting chased around campus by a swarm of angry ducks.

The next day I went around for some more shots. It was a bit windier, so reflections were out. I was walking around the lake, and stumbled on one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen:

After yesterday’s shooting, this was horribly depressing. I gave it a little poke to see if it was still alive, at which point I would rush it off to the veterinarians on campus, but no dice. Sad day for sure…

One of the two swans came up to me while I was shooting, so I took the opportunity to follow it around for a while, eventually ending up at the nest where the two are currently incubating eggs!

One of the swans watching over the eggs

Jumping in for a swim…

…to go screw with some coots! Which was okay with me. Coots are assholes. I saw one chase a duck and her ducklings all around the lake, beating at them with its wings and such for no apparent reason. By this point I was a little attached to the little campus ducklings, so I wasn’t havin’ it. Good for the swan!

Swans at their nest!

Checking on the kids! I got surprisingly close to the nest before they chased me off- there was a lot of hissing going on, and they clearly weren’t happy, but it wasn’t until I was only about a foot or two away that they started getting aggressive!

EDIT: The eggs hatched! We now have a new baby swan population on campus!

How cute!

Here they are screwing with the coots again. +1 Swans!

We have a small population of long finned eel (Anguilla dieffenbachii), a common, New Zealand-endemic eel, in the campus lake. Dylan actually caught one in the creek behind the Courts, and cooked it up- not bad!

An eel going after a coot. GET IT!

Robots & Sluts

The second week after break, we threw a Massey U. version of “Robots & Sluts,” an annual party we were missing at Hendrix.  I’m still unsure as to the origins of the name/theme of the party, but alas it happens every year! Mauren spearheaded the effort, and we got a pleasantly surprising number of people to get on board! We started drinking around noon, went to dinner, made costumes, then headed to Monroe for the impending festivities. Costumes were awesome, people were sloppy- it felt just like being at Hendrix again!

This is the (rather awesome) helmet that I made. I tried to make it look inebriated/joyful at the same time, I think it worked!

Group Shot!

I also shaved Aysha’s head, who wanted to put a design into it. It’s some sort of Cook Island design, and considering what we had to work with I think it turned out pretty cool!

It was recommended to me that I check out a new store in town, so I went the next time I needed groceries. It’s this neat little shop called Hipsta, who specializes in tons of different “ethnic handcrafts and clothing,” basically heaps of hippie garb, rasta stuff, etc. I bought a new earring (don’t worry mom & dad- I didn’t size up!) and a sweet OD green tam, as pictured above! Sadly I can’t wear the earring all the time, as I think my ear is still healing a bit. The store is really fun, and the girl working there has some sweeeet dreadlocks that she got in Thailand or Taiwan, I don’t remember exactly. But they’re righteous!

Later that week, Abby, Burgess and I were working on a Biostatistics assignment due on Friday. The third part of our assignment required us to test reaction times, before and after participating in some sort of activity that would affect volunteers’ reaction times. We were pondering what to do, when Burgess suddenly remembered that he had an 18 pack of Steinlager (a rather tasty brew), wine, and some home made Kahlua (which was also pretty delicious) back at his flat.  We texted everyone we could think of, and got a group consisting of myself, Burgess, Wisco, Ben Rumbaugh, Dylan Stompe, Martyna Kotek, and Dion together. We ran our test, which was basically dropping a ruler and seeing where people caught it- not that interesting, but easy to do with limited means.  Surprisingly, the majority of people performed BETTER after drinking, go figure.

It was kind of an excuse to go drink on a week night, but hey, thanks Biostats!

I got back to my room that night, and lo-and-behold, my second weta was molting! Sadly I have no idea how to tell them apart now, but it’s still exciting! Here are some shots:

Starting to come out of the old exoskeleton…

Making some progress!

Just about finished! It’s a slow process, but fun to watch! It can actually be really dangerous for the insects, since their new exoskeletons are rather pliable when they first emerge.  This makes them very susceptible to having bent legs or losing limbs before the exoskeleton has a chance to harden.  Fortunately for this one, she’s all intact!

Our friend Maggie, who we went in Taupo during break, came up for a couple of days! It was really fun to see her. She made some delicious pumpkin soup, so her Ariel and I made some lunch when she got in!

Photo Editing

That Friday there wasn’t much going on, and I didn’t feel like going into town. I spent the evening doing some much needed editing on my photos from India, and my last two LA visits, all of which were over two years old (about time!). While Stumbling I found a tutorial on how to apply a tilt-shift effect to your pictures, something I’ve always been interested in.

Tilt-Shift: A method of photography which encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens plane relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. I’ve always wanted to take tilt-shift photos, but they require a hideously expensive lens in order to do so.  Fortunately for those of us who are not filthy rich, some mild Photoshop skills can produce a very similar effect.  What it basically does it blur the foreground and background, leaving your subject in focus.  This makes the photo look miniaturized, almost like a mini train set diorama.

Here are a few of my attempts:

This is a gorge in India, on the slow climb up the Himalayas, to Dharamsala.  I took this out of the window of our taxi/van, which itself was one of the most excruciating experiences of travel I’ve ever gone through. Fortunately, I managed to snap a few good pictures on the way up!

Another shot from Dharamsala- this little farm was across a valley from where we were staying. Awesome!

This one is probably my favorite. It’s a small section of the town near where we were staying in Dharamsala, and turned out the best out of any of them!

This one is just some hills in New Zealand, taken at some point during our mid semester break travels. Not bad!

This was taken in Auckland- some haka boats! They look like little toys post tilt-shift!

Up until this point, I had just been using old photos to apply the effect to.  Later the next week I started taking pictures TO tilt-shift, which was pretty fun. This one makes me think of Micro Machines or some sort of toy cars.

This one I took on the way to Foxton Beach. Little toy faaarm.

Foxton Beach + Rosie O’Grady’s

The following week was nothing out of the ordinary, some assignments and papers here and there, but more or less a standard week. On Friday, I got a text from Wisco asking if I wanted to go to the beach- Joubert had suggested we hightail it out of Palmy and drive down to Foxton for the afternoon before hitting Rosie O’Grady’s for happy hour. After some last minute organization, Caitlyn, Wisco, Joubery, Morgan, Ben, Max, Shayna, Becca and I piled into Joubert’s van and carted off to Foxton.

Right before we left, Wisco pointed out that you can see Mount Ruapehu from the deck of Monroe- holy crap! That’s a good four hours away, if not more. Only on reaaallly clear days can you see it, but how awesome! Anyway, on to the beach!

Cool reflection shot through Ben’s glasses! That’s Wisco you can see in the reflection- Ben and him are having a beard off, seeing who can grow it out the longest without shaving! Ohh the joys of having a beard.. sigh.

We parked at the beach entrance, which was more or less a little grassy area on the side of the road. I doubt any part of this sign is legible, but it tells some information about the beach!

There was a bit of a hike through some dunes before hitting the beach, lined with non-stop razor sharp grass that nicked your legs up real nice…

Almost there! You can just see the water in that dip in the dunes to the left. Once we got there, we were treated with a truly beautiful sight.

What a great escape from Palmy. And we couldn’t have picked a better day to do it, there were hardly any clouds in the sky!

BEACH!!!

What a goofball.

Some of us played rugby…

..While others relaxed on the beach!

There was this nasty dead puffer fish behind us, covered in flies!

…which Max decided to play with.

We also made some drip castles, which I unfortunately don’t have any pictures of! It was a nice throwback to family vacations at the beach!

I snuck off to take some shots around the beach. The dunes were really neat!

After a couple of hours at the beach, it was nearing happy hour. We piled back in the van, got cleaned up, and caught the 4:40 bus to Rosie’s!

We had beer. Lots of beer. And some awesome pub food!

Sunset/Moonrise in Palmy. Not bad!

I picked up some Guinness pint glasses. On the right is the old version, and to the left the new version. Real classy!

Our People Our Place Festival

The next morning, I accompanied Martyna Kotek and her friend Juliane to an Our People, Our Place festival that was being held in the square. I took this while waiting for the bus- I thought it looked like night time, despite being taken in the morning!

Here’s a flyer for the festival- there was an Argentinian section that had Tango lessons in the library!

The band playing did a cover of “Little Lion Man” by Mumford & Sons… awesome!!

We made our way form the concert to the library to check out the tango lessons- this was on the way there! It has nothing to do with the festival, but I thought it was a neat sculpture nonetheless. Elephant chain FTW!

Dance lessons!

After tooling around the festival for a little while, we climbed a big ol’ tree in the square and sat up there for a while. I forgot how fun climbing trees is! I haven’t been able to do that in a loong time.

It was starting to get late, so we hitched a ride with Moses, who fortunately was leaving when we were- that saved us a ~30 minute walk from town to campus!

We saw this awesome sculpture on the way to Moses’ car!

It was a bit of a squeeze fitting everyone in the car, but fortunately for everyone, Martyna fits well in the foot well!

Later that night, Serhan cooked an AMAZING dinner while we watched the Scotland/England rugby game, which was really awesome. I have to say, rugby is infinitely more fun than American Football, which I feel stops every ten seconds for some reason or another. Rugby has a much faster pace to it, and gets really intense really quickly. The game was a close one, with England pulling ahead at the last second!

Serhan had made two enormous dishes of scrumptious rice, topped with a slow cooked and probably the most tender chicken I’ve ever had. It was delicious. There were about five people surrounding each dish, and we were all just digging in with our hands. It was quite the feeding frenzy!

The rest of the weekend was pretty low key- nothing too exciting, but Martyna and I watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, one of my all time favorite movies. Gotta love Wes Anderson films!

The following week I was plagued with either whatever sickness was making it’s rounds through campus, or my allergies were finally starting to kick in (it’s spring now! in October! what the devil?). This was helped in no small party by the lovely Martyna Kotek, with whom I watched many a movie while incapacitated.

We also watched Grave of the Fireflies, a horribly depressing (but really well done) anime from 1988 about a brother and sister trying to survive during the Kobe fire bombings during World War II in Japan.

Another movie we watched was Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World, which told through Malick’s usual cryptic but interesting way the story of John Smith, Pocahontas, and their involvement with the colonization of Jamestown in early America.  It was strange, as Malick’s films tend to be, but very well done. Good acting, and awesome cast, including Colin Farrel, Christian Bale, and David Thewlis!

Martyna is one interesting and incredibly lucky girl. She spent the last year in Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, and has traveled ALL over the world (Twenty five countries in all!), including Mongolia and China! I wish I could travel to as many places as she has. Maybe after college… in a perfect world! She also likes photography, climbing trees, and movies! What more could one ask for?  That Thursday we had a picnic behind the courts, where there’s this gorgeous little plot of land with a creek running through it. We plopped down under a nice tree in the sun, and chowed down! I made some sandwiches that consisted of toasted ciabatta bread, avocado, garlic salt, tomatoes, melted brie, and satueed onions. Quite tasty!

Himatangi Beach

A rather large group of us had planned on going back to the beach on Saturday to have a bonfire/cookout, which was kind of off and on for the week as the weather was looking a bit ominous. Most of the people ended up dropping out, but at the last minute Hilal, Martyna, Jen Hillam, Ema Hicks, Aysha, and Catherine decided to go anyway! The weather held out, and we had a great time!

We found a great little recessed area in the dunes off the beach where we could have our bonfire without people noticing! Despite what looks like terrible beach weather, the clouds provided for some really neat pictures.

Despite the light rain, this was by far the quickest I have ever gotten a fire started. There was tons of grass lying around which made the perfect kindling, and some really porous wood that started burning real easy! We had to be sneaky about it, because we were technically in a fire ban area…

Fire!

Awesome sand! It was between black and white sand (gray sand, you could call it :P ) It was super smooth and felt awesome under bare feet. Until I got a shell lodged in my heel, that is…

Seagulls! They were picking at this huge gross dead fish that had washed up on the shore.

Artsy pic of a dead fish. hmm..

I found these really awesome purple flowers with big water droplets on them. I WISH I HAD A MACRO LENSE!! I didn’t get it quite as focused as I would’ve liked, but oh well!

I made a couple of tilt-shift pictures from the beach. Little tiny peeoples

All in all it was a really great day. I took tons of photos, we played football (aka “soccer”) and frisbee on the beach, and ate a smorgasbord of food that everyone brought! Hilal actually had some Louisiana Crystal Hot Sauce, one of the most delicious toppings in the world.

Here are some more random shots I took:

More fire!

Woo! It was perfect for roasting marshmallows!

Awesome clouds! You could see how the storm was kind of breaking up across the ocean, which made for a nice contrast between the clouds and clear-ish skies behind!

Towards the mainland.

Takin some pictures! I’ve been trying to get into black & white.

Martyna!

Hilal climbed to the top of the dunes, said something along the lines of, “Hey, watch me slide down!” and jumped off the dune… THUMP. He didn’t make it far (see: he hit the sand and didn’t move), but it was hilarious.

Sunset! At about this time, we were relaxing around the fire when the WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP of an alarm sounded. Expletives were shouted, sand was frantically kicked over the fire, the rest of our fire wood was spread out, and we got the hell out of dodge.  The second we came over the crest of our dune area and onto the beach, a fire patrol truck rolled up on us. They got out, asked us if we had made a fire, and went in to check it out. We high tailed it out of there, but naturally they found it and caught up to us… Fortunately, we made off with just a warning! Close call. At least we had gotten a good three hours of bonfire in before getting busted!

I did manage to snap a few more pictures of another set of ducklings on Sunday, so here they are!

This time mom was around, but she didn’t seem to mind me!

I figure out that I could lure them closer with some grass.. woo! They were adorable.

That just about catches you up until the present! The last few days have been pretty routine, lectures, food, and sleeping. I just realized how rapidly the end of the semester is approaching… I have two weeks of classes left, then a week off (hopefully full of travel), finals until November 12th, then a bit more travel time before going home! I’m sad and excited at the same time… I love this country. I miss home. It’s a terrible dichotomy! Anywho, I’ll write again when something exciting happens!

We got into Auckland around noon, and got picked up by our good friend Dion Lee Paola Chamberlain!

Dion and his lil Toyota! We stayed with Dion’s step family, who are some of the most amazing people I’ve met in New Zealand so far.

Our adoptive family from right to left: Monique, Dion, Simone, us, and Scott, Simone’s boyfriend.  I unfortunately never got a picture of Terry, so here’s one I stole from Monique! This whole family was so welcoming, funny, and just great to be around. We couldn’t have stayed at a better place in Auckland!

Terry and baby Mackenzie!

Meet Misty, the Niethe’s cat! Strange little creatures.

Dion took us the roundabout way to “One Tree Hill,” (yes, like the tv show),  a park in Auckland centered around a 182 meter tall volcanic peak.  It is currently colloquially known as “None” Tree Hill, because Maori activists cut it down, as it was seen as a symbol of colonialism. 

The top of the hill offered an amazing view of Auckland, allowing one to see both harbors and the Sky Tower!

Auckland city, Sky Tower!

More Auckland. There were some amazing clouds that day!

Dion looking pensive at the top of (n)OTH.

After getting our fill of One Tree Hill, we headed back to the Niethe’s to hang out for the evening.  Dion and I cooked some kiwi burgers for the family, which turned out to be pretty scrumptious.  Egg+ground beef, onion, some fresh chopped garlic, cheese, lettuce tomato, and the rather amazing kiwi ingredient: beet root!  Post dinner we met some of Scott and Simone’s friends, and it was really fun to hang out with some kiwis outside of campus for once!  We made fun of each other’s accents, and generally had a hilarious time together.  We proceeded to watch about three hours of Animal Planet- they have this really amazing new show called “Speed of Life” which is very Planet Earth-esque, mostly consisting of macro and high speed shots of really neat animals (see: praying mantids, basilisk lizards, chameleons, etc.).

The next day we headed into Auckland to check out the city. It was all dressed up for the world cup, which was really fun to see! We went to “The Cloud,” a neat little convention center on the bay, that had somewhat of a cultural fair, which was pretty neat.  We made our way around the city and eventually found ourselves at the looming Sky Tower, which I was pretty excited about- Weta just opened up a second “Cave” like the one in Wellington.

Sky Tower is actually a telecommunications building, though you can take a 40 second elevator to the 1,076 foot top, giving what I imagine is a spectacular view of the city.  It’s actually the tallest free-standing structure in the southern hemisphere, which is pretty neat!

Once we got into the Cave, we were greeted by an awesome statue of a Nazgul! Up to Weta’s usual standard, this sculpture was detailed down to the hair on the horse and the woven fabric of the Nagzgul’s cloak. Awesome!

They also had a what I assume to be life sized Neytiri Avatar statue, which was really neat! Sadly the cave as a whole was nowhere near as exciting as the one in Wellington. It was more of a gift shop than a showcase of all their past and present projects, but it was still fun to see!

We spent the day hiking around Auckland city, checking out shops, parks, and some really neat street art! Kind of funny to see an advert for the police in the form of graffiti…

We found a park that had three sections of an old building semi-buried in the ground. They were slowly getting covered in lichens and such, I thought this was a really neat idea! It looked like the archaic remains of an late 1800’s civilization.

It took us a while to make our way back into the city to catch the bus to Pakuranga, but I got some good night shots of the city on the way!

The Sky Tower gets lit up at night, which was really neat to see! Made for a good photo op anyhow.

The next day we went to a beautiful beach whose name I conveniently forgot, but it was a lovely place! Cold water as to be expected, but lots of cool little shells and such to collect!

Mauren collecting some shells.

A woman walked past with the cutest little dog who did NOT want to let us be, which was a-okay with us!

The gang decided to sculpt the good ol’ US of A out of shells!

Beach shot!

After that we went to Auckland city to check out this whole world cup business- the town was flooded! They projected around 100,000 people were in the city

So many people.

We met up with Ariel’s friend Rebecca from Cornell, who goes to school at Massey in Albany! She and her friends were all super cool.

We also finally met up with Leslie! It was great to see another Hendrix face in New Zealand. She seemed to be doing great, and we hung out with her and Ariel’s friends for the rest of the evening! We just toured around town observing all the crazyness until eight, when the largest fireworks show in New Zealand (ever!) started.

We got totally study abroad and ate some leftover curry that Ariel had made the night before (which was delicious, like all of her cooking- even the Niethe’s were loving it!), using lids and credit cards as utensils. Go figure.

Fireworks! The show was really fun! It was neat to see them launch from across the bay, and there were four sets of the same show going on from the edge of the bay to the mainland!

Three sets of the fireworks- the first was out of frame

Ooo Ahhh

A nice bit from the finale

The game was even projected onto the wall of a building! Pretty sweet. We decided to head back to Pakuranga to avoid the post-game masses, but boy were we wrong…

It was absolute CHAOS trying to get on the next bus. Hundreds of people were swarming every possible bus, pushing to get on before they had even stopped and opened the doors.  It was worse than a concert! Mauren and I managed to fight our way onto the bus to Pakuranga, and we watched anxiously as Ariel JUST made the cut and got on.

Once we got back, we did a quick bout of light graffiti and got ready for the bus ride back to Palmerston!

Pakuranga!

The next morning Terry very nicely drove us to the bus stop on his way to work! We grabbed some breakfast in a cafe and waited around.  I’m really going to miss our adoptive Niethe family, they were all such welcoming and warm people to be around!

Shark bus!! Saw this while waiting for the bus back to Palmy- pretty awesome!

Roughly 9 hours later, we got back to Palmerston. I spent most of the ride alternating between listening to music and sleeping, which was pretty nice after all that moving around on break! 

All in all, midsemester break was one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever done. I got to travel to so many different places around New Zealand, see some beautiful sights, and meet some people.  I learned that I can comfortably and happily live off of not much more than a backpack’s worth of stuff, which is a great feeling. It just makes me want to go backpacking/camping/traveling all the more, which is too bad considering that I’ve got a lot of work to do before I can! It was a bit of work to get back into study mode after all this :P

Some more cool shots in Auckland:

Sky Tower at night

Sunset at a park in Auckland

Cool shadows on a wall!

Sky Tower reflected on a building!

Sap! yuummm…

Lamb! They were all over One Tree Hill.

Until next time!

R

After our lovely few days in smelly Rotorua, we hopped back on the bus to go to Hamilton!

Once we got there, we ran into who other but Kim Fairhall! She was on her way back to campus, and we just so happened to be at the bus station at the same time! After saying hello and bidding her farewell, we headed off to the nearest Countdown for some groceries (the usual- pasta, sauce, and Jatz- a knockoff of Ritz crackers that are quite delicious).  We got a ride from town to Ngahinapouri by Glenn Eyers, one of Meg’s friends who live in Hamilton.

Ngahinapouri was the only place we got confirmed to couch surf- and we stayed at a dairy farm run by a man name Carl Cunningham, a fellow avid traveler and generally awesome guy.  He knew his movies, and his beer, my kinda guy.  Here’s a picture of his house! Carl has hosted heaps of couch surfers, and has had some interesting hostees from the sounds of it!

There were baby cows everywhere!

Cow butts.

One of the cows had a calcium deficiency after nursing, so Mauren helped Carl inject it with a fluid to see if it could get back up! When we left it still couldn’t stand for very long, and Carl said he might have to put it down. Poor cow!

That night we met up with Glenn, and he took us to Raglan beach for a BEAUTIFUL sunset and picnic dinner. We arrive at the perfect time, and got to see the sun go down before settling in to chow.

And now, a bunch of assorted sunset pictures:

Mauren took the headlamp and did some searching for “little things,” and found a lot of awesome shells!

Hamilton!

Our attempt at Ngahinapouri!

The next day, our chauffeur Glenn took us to HOBBITON!! We got to the starting point, a little cafe that served second breakfast and some Lord of the Rings beer, which I’ll get into later.  Before doing anything, we had to sign waivers saying that we would not post pictures of Hobbiton (sorry!) until the movie comes out sometime next year. Once everyone was situated, we hopped onto a bus dubbed Gandalf the Gray, and drove down to the shooting location!

The bathroom was decorated like a hobbit hole! I wish I could show more pictures of Hobbiton, but it’ll have to wait!

After the tour, we got to see a sheep shearing demonstration, and feed the little lambs! Mauren was beyond ecstatic. She’d be trying to pet baby sheep all break, and now was her chance!

How cute are these things!?! I never knew sheep had long tails (sorry, never snapped a pic!) and that they’re bobbed when they’re still young as they get really hairy/dirty/in the way.  They look more ridiculous than usual with long floppy tails!

We picked up some SobeRing Thought, the beer used in the movie! They wanted the extras in bar/hobbit party scenes to drink what tasted and looked like beer, but couldn’t use regular beer with the standard alcohol percentage, as the number of takes/shots used would’ve left the actors unable to perform.  Thus, SobeRing Thought was created, with a whopping 1% alc/vol.  It tasted like… watery beer. But it was a fun novelty item to pick up!

After Hobbiton, Glenn took us to Pirongia park, and we hiked the Mahaukura trail to the Wharauroa Lookout! The trail wasn’t as steep as Tauhara, but it was certainly muddier. It took some careful maneuvering not to land in some really deep mud pits!

It got steep in a couple places- Climbing, GO! (That’s Glenn, by the way!)

Trollfootin’ at the Warauroa Lookout! We got there just in time to see the sun set behind that peak in the background. It was a beautiful sight, but made the hike down a biiiit difficult as after a while we were hiking by moonlight.  In a heavily forested area.  Which actually turned out to be quite fun!

On the way down (mind you it was almost pitch black at this point) I finally saw my FIRST live, wild weta! This guy’s a cave weta, who contrarily to their names often inhabit forests.  Though it looks small, those legs made it about 7-8 inches long! AWESOME. It’s too bad it was so hard to get pictures when it’s so dark out and I don’t have a tripod…

Night shot in a little clearing on the way down!

We did some more light graffiti/long exposure shots in the parking lot before heading back to Carl’s for the evening!

More space shots! woo.

The next day we hitch hiked back into Hamilton, and caught our bus to Auckland! This is a shot of Mauren I took in the window of the bus. Kinda neat!

As usual, it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything on here, but for good (decent?) reason- life has been going as usual (classes, exams, campus life- not much to write home about!) up until mid semester break, which was indescribable! They say a picture tells a thousand words, so I’ll just load up heaps of pictures and hope they do the trip justice!

We began our trip with a stop in the always-lovely Wellington, catching the Nakedbus without problem (although Mauren’s shoes got a liiittle muddy!). Fortunately, there were no hyperactive Pepsi-chugging children this time around, and we got to Wellington in a quick couple of hours!

After some initial mixups with the Lodge in the City hostel, we ended up staying our first night in Base Wellington- a little grungier, but we had an amazing view of Wellington- here you can see a good portion of the city and a bit of the bay in the top right edge!

Some more Wellington Pictures:

The Bay!

We saw a group of guys jumping into the bay, so Wisco and I followed suit! It was cold as hell, but worth it.

Wellington is such a gorgeous place. I’d be keen to move here one day…

We met some crazy kiwis out for someone’s 18th birthday, they were heaps of fun!

Our second night in Wellington, we were in a six-person room, and paired with a goofy pair of German kids- Tobias on the left, and Fabian on the right! Tobias gave me some good dreadlock tips, although he just cut his off. They also figured out how to get onto the roof of the hostel, which gave a pretty fly view!

The next day we hiked to the top of Mount Victoria, where the scene during “The Fellowship of the Ring” in which our hobbity heroes jump off the road to escape the ring wraiths was shot!

Ariel hiding from the ring wraiths- sadly we never found the tree used, if it’s still there.

We also ended up meeting a friend of a girl from Hendrix while in Wellington, whom (who? I never know which to use) she knows from Ghana! Amber works in a bead/jewelry store, so I bought a big wooden ring for one of my dreads! Shortly thereafter, we walked up to a great piercing shop that Amber recommended called Ninja Flower (check them out- http://www.ninjaflower.co.nz/ ), and the girls wanted to check out. I ended up putting a 3mm hole in my ear, go figure! I got a black titanium gauge, and it’s actually healing up quite nicely.

Here Scott’s about to put the needle through… I wasn’t really nervous about it once I decided to go through with it, but it did hurt a bit. I guess having a 3mm needle go through your ear isn’t supposed to feel TOO good, though. 

I had loosely thought about getting a gauge done while in New Zealand, but by the time the initial piercing had healed and I could then move up to a bigger gauge, it’d probably be time to leave the country. The place we went to, Ninja Flower, was a really well put together place. It was extremely clean, the two co-workers, Esther and Scott, were very well informed and honest with customers, and it was overall a great experience. They had a novel method of using a large needle to instantly gauge a piercing, without having to remove ear material, as some instant-gauge methods (basically hole punching) do.  This allows for a larger sized piercing, while still ensuring the hole can close up should that be desired.

All done! I really like it- Subtle, but still there. I’d love to start smithing my own gauges once it heals up and I can sculpt with different materials, but first I have to see what mom and dad say.  I unfortunately might have to take it out, but in the end, it’s not worth emancipation.

Our next stop over break was in Napier, and we stayed at The Stables, a horse-stable (go figure) themed lodge that was quite cozy! Napier was a quiet little place compared to Wellington, although we did get there on a Monday evening, so we didn’t expect much to be going on.  I would’ve liked to stay a bit longer, but at the same time, there is so much to do in New Zealand it’s hard to sit still!

Here Wisco puts up his fightin’ dukes in the common area.

They had two cats there, who were quite happy to hang out on Mauren’s back!

Since we only had an evening in Napier, we took a stroll along the pretty (and very, very cold beach) where Wisco did his ritual jumping-in-places-he-goes. None of us followed him in.

Squid on the beach!

Next up: Taupo!

The ride from Napier to Taupo was unbelievable. We passed some of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen, and it’s hard to give the country justice with a couple pictures.

Snowy Mountains! My god I want to move to this country.

Our first day in Taupo! We followed a foot path for a couple (or more) hours in search of some hot springs, and were treated with not only a great walk, but some absolutely stunning views along the way.

We eventually ended up by these bluffs, where a bungee company operated off that cliff to the right. You can just see the crane and bungee cables hanging over the edge at the top right.  We saw them drop a bungied chair, and oooh was it tempting to jump!

After Wisco and I hunted around for a hot spring for about an hour, we eventually found a beaauutiful (and free!) place with scalding hot water.  We met a group of Americans at the hot springs, go figure! They are studying in Wellington, so we now have a place to stay for future endeavors!

We ended up hanging out with the other Americans that night at their campsite, which was really fun! Eventually got a fire started (as you can see, no actual fire wood was used- I think that’s some page from a pamphlet?), and sat around drinking/making light graffiti, which is always fun.

The next day we hiked Mt. Tauhara with the Americans, which was quite an experience. The majority of the two hour hike was one of the steepest grades I’ve ever hiked, but it was well worth the work, as we were treated with an interesting view from the top!

Tauhara was beautiful! Here’s our new friend Maggie hiking up the path. It got a little hairy at times, with really dense foliage and thin paths with a pretty far dropoff on the other side!

At times the path would take us through these really awesome mini gorges!

We were treated with a breathtaking view halfway up- but this would drastically change once we reached the top!

It was so foggy at the top, you couldn’t see over the edges! The mist added a really surreal feeling to the whole experience- we all felt like we were in another world! It was cold and windy, unlike the rest of the hike (which was quite sweaty)!

Another view form the top!

The base of the mountain was really neat- there were these deep valleys cut into the side, and several cow farms below! A great place to sit and chill after a great hike, among the numerous cow patties.

5FingerFoot at the cow farm below Mount Tauhara!

After the hike we all returned to the hot spring, and started taking some night shots! Taking photos at night can be tricky, because you have to have a slower shutter speed (the shutter stay open for long while taking a photograph) to let in more light. You can also mess around with the aperture, which lets in more or less light, to change the brightness and depth of field. This one was taken during the last little bit of sunset, with the moon slowly rising above us! It was the perfect night to shoot- dark and cloudless!

Wisco playing with my Surefire!

20-30 second exposure, with an f/stop of about 4.5 I believe! On really clear nights you can see the Milky Way!

After a short bus ride through some of the most beautiful countryside in existence, we got to Cactus Jack’s in Rotorua, fun Mexican themed hostel!

Since there were 4-5 of us sharing a room with one key, this is generally how we got into our room if the key holder wasn’t available. Meg’s being a little more zombie-like than usual, but it was always a little freaky when you saw an arm reaching through the window and flopping around trying to find the door knob!

Rotorua’s plans- on a band-aid no less! How study abroad.

Our first order of business after moving into the Rainbow Lodge was zorbing! Basically, you jump into a giant plastic gopher ball, and roll down a hill. We took a bus out of the city, as the zorbing spots were pretty far away. After getting to the place, we signed up on some computers, filling out generic waiver stuff, and taking a picture for our official zorbing certificates (which I seem to have lost at the moment, or I’d show you a picture!). After that we trucked up the hill, dove headfirst into our zorbs (Wisco and I did a tandem), and giggled the entire way down, slipping and sliding around the zorb at a surprising pace! The whole experience is probably under forty seconds long, but it’s one of the strangest and most fun things I’ve ever done!

After our second day in Rotorua, Wisco left to go FHINZ (a WWOOF type organization that’s New Zealand-specific) at a farm in Karikari. He hitch-hiked the whole way there rather successfully! We were sad to see him go, but we were also gaining a new member: Meg Harahan!

Like the thugz we are, we picked meg up from the Nakedbus stop and moved her in! We went to the redwood forest today, which like the rest of New Zealand, was beautiful!

At that cliffhanger, I’ll leave you for now! More to come soon!

I’ve never seen the redwoods in California, but these ones were HUGE! The hike itself was really amazing. Not too steep of an incline, so you could really focus on what was around you as opposed to just trying to make it up to the top.

On the way up, and throughout the rest of the hike, there were tooons of fiddle heads! If you don’t know, fiddleheads are the curled tops of ferns before they open up (a process called cercinate vernation, in case you were wondering). Even though New Zealand plays up the fiddlehead/fern a ton, I still thought they were really neat to see in person.  They rest of the group began referring to them as “alien monkey tails,” which I think is a pretty accurate description!

Giant trees, giant ferns.. everywhere! It’s really hard to capture the scale of the flora life with a camera, so I thought I’d step in an try to give some idea of how enormous the plants were!

At the top of the hike- we were treated with a nice view of some hotspring type geysers, and some amazing clouds!

The sun started setting on the way down, which treated us to some gorgeous views through the trees!

They’re everywhere!!

The next day we hiked around stinky lake Rotorua again (which smells so bad because of heaps of hydrogen sulfide emissions coming from the ground, as well as sulphuru deposits, which leaves a horrid sulphur smell throughout the city, but is particularly strong along the coastline).  Despite the smell, Lake Rotorua was quite beautiful. A nice easy walk with paths along the shoreline, we saw tons of birds!

A ways down the coast, we found some natural mudpits where the hydrogen sulfide was bubbling up out of the ground! It was especially stinky around here (almost nauseatingly so), but they were quite a sight to see!

Here’s one of the “geysers” spewing stinky stinky hydrogen sulfide out of the ground. Really neat to look at, awful to smell!

A broader view of where the mudpits were! Really cool landscaping. New Zealand has an interesting variety of types of land, from forests to mountains to pasture/grasslands, to deserty-looking rocky areas.

Rotorua is just riddled with Pukekos, which, despite being a fairly common bird, I think are really neat looking! They have nice colorful plumage, and are a little strangely shaped. Enormous legs and feet (they’re fast runners), and the bright red heads are pretty swell too.

That night we played around with some more long exposure/graffiti shots at a nearby park, which was pretty cool over the lake!

With the Surefire on the lake, you can see all the steam rising up! I guess the water was pretty (relatively…) warm!

Rotorua!

Some random, cool looking graffiti! Sometimes just running around with a flashlight produces some fun effects!

We had to rep Hendrix while we were here!

This concludes our mid semester trip from Wellington, Napier, Taupo, to Rotorua! Next up will be Hamilton and Auckland! I hope you enjoyed this portion of our trip, the rest will be up shortly!

Today I got my New Zealand-endemic pets from the ecology lab! Two awesome little female Hemideina crassidens, or Tree Weta.

I made a vivarium with some tupperware and a strainer. Cut a hole in the tupperware, pull the screen off the strainer, and glue it on.. voila! Once that’s done, I’m ready for bugs!

Next up: The critters themselves!

This is #1. Neither of them have names yet (edit: this one’s Boomer!), but I’m working on it! She was the first one that I saw, as the second had lodged herself in a roost pretty well (it was daytime, and they’re nocturnal)! Unfortunately, one of her antennae is about half the length it should be… hopefully with the next molt it’ll grow back! After playing with/shooting her for a bit, I got them all situated in their new home:

I laid down a layer of soil and moss, then placed their two roosts and some food (all the leaves, as well as some unpictured carrot slices). Nice place!

Oh, just crawlin on the cage.

On the desk! These things are so cooool. Check out the nasty spikes on the back legs!

Back in the cage! Mauren let me borrow her Nikon and macro lense for those last three shots… amazing!! I can’t wait to get a macro lense for the NEX-5. Anywho weta are so awesome! They can be a little fiesty at times, and it’s too bad they’re nocturnal, I just want to play with them and take pictures all day!

I plan on catching a local male, and hopefully it’ll play nice with the rest of the two. The males have some awesome looking mandibles, and are the logo for Weta Workshop!

Weta Workshop’s logo

How sweet are those!? This one is a Hemideina thoracica, but they all look pretty similar! Anyway I’ll make a non-weta post soon ( I have been up to other things than playing with bugs, I swear).

Hello true believers, I’ve spent the last week doing some AMAZING things! Namely, having a unimaginably great time in Wellington, and learning the All Black Haka.

Last Thursday all of our female friends had a “Girls’ Night”, so the boys learned the All Blacks’ Haka, a ritual chant performed during every rugby game.

A bit about the Haka:

“The centrality of the haka within All Black rugby tradition is not a recent development. Since the original “All Black” team of “New Zealand Natives” led by Joseph Warbrick the haka has been closely associated with New Zealand rugby. Its mystique has evolved along with the fierce determination, commitment and high level skill which has been the hallmark of New Zealand’s National game.

The haka adds a unique component, derived from the indigenous Maori of New Zealand, and which aligns with the wider Polynesian cultures of the Pacific.

The All Blacks perform the haka with precision and intensity which underpin the All Black approach” (http://www.allblacks.com/index.cfm?layout=haka). The lyrics read as such:

Ka Mate! Ka Mate!
Ka Ora! Ka Ora!
Tenei te ta ngata puhuru huru
Nana nei i tiki mai
Whakawhiti te ra
A upane ka upane!
A upane kaupane whiti te ra!
Hi!!

In English:

I die! I die! I live! I live!
I die! I die! I live! I live!
This is the hairy man
Who fetched the Sun
And caused it to shine again
One upward step! Another upward step!
An upward step, another.. the Sun shines!!

After a two-ish hour bus ride from Palmerston to Wellington, our first night consisted of checking into our hotel, and catching up to the rest of our group, who had gotten in a few hours previous. We got a lot done that night.

 We stayed in a hostel called “Lodge in the City,” a nice little place with pool tables, tiny rooms, and a storage closet that smelled like dead bodies. Or spilled milk. Either way, it was sour and pretty gross… Besides that, it was a great place to hole up for the weekend!

The next morning (Saturday) we walked around town, got a fantastic breakfast at an all-day diner (eggs benedict!) and headed out to Mirarmar to visit one of the sole reasons I went to New Zealand… Weta Workshop’s “Cave,” a sort of mini museum/gift shop!

Above is me at the Cave, about as excited as I’ve ever been.  Weta makes the highest quality movie props/concept design/effects that I’ve ever seen, and has worked on some amazing films, such as the Lord of the Rings triology, Hellboy, District 9, Braindead (Peter Jackson’s first film), Avatar, the upcoming Tintin movie, the Halo 3 live action shorts collectively known as “Landfall,” and many more.

They had an awesome statue of Lurtz, one of the Uruk-Hai from LOTR! He didn’t look too happy to be there, though…

Gollum was in the lobby too, just chillin with a fish.

Little Chris Johnson was there, lookin’ cute and tentacley as ever. This sculpt was amazing… the intricate exoskeleten, the eyes, all the tentacles… Weta’s got skills.

An amazing set of Sauron armor, which took over four months (if I remember correctly) to complete, also sat in the lobby. Get this- the actor who portrayed Sauron and several prominent Orcs was IN THE STORE WITH US! Apparently he’s quite shy though, so we didn’t get to bother him.

Braindead props! Hardcore Peter Jackson fans should recognize these. These I were not expecting!

Any Tintin fan should recognize this from the cover of “Red Rackham’s Treasure”! What a great sub design.

I almost wet myself when I saw these! District 9 prawn weapons! Oh they were so amazing looking… I couldn’t believe how great these sculpts were! The attention to detail was flawless, from scratchy battle damage down to strange alien gunk oozing out of the canisters. AHHH!

The guy running the store that day, Mark, took some of the weapons down to let us play with them!  Needless to say, I was ecstatic. D9 is one of my all-time favorite movies and I thought the creature/technology design was amazing, and these props were no exception! They looked and felt great…it’s too bad they run upwards of $700 a piece! I would love to own some of these… time to start sculpting! Mark was a fascinating guy, and really friendly. We chatted about different movies, the Dr. Grordbort’s concept, some of the different props in the store and their creation, and how awesome we think Weta is for a looong time. Apparently he was one of the drunkards in The Prancing Pony scene of Fellowship, as well as a background Orc in a few different scenes!

Weta also had this awesome collection of steampunk pistols from the Dr. Grordbort’s concept, which I’m still a bit unclear as to what exactly it IS, but as usual for Weta the design and execution was amazing! They had a really great steampunk/old school sci-fi look to them, and some, like this Derringer-esque “Victorious Mongoose,” had a twinge of western flair. Sadly, there was no “Unnatural Selector,” Grordbort’s blunderbuss type rifle, which I think had a great look to it.

http://wetanz.com/the-unnatural-selector-miniature-edition/from/brand

The next day we went to Te Papa museum, which was incredible! It was right off the pier, which in itself was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever laid eyes on. Sprawling mountain range, a clear blue harbor, and houses built into the sides of hills… gorgeous!

Much to my glee-filled surprise, Te Papa was in possession of… THE COLOSSAL SQUID! Some of you may not know this, but squid just happen to be one of my favorite animals of all time, so this was a fantastic surprise! The exhibit had heaps of information about the capture in the Ross Sea, dissection (which took place at Te Papa!), preservation, and anatomy of the squid. Read more at http://squid.tepapa.govt.nz/ !

They also had FREAKING DINOSAURS!!! These two Deinonychus statues were amazing sculpts. Like the squid, I wasn’t expecting this and it was a more than pleasant surprise.  What guy DOESN’T like dinosaurs?

Next to the dinos there was a little bit about the Weta, my new favorite New Zealand critter- fascinating little (well, rather large actually) insects of which there are approximately 70 different species in New Zealand alone! I’m currently in the process of researching the four main species of weta endemic to New Zealand for Biological Evolution and New Zealand Environments! Those four are classified under the order Orthoptera, suborder Ensifera, family Anostostomatidae, and the genera Deinacrida (giant weta), Hemideina (tree weta), Hemiandrus (ground weta), and Motuweta (tusked weta). The word weta itself comes from the Maori wētā. In case you were wondering.

All in all, Wellington was an amazing place.  Fun city, lots of cool stores and sights to see. I can’t wait to go back! There was so much we couldn’t see in one weekend.  This one alone I took 496 pictures, so I unfortunately had to leave a bit out of this post…

Last up: more food! This time Ariel and Abby made pumpkin-apple scones (I chopped the apples! woot!), which were without a doubt the best scones I’ve ever eaten! I’m digging this cooking with pumpkin thing… we need to get another! This weekend we’re going to try to BBQ, make some Mexican, and go tramping or Zorbing! Zorbing is basically rolling down a hill in a giant inflatable hamster ball. How could that not be awesome?

Last night Ariela and I went out to dinner and got some delicious Korean food! I got some bibimbap, we shared the side dishes which had kimchi, a spinachy leafy thing, and some root-y sweet potatoey stuff, and Ariel got a rice bowl with tofu! Everything was incredibly tasty… I have to start eating more Korean food!

Side Dishes! The kimchi is growing on me. Yum as!

Ariel’s tofu-rice dish!