Just another day in paradise…

Monday:
11:30am Biology midterm

1:15pm Psychology midterm

Tuesday:
1:00am board a bus bound for the ferry

8:30am arrive at breakfast spot, a McDonalds near the ferry, after a very long drive

11:00am ferry to Heron Island

1:00pm arrive on Heron Island and be amazed

Spend less than 30 minutes walking around the perimeter of the entire island



4:00pm snorkel safety lesson

Shortly thereafter, find out that we are evacuating the island due to the impending Cyclone Ului

Try to watch the sunset, get caught in random rain, run away from beach

Go hang out on the jetty looking for sea turtles, find a few

Stay up late watching a movie, get a few hours of sleep

Wednesday:
7am breakfast

Snorkel until 9:30

Walk around island again, see at least 100 rays and 2 sharks not 5 feet away

Pack, leave room by 11:00am

11:15 lunch

Hang out on the jetty watching sea turtles, Gus the giant groper, and rays. Try to catch the rays jumping up out of the water.

1:00pm leave our island paradise after only 24 hours

2 more hours on a ferry, 7 more hours on a bus, dinner at a truck stop, arrive back in Brisbane around 11pm on St. Patrick’s Day and crash asap.

Brisbane, part 1

Queensland museum
Not my favorite museum, but nice anyway. Free, which is always a plus.

Salsa dancing in the square
Tough, tiring, and a lot of fun. Also free.

Pub crawl
$15, 5 bars, Jay’s birthday celebration, excellent night.



Pulp Fiction
We saw this at an old theater just down the street from our hotel. I had never seen it. It was good.

Pan’s Labyrinth
We could have seen this at the old theater, but we had the DVD so we watched it at the hotel. I really enjoyed the movie, even if you do have to read it all.

Casablanca
I had never seen this one either, which is surprising since it’s such a classic. I loved it. I’ll have to watch it again soon.



That’s all I can really remember doing in Brisbane. We haven’t been here for very long, though. I’ll post more later.

3 weeks in Sydney, AUS

La Traviata at the Sydney Opera House
Price of the ticket (just a few rows from stage, almost dead center): $275
Price I, as a student, paid for that ticket: $55



Wicked
Front row center, price of ticket: $30, thanks to the daily lottery for cheap tickets

Bondi Beach
Only cost us the bus trip there, and dinner/Sangria on occasion. Awesome place.

Taronga Zoo
Adult price: $41
Student price: $28 Thank you, Tech
Drew and I got to pet a wallaby (tiny kangaroo) and a wombat (huge mammal, looks like a teddy bear). The wombat tried to climb the fence, and tried to bite Drew. He was completely adorable. Also adorable, the tiny sugar gliders that ran across the glass walls of their cage. Too cute! We also saw an emu, grey kangaroos, and a platypus.



Mardi Gras
Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, to be precise. We went to see Wicked the night of the parade. It was an interesting weekend, though.

Avatar and Alice in Wonderland at IMAX
I had never seen Avatar, so this was awesome.
Alice, obviously amazing (if you know my love of Johnny Depp)
$23 for students

Fish market
I didn’t like fish before coming on this trip, but I’ve opened my mind to some of it, including mussels, which I never thought I’d like but I do

Kangaroo
I ate kangaroo. It was interesting. The chef wouldn’t cook it past medium, which is the rarest I’ve ever eaten a meat, but it was pretty good regardless. Way too expensive though. $25

Caving
Awesome! We went into the Blue Mountains to a cave called the Plughole, and we went adventure caving. It was my first time really caving, and I loved it. I can’t wait to do it again! $70



Sydney Aquarium
Pretty cool place, definitely worth the trip. We saw dugongs, which are like ocean manatees. Also had a student rate, but I don’t remember what it was.



Markets
We went to several markets in Sydney, including Paddy’s, which wound up being our main shopping center for three weeks.

Possums
We got to pet wild possums in the park just up the street from our hotel! I sat in the grass near a tree and let them come up to me, and I got to pet at least 5 of them. It was amazing. They’re adorable, not like our possums back home. Cost: nothing at all

If you didn’t catch the common theme, Sydney is very student-friendly. They want students to be able to experience things that we would otherwise be unable to experience, like amazing seats at an opera. No student would ever pay $275 for their first opera, and even if they wanted to they probably wouldn’t be able to. We were able to gain an appreciation for opera without breaking the bank. Overall, Sydney was a great success.

South Island Tour, and Farewell NZ

Sorry this has taken so long. Between traveling, packing, finals, papers, moving, and exploring some more, I’ve been too busy to sit down and write about all of the awesome things I’ve seen and done. But here’s an attempt.



Our last weekend in New Zealand was amazing. We left Wellington on Thursday (February 11) afternoon and flew into Christchurch, a town on the south island. The plane ride was great, and lasted all of half an hour. We leveled out for maybe two minutes before beginning out descent into Christchurch. Crazy!

Our primary mode of transportation for the weekend was a van, but since we had 13 people we also booked a car so that everyone would have a little bit of breathing room, and room for bags. Our poor van was interesting. We weren’t entirely sure if it would survive the weekend, but the van, and all of its passengers, including the moss growing in the windows, made it safely back to Christchurch on Monday, so it worked out nicely. That’s right, we didn’t bother going back to Wellington until Monday, because we get one free absence per class and it seemed like the perfect time to get some extra travel time in before leaving the country. Our hostel that night was huge, and we were in a room with 38 people, sectioned off into groups of 4. My room (which was 3 walls and a curtain) had 3 of the girls from our group and one random guy who we never met because he came in after we went to sleep and wasn’t awake when we left the next morning. It’s fun meeting random people in hostels. We ran into a guy from Alabama in the hostel. He recognized the GA Tech clothes most of us were wearing and introduced himself. Small world :)



We spent Friday morning exploring Christchurch, which turned out to be a beautiful city. We walked along the river, where we saw people in gondolas. I wanted to ride, but we were on a tight schedule. We ended up at the Botanical Gardens, which were beautiful. I took lots of pictures of bees on flowers. Biology has ruined me. Anyway, we left Christchurch early that afternoon and headed towards the glaciers, stopping along the way to admire the beauty of New Zealand one last time. We stopped at Arthur’s Pass, where we met some very friendly keas. Keas are parrots, and they’re notorious for getting into everything and tearing up the rubber around car windows. These keas were definitely used to people being around and feeding them. They would pose for a picture, then approach you expecting some food. It was kind of sad, since they are learning to depend on humans for food, but it made for some great photo ops. We made sure to close our car doors and windows before chasing them around with cameras.



Kea on the car. The doors were shut soon after.



Kea on the van :)

At some point during the day, we climbed a really pretty waterfall. I managed to hit my knee on a rock, and I still have a little bit of a bruise 3.5 weeks later. It was awesome though.
Some of our group took the car to a place called Pancake Rocks, which was apparently beautiful. The rest of us were already tired and were not willing to take an extra few hours to get to the hostel, so we opted to take the van and continue towards Franz Josef, a town near the glaciers. We stopped at a few lookouts along the way and took some amazing pictures.



The hostel was nice, although I can’t remember too many details about it. The next day was foggy and rainy, and our glacier walk was canceled. This was especially discouraging because some of our group had opted to do ice climbing (much more dangerous, I would say) at a different glacier very close by and their tour had not been canceled. So we decided to crash their party and go see the glaciers from as close as we could get. Turns out, you don’t really need to be on a tour to get a really good view of the glaciers, and when it’s that cold, you don’t mind not standing on the actual ice. After seeing the glaciers, we headed towards our next hostel, stopping at several points along the way for more pictures. We stopped in Queenstown for dinner at a place called Fergburger, which is listed in every guidebook we have and is relatively cheap. It was amazingly delicious, and we actually ended up going back on our return trip a few days later. I honestly can’t remember too many of the details from the rest of that day, but I remember it being a lot of fun.

Once again, we crashed fairly soon after arriving at the hostel. Sunday started much earlier than we had anticipated, with a bus showing up to take us to another bus to take us to Milford Sound. Crazy morning. The bus to Milford Sound was great. Our driver told us things about New Zealand along the way, and although we had heard most of the things in biology class (for the last 5 weeks) it was nice to see some of the things firsthand, and to hear a Kiwi’s take on everything. It rained most of the day, and it was cold, but we couldn’t have cared less. We took a cruise, and on the way out we had dolphins following along beside the boat. We even saw a baby dolphin! Through the mist we could see cliffs and waterfalls and caves and seals, all of which were beautiful despite the low visibility. We went really close to one waterfall and wound up in the mist, where some of our group got completely soaked. I stood behind a wall so that only my face and my rain jacket would get wet. It was effective, and fun.



After our cruise and the bus ride back to the hostel, we headed back towards Christchurch. We were staying in a hostel about halfway between our last hostel and Christchurch so that we could get to the airport without having to drive for hours on end the next morning. We got to the hostel fairly late, but we ended up staying up for hours anyway. The hostel was a collection of buildings in a field in the middle of nowhere, and we filled the entire thing. It was very cold, but the clouds had cleared so we decided to do a little star-gazing before bed. We took our comforters out into the field so we wouldn’t freeze, and we watched shooting stars until well after midnight. It was the perfect ending to the perfect weekend on the south island.

Monday morning came way too quickly. We left the hostel before daylight, since some of our group had to catch an earlier flight to make it to the class they had missed on Thursday. We got to Christchurch around noon, returned the car, and began exploring some more. We went to an art gallery for a little while, had lunch, and began preparing for our flight back to Wellington. We were very sad to see the weekend, and this half of the program, end, but we definitely made the most of our short time in NZ.

Dr. Volcano's Trek to Mt. Doom

Sorry it's been so long since I updated this. Things got a little crazy for a while there. We had our Taupo weekend, which is a 4 day group-wide trip to Lake Taupo and some volcanoes in the area. Dr. Volcano (Dr. Parker) is the Kiwi professor we had for the first 3 weeks of our Island Biogeography (biology) course. He taught us about plate tectonics, rock types, etc. and then showed us all of those things in the field. We took a ski lift up Mt. Ruapehu. We were then chased back down Ruapehu by a storm and bugs. On Saturday we hiked to the saddle between two mountains, one of which was Mt. Ngauruhoe (Mt. Doom from Lord of the Rings). This was an exhausting hike, but I enjoyed it. Also, every night was movie night in mine and Allison's room, which was a lot of fun. I was not aware that 12 people could fit in a tiny hotel room, but apparently it's possible. Those were the major things we did last weekend, but a lot of little things happened to take up our resting time.
Last week was no less busy. Monday was a normal class day, but Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were field trip days. Our field trip days involve climbing around on rocks to check out tidepools, counting how many birds visit feeders in the wild life reserve, and meeting the US ambassador to NZ. Sort of exhausting. This weekend we stayed in Wellington for the NZI Sevens Rugby Tournament, which translates to the biggest party of the year. Everyone dresses up in crazy costumes, gets drunk, and has a giant 3 day party in the streets of Wellington. There's supposedly some rugby being played while all of this is going on, but I think that may just be a rumor.
Today is Sunday, and everyone is resting and recovering from the excitement of the weekend before we start another week of classes. Only 2 weeks left in NZ, and nobody is ready for this half of the adventure to be over yet.

Stream we hiked along

Our lab, the tide pools are in there somewhere

"Steven, your Y chromosome is showing!"

The title was a quote from this weekend, Aerin's or Allison's, not sure which. Steven and Tomas went exploring after kayaking, a very boy thing to do since we were being picked up very soon. I believe the Y chromosome comment was made while Steven was climbing a random cliff. Go figure. I guess that rash (male-ness comes out like a rash, in case you were wondering) is getting more and more difficult to control. Haha.

This weekend was epic. We left Wellington in 2 cars (there were 9 of us this weekend) Thursday afternoon and drove 7 hours to our first hostel. Tired is an understatement. Friday we got up relatively early and went blackwater rafting. We abseiled into a cave (it's like repelling, sort of), waded through the water to get our floats, hiked upriver to a flat spot, turned off our headlamps and just stared at the ceiling. There were thousands of gloworms in this cave. It was an amazing sight. We then floated down the river (through the cave) for a little while before climbing up onto the rocks and doing some caving. We climbed over, under, and through random rocks and holes, trying not to fall or lose our gumboots in the process (not an easy task). Maneuvering in wetsuits is not as easy as you might think. I can't describe this experience in enough detail for you to understand how cool it really was. We hiked back upriver (still in the dark, cold cave, in water up to our knees in most places) to the cave exit, where we had abseiled in 3 hours earlier. That means it was a big cliff that we now had to get back up. This was accomplished by climbing up the side of said cliff, which was covered in moss in some places, had very tiny ledges for toes, and was perfectly vertical in other places. Still, we all made it out alive and very sore.

The rest of Friday was spent napping and relaxing. At least some of us chose that option. The boys (Steven, Tomas, and Matt) decided to go exploring, so they took one of the cars and went who knows where and apparently explored a cave on their own. Now you know why we call male-ness a rash. They just can't help themselves. Charity and Aerin explored the town for a little while. Sheri, Allison, Miranda, and I chose to nap for a few hours instead. Great decision. It's amazing how comfortable a foreign place can be when you're completely exhausted and how peaceful it can be when you send half of your group off to do other things while you sleep. :)

Saturday was another busy day, but it was much less strenuous. We visited some hot springs, where we spent a couple of hours lounging around and enjoying the hot water. We then went to a place called Hell's Gate. Hell's Gate is one of the most active geothermal sites in NZ, apparently. There were dozens of pools of hot water, bubbling up from underground. Of course, the whole place (and therefore all of our clothes and belongings) smelled like sulfur, but it was too cool a place to pass up based on the smell. We were able to put our hands in one of the pools (one of few that was less than 98 Celsius) and feel the mud, which was thought to have healing powers. Saturday night we went to a Maori cultural dinner and show, which turned out to be even better than we expected. We had an amazing dinner. I tried lamb, fish, mushrooms, and some other random things that I can't really identify. I wasn't sure how I felt about eating lamb, but it was really good. I'm not a fish fan, but this fish was amazing. I went back for a second helping. I really am embracing new experiences and trying new things every chance I get! The actual show was fantastic. We got to experience the Maori culture, and Sheri and Steven got to experience it firsthand. Sheri was called up to do a poi dance (it looked pretty complicated, you have to be really coordinated to manage. It involves swinging a ball around and catching it, and bouncing it off the back of your hand. I can't even describe it) and Steven was called up to perform the Haka, or war dance. The video is on his facebook. I suggest everyone go watch it. I'll try to post it here when I get a copy. :) Miranda and I were laughing so hard we were crying, so my pictures didn't turn out too great, but it was worth it.

Sunday, we went kayaking down the Whanganui River... 22 kilometers down the river. It was very tiring, but definitely worth it. The 5+ hour drive back home was less than exciting, but the car karaoke was pretty awesome. We have a 3 day week this week, leaving for Taupo Thursday morning and coming back to Wellington on Sunday. So much to do, so little time!

The girls after kayaking the river

Sheep!!

Last weekend was our first real adventure in New Zealand. We got out of class on Thursday afternoon and boarded a ferry for the south island at 6. After a 3 hour ferry ride (napping some, of course) we arrived in Picton, described by Kiwis (native New Zealanders) as "a hole" for good reason. After 5, there is nothing open in Picton except the hostels. So we found our hostel, which could have been much worse, thank goodness, and went to sleep. It had been a long day, getting up at 6:30, classes, packing, travelling.

Friday morning we got up and had breakfast in Picton. The town is actually pretty nice during the day. We got a lot of great pictures (check facebook soon). We picked up our rental car at noon and then the real fun began. I got to drive on the left side of the road through winding roads up the side of a mountain. Kiwi drivers are INSANE. I was passed by a lot of them because I was staying right at the speed limit, and they pass in the middle of turns. I really thought some of them were going to hit oncoming cars. I was even being passed when the speed limit was 100km/hr and I was at the limit. We stopped at a couple of lookouts on the way to Nelson, where we stayed Friday and Saturday night. We took a lot of really pretty pictures, including the one on my blog (not the one on the first entry). We also stopped to play in a stream. In January :) Our hostel in Nelson was amazing. We were able to cook a spaghetti dinner Friday night, pizza Saturday, and breakfast Sunday morning before heading back to Picton to catch the ferry to Wellington.

We went to Tahuna Beach on Friday (again, January!!), and Steven swam out to this huge rock that he just HAD to climb. Aerin, Allison, and I looked at the tidepools in the rocks closer to shore while he went on his adventure, and wound up getting semi-trapped by the tide. We then proceeded to climb up onto our own rocks and jump up onto the sidewalk above us. It was our own little adventure.

Saturday was amazing. We got up early and visited the market in Nelson, where we bought a few souvenirs, and then headed up to Abel Tasman, a national park not too far from Nelson where we went sea kayaking (completely new experience for me). We paddled out to a small beach, where we had lunch and Steven climbed another rock (and then back-flopped off), then we paddled across to Adele Island (I think) where seals hang out. When we got around to the north end of the island, we found the rest of the Pacific Program group (we split up on Thursday but had booked the same events) along with at least 10 if not 15 seals, including babies :). I took Steven's camera and got some really good pictures, which I will upload as soon as I get them from him, and he continued paddling. Sometimes it pays to have a guy around. We lost Aerin and Allison at this point because we kept going around the island to see what's "just around the next corner!" So we continued our adventure alone. The return trip was exhausting, but well worth it. We made it back to shore (an hour later) with minor blisters and pains, and a pretty impressive sunburn on the one place i neglected to put sunscreen. I guess I was just too excited about getting in the water.

On the way back to Nelson we stopped at a place called Rabbit Island. It had to be the most peaceful, open beach I have ever been to. There were very few people and no pets, so we were able to take a lot of pictures of the scenery. We made it back to Nelson fairly early, so we were able to go to the grocery store and get back to the hostel in time for pudding. We spent close to an hour socializing with a girl from England who is spending her gap year (between high school and university, apparently it is customary to spend a year travelling) in NZ. It was interesting to talk to her about her travels and the differences between England and America. It was also interesting to hear her views on government healthcare, since she comes from a country that has it. I enjoyed talking to her. Then I talked to a woman from Germany who is cycling (as in bicylcle...has anyone looked at the pictures of the mountains I've posted??) through NZ. I was impressed.

To explain the title, we FINALLY saw some sheep in NZ! Sheep outnumber humans in NZ, but we're staying in a city so we had yet to see any. We definitely saw sheep and cows (you know how we stop for trains in the states? They stop for cows here. And sheep, but we didn't have to stop for any of those. Just a whole bunch of cows). The entire ride to Nelson, and then to Abel Tasman, was filled with screams of "SHEEP!" and "COW!" (like the Chick-fil-a commercial where the kid yells cow! repeatedly). It was terrifying the first few times, since I was driving and wasn't prepared for screaming.

Random other things happened, but this blog is insanely long already. I'll end by saying that Nutella is fantastic and Tim Tams (chocolate covered chocolate thing) are better than Tui (local beer). But chocolate is better than everything, so I guess that's not really fair to say.

:)


Rabbit Island