Bushball 2007

After a long delay, I present you with my account of Bushball (a bit shortened for my desire to finally have it over with, and just a little censorship as well):
Now that I'm done with the week, I thought it would be nice to update about last weekend. I headed out with 48 other people in the Tramping Club for Bushball 2007: A Red Carpet Rendez-Vous. We went to Mt. Aspiring National Park, about a 4 hour drive from Dunedin. We stayed over Friday night at the trail head, near Wanaka (a little resort town, from what I saw, similar to Killington). Since it was 2 a.m. by the time we got to bed, we couldn't see our surroundings well. The next morning though, was a spectacular sight:From there we spent the day hiking into the park, towards Aspiring Hut, which is in the middle of the West Matukituki River Valley. It was drizzling a little bit, and was super wet on the trail, as you can see on the left. Of course we couldn't carry all of our wood, cooking and partying equipment in, so we had a 4x4 to take care of it, with a little help from us in the mud.

After getting there in the mid-afternoon (after a few beautiful stops), we proceeded to get the hut ready for the formal dinner. It was a really nice hut, big and well-maintained. It has 38 bunks, a kitchen, wood stove, and 3 big tables which were perfect for seating our huge group. We made stroganoff, salad and had desert, then cleared the tables out and partied the night away.The next morning, we all woke up (somewhat of a struggle) and packed our things up, giving the hut a good cleaning. Thankfully the weather on the tramp back to the trail head was really nice, so it was pretty refreshing, going through the valley. The best part about the whole trip was that out of 49 people, I was one of only 2 Americans (a relatively low number for Bushball), and the only other internationals included a handful of Canadians and a few Germans. Actually, there were a bunch of Brits too, but they hardly count as internationals here, particularly at the Uni. So as has been my desire since I've gotten to NZ, I finally got to meet some Kiwis!

It's pretty funny, their sense of humor. The liked to give me a hard time about being an American; here's one exchange:

Me: So I hear you guys have a real possum problem over here.
Kiwi guy: Yeah, but not as bad as our American problem!

Of course, it was all in good fun. I also had a pretty good conversation with a Kiwi girl, comparing our education systems. For example, Kiwis start school at 5 and finish at 17, and apparently it's really easy to get into university, but that the first year at Uni is used to weed everyone out; it's not like us, where we stress about getting into college while we're in high school.

So all told, Bushball was an unqualified success. A lot of people, a lot of fun, a lot of Kiwis.