The Glaciers and Wanaka (Part 2)

[Note: This is part 2 of 2. Go here for part 1.]

Franz Josef glacier was just awesome. There's nothing else to say about it. What was also really awesome, though, was the valley the glacier was in - it had a ton of places to climb on, over and in. We saw glacial striations on the rocks - marks that are gouged into the rock by the moving glacier - and even two excellent outcrops (here and here) of a small fault (waterfalls/streams are great candidates for finding faults). We walked right up to the glacier itself; there were stairs going up it for the guided (read: paid) tours. After checking out the sweet river coming out from the bottom of the glacier - it struck me as something coming out of the depths of hell, albeit an icy hell - we were forced to head back by the inevitable rain.

Just a half hour drive south, we saw Fox Glacier. Once again, very, very cool. Andrew, Mary and I made the short walk out to a good lookout - no need to go right up to it, once you've seen one glacier, you've seen 'em all, right? Ha! In the picture, you can sort of make out the layers of snow and dirt going across the glacier, especially dipping in the middle where the river comes out. Nice.

That day, we drove 4 hours back to Wanaka, both because we didn't want to drive 8 hours home to Dunedin in one day, and also because it was Andrew's 21st birthday, so we wanted to be somewhere a little more amenable to fun, namely a BBQ. The drive, like all of the drives on this trip, was stunning, particularly Lake Wanaka, with its turquoise blue water. Shadowfax - Carrie's trusty steed of a Toyota Corona - was really in her element here. The hostel we had was right in town and had a grill, so we were all set. Sausages, portobellos, peppers and cucumbers - a veritable birthday feast!

The last day, Monday, we woke up to more gorgeous weather, and in Wanaka that can mean only one thing: Puzzling World! We were quite ready to be a-MAZED, so we made haste. This wonderland has two main attractions: a series of 'illusion rooms' and a huge outdoor maze, which can take up to 2 hours to finish if you try the hardest method. The illusion rooms were great - highlights included a room of scowling faces like Ghandi, Churchill, Lincoln, etc. which appear to follow you as you walk around with one eye closed, an Ames room, which makes you look alternately huge and tiny, and a tilted room where balls and water moved uphill, and you can stand 'askew,' as it were. NUTS. And yes, we did the maze (albeit with some cheating).

So, all in all, it was a magnificent trip. We drove about 1,400 km - 870 miles. The oil-guzzling, WOF-free Shadowfax handled it like a champ, and we saw some incredible stuff. Best to go out on top, I say.

Epicness

Well, I've been itching to post something about the trip to Kepler Track, the glaciers and Wanaka, but I don't have all the photos yet (I need to get some from friends), so I'll just post a few samples of what we saw now, and follow with a full post (probably) tomorrow. Also, check out the full album of what I already have to the right (or here); I also put my pictures from the trip to Qtown with Andrew into the Queenstown album.

Walking to the terminal face of Franz Josef glacier. We're about a 20 minute walk from the wall of ice, to give an idea of size.

Throwing caution to the wind.

On the drive from the West Coast to Wanaka.

Our BBQ feast for Andrew's 21st bday. I pierced the sausages too early, clearly.


And finally, us enjoying the optical illusions at Puzzling World in Wanaka. If I were smarter, I would've recorded this with my camera parallel to the floor, and not truly level. Oh well.

The Game Plan

So about a month ago, Andrew, Carrie and I decided that during finals we should do a tramp on one of NZ's Great Walks. Since I've never explained them before, briefly, they're a set of tramping tracks on the North and South Islands, managed by the Department of Conservation. Each track has well-maintained tracks and huts spaced about a day's walk from each other, meaning it actually costs quite a bit, usually $40 per hut. They have a booking system, too, to keep pressure on the tracks to a minimum, so really popular tracks like the Milford and Routeburn fill up fast. This brings us to the tramp we planned on: the Kepler Track. It was actually built in the mountains near Te Anau to alleviate pressure on the Milford and Routeburn, and is really nice - particularly the second day of the tramp, which is almost exclusively walking along alpine ridges.

Unfortunately, it's that ridge line that's caused us problems. We were going to do the track this weekend, but because of some late-season snow, crampons and ice axes are required, which is something we can't really muster right now. So briefly, the outline of our fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants plan:

• Go to Kepler, and hike the first (passable) section, and stay at Luxmore Hut Friday night.
• On Saturday, hike out and make an epic, beautiful drive to Haast and the West Coast, and stay in a hostel.
• Sunday, we'll go to the glaciers at Franz Josef and/or Fox, which are the most accessible glaciers in the world. At the same time, we should get a great view of Mount Cook across Lake Matheson. Maybe camp out Sunday night, and head back to Dunners Monday.

Cool, eh? It's gonna be great. Cheers.

Qtown adventures

Amazing. Incredible. Mind-blowing. Breathtaking. You could find more synonymous adjectives here. I'll include some of my favorite photos here, but definitely check the full album out by clicking here or scrolling down to it in the right hand column. Here's my all-time favorite: That was view that we had from our parking spot at the base of the Coronet Peak ski field, at about 9:30 am, on Sunday. The skiing itself wasn't amazing - the whole area was open due to extensive snowmaking, but was pretty icy - but the fact that we could ski in August, with panoramas like this, made it completely worth it. That and the fact that the exchange rate has plummeted to make the Kiwi dollar just about 67 cents US...this compared to 80 cents just a couple weeks ago.

To get back into some sort of chronological order, we headed out to Queenstown Saturday morning - a four hour drive. We ran into Julia, Katie and Sven there, amazingly just as they came back from a two hour kayaking trip out on Lake Wakatipu. We grabbed lunch at a cool Irish pub (I had an obligatory Guinness, of course) and then headed up to the Skyline Gondola, which takes you up a 1500 ft. vertical rise immediately above the city. We got some spectacular views of Queenstown, the lake and the Remarkables. It was just really unbelievable. Up on top of this, well, mountain I guess, we went luging, which is kind of like an alpine slide, but the track is wide enough to have several people going at once, and you can steer your sled. The races got intense, with 8 of us going around slippery, banked turns.

After a night on the town Saturday - the nightlife in Queenstown is very good - Katie and I split off from the other six in our group (who variously went bungy jumping and kayaking again, something I'll do another time) to meet up with Andrew and his friend Mo to go skiing at Coronet Peak, which is a half hour from the city. As you can see above, it was pretty great up there. We hit the slopes (along with quite a few other people that day) and had a blast, despite the icy conditions. It probably doesn't help that the mountain isn't that tall (5400 ft.) and there's a lot of traffic on it, what with the night skiing and being so close to Queenstown. Regardless, it was fun to get back out on skis again, and especially in August. After skiing all day, we headed back to Dunedin, along with a lovely stop on the road to see the sunset outside Alexandra. After a quick meat pie at the 24 (a delicacy here), we were home and not-so-ready to start the week. And to think I wasn't doing anything this weekend as late as 4 pm on Friday...

Holy shit...

This is a view of The Remarkables from Coronet Peak - just a taste of what I saw this weekend in Queenstown. Details and full photo set tomorrow.

Off to Queenstown

Random! As of an hour ago, I wasn't going to Queenstown - a really popular international ski town in the mountains - this weekend. Now, I am. I got a text from a friend who's already in Queenstown for the weekend saying I should come out tomorrow morning and ski - they even have a bed for me tomorrow night - so I figured, why not? I'm here to be spontaneous, right? Right. Expect some great photos after the weekend.

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.

So I Lied.

I didn't actually go to the Otago Peninsula on Friday. Sad, I know. I hope you can all forgive me. My flatmate, KC, and I made the easy one block walk (compared to the 10-15 minutes other students had to make from their flats) to the middle of campus where we were supposed to meet to catch the buses, and it turned out the trip was canceled. Why, you might ask? I think that the picture below may explain some things...So yeah, it's goddamn cold here, you may have guessed. I know that most of you are probably in the dark about what the weather is like down here, so briefly I'll let you know that it's about 28 degrees right now (1 a.m.), which is -2 for all you Kiwis out there. I'll get around to a post about my moving into my flat and Dunedin soon-ish, hopefully by Monday, but for now I think a description of my day is sufficient. Hopefully my infamous storytelling will improve.

Anyway, lacking a plan of what to do or a place to go or food to eat (we all thought we would be gone from noon to 7, and get a free BBQ somewhere in between - only a few of us brought sandwiches), some of my friends decided to go on a trek and find their way to the water anyway. Forget the buses, we have feet, right? Well off we went, and before we knew it our group of international students was at least 20 strong, and I'm sure most of them didn't even know us or where we were leading them. Just for the glamor of it, here's the Clocktower Building; it's probably the most iconic part of the Uni. Don't be fooled, though. Luckily there are some cars in this picture for scale, but in almost everything published by Otago, the tower is made out to be 100 feet tall or something, which it clearly is not.

So our little jaunt obviously wasn't planned, meaning we didn't have much of an idea of where to go other than generally southeast. In fact, we went due south, and as you can see if you head south of the campus (basically from the green arrow on the map in a post down below) you'll end up in the lovely industrial section of Dunedin. At one point, a couple of us stopped at a corner store in the shipping yards to ask for directions on how to get to the water, and the woman replied, 'Well it's a good thing you have them long legs, you're sure as hell gonna need them!' There were some other clever Kiwi comments about the apparent busload-size of our group, too.

After about a half-hour of walking from campus (and several a cappella renditions of such classics as 'The Final Countdown,' 'Juke Box Hero' and 'Come Sail Away') we finally saw the water, and my was it beautiful. Of course in the civilized world, you can't just have waterfront that isn't being exploited for tourist dollars, and we found a little walkway with benches and a pub along the waterfront.

We whittled our numbers down to about 7 after hobos and fishermen killed and/or ate the others) and we weren't even that cold since it was the middle of the day and we had been walking so much. It's a great way to keep warm. Anyway, it was actually pretty nice there. Seeing the snow on the surrounding hills was great (bizarre in July though).

On the way back to the campus, we walked by another landmark in Dunedin, the Dunedin Railway Station. It looks like a gingerbread house, of sorts (I'll admit I stole that characterization from the Wikipedia article) and has some great gardens outside. Maybe I'll go in one day...

So I'll probably be checking back in by Monday about my move in and the Kiwi life in general. Definitely some interesting quirks here. And since I can't get the song (or what I associate with the song) out of my head, I have to do this...sweet as, mate.