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.

My Life Right Now

The Queenstown post is coming soon - I'm just waiting for pictures from Andrew. Needless to say, it was great. More importantly, in my remaining two or so weeks here, here's a look at my daily routine:

• Wake up around noon; shower and make eggs for breakfast.
• Head to Gardie's, a sports bar near campus, at 1; watch the Red Sox dominate while having Speight's and wedges.
• Walk down to Pat and Rob's flat on Castle St. (middle of the student flats); have a BBQ with a bunch of friends, enjoy frisbee and Speight's.
• Play poker, win my $5 buy-in back.

Now I'm sure maybe a few of you are wondering, 'Wait, that's too specific to be a routine!' Well, it's what I did today, and will do tomorrow, so that's enough to me. Also, you may claim, how is this experiencing study abroad culture at all? Well when you're a 'Scarfie' on a beautiful spring day during finals, this is what you do. And it can't be beat.

The Beginning: Arthur's Pass

Alright! I've finally gotten around to posting a little about the trip. I thought the first day was a good place to start. And don't worry, I'm not gonna get all detailed...I'm mostly doing it for some of the pictures.

This first one is from the Moeraki Boulders, which are on the beach only an hour north of Dunedin. We got a bright and early start Friday morning, and amazingly, it was absolutely gorgeous out, so a stop at the beach was perfect. I won't bore you with all the details, but these boulders were always spherical - they're called concretions - so the water didn't have anything to do with shaping them. It just wore them out of the nearby cliff.

Our next little stop was in the town of Springfield, home since July to a giant pink-frosted sprinkled donut. Sadly, there's no movie theatre in this town...a population of 219 will do that. Just goes to show how far the people at the Simpsons Movie were willing to go to promote their film.

Soon we started to climb into the mountains, leaving the terribly flat Canterbury Plains for the Southern Alps. We did well going into the mountains, though, thanks to our trusty rental van...we may have had 7 of us packed in there like sardines, but she was a trooper. All in all we drove just around 1,300 miles in her, and I got to drive almost 1,100 of them. And all but maybe 100 feet on the left side of the road! Not bad.

The village of Arthur's Pass - the highest elevation settlement in New Zealand, at around 3,000 ft - was really cool. Its population is about 50, but it could have been as low as a dozen, since that's all it seemed was necessary to run everything in town - the Mountain House hostel we stayed at, the store next door, the restaurant/tavern across the street, the DoC...not sure what else there was. The hostel was phenomenal, and the manager (who was from Calgary) gave us all a hard time for studying in Dunedin, saying he would turn off the heat in our room and give us puke buckets in our room because that's what us Otago students are supposed to be used to. Crazy.

After we settled into our bunks a little bit, we went for a quick hike to the Devil's Punchbowl waterfalls, a 525 fall. I took this picture at the bottom of the falls, in some of the rapids. I'm a big fan of this one - the sun going down made it come out this way. Incredible. Next up is the Dragons Cave in Greymouth and the Pancake Rocks in Punakaiki.

Mt. Cargill

You may remember that back at the beginning of the semester, me and a few of my friends thought it would be a good idea to summit Mt. Cargill. Of course, it drizzled all the way up, and provided the lovely view from the top that you see to the right.

Now that was fun enough--we had a good time trying to solve stories about how/why people died. My favorite: there's a man (dead, of course) sitting at a table, surrounded by 53 bicycles. What happened? You get to ask the person telling it yes or no questions. I'll write up the answer to it next time.

Anyway, it was nice and sunny out, and 50 degrees seemed warm enough to head up Cargill again. The best photo of the day would be below (so you don't just look at the photo above and think that was what it was like), showing the entire Otago Peninsula and Dunedin, but Blogger is being sketchy, so I'll pop it up below once things decide to work. You can still check the pics out in my Picasa Web Album.

The weather gods have smiled upon us...

Finally! A beautiful, gorgeous, warm day! I couldn't believe it. Of course, everyone took advantage of this fine weather to go outside and generally enjoy life.

Without Friday classes, I was able to wake up at the crack of noon, go outside and take my laundry down from the clothesline (my clothes smell great, but I think maybe the soap or the sun made them a little starchy). Then Andrew came over and we went to the Dunedin Botanic Garden, which is just a 10 minute walk for me, but is right out Andrew's back door.

It was a little windy out, but still not enough to deter me from wearing just a t-shirt and shorts, along with flip flops, for the first time since I've been in NZ. The gardens were great, with a ton of trails through different types of forest, an aviary, rock garden (not a garden for rocks, apparently, but lichen and moss - sadly all the rocks were the same), and a fantastic sandwich place, among other things.

With any luck, it'll stay this way tomorrow, and I'll maybe get another change to hike up Mt. Cargill...the same place where a bunch of us hiked up a few weeks back, only to get to the top and be in a rainy cloud (as opposed to a dry cloud?). But with the nearly unpredictable weather we have here, I can't count on it; I'm enjoying the warmth while it lasts, because next week it'll just be in the 40s and cloudy again, no doubt.

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.

Cadbury Chocolate Carnival

Beautiful day for a chocolate festival, eh? I think it got as warm as 45 degrees today, and it may not have even gotten to freezing last night. I could get used to this. Anyway, the shot above is from about halfway up Baldwin Street, which, I'll mention again, is the steepest street in the world. At its steepest, for every 2.86 feet you walk horizontally, you'll go up by a foot. That's a 19° slope (35% grade). Here's one way to get an idea for it:

That's more or less the steepness of the street. It feels way steeper than it looks in these pictures, though. There was a pretty big crowd there, too. And who wouldn't want to be out on a day like this to see 20,000 Jaffa candies bounce and roll down the street? Down at the bottom of the street there, they had some vendors, but strangely no Cadbury vendors. Now if you were to have a chocolate festival, and particularly an event which promotes a particular candy, wouldn't you want to capitalize on the cravings that all the spectators are getting from watching the festivities? Sad times for me.

Anyway, you could donate $2 to charity in order to have your own Jaffa ball in the 'race.' Each ball had a little numbered piece of paper attached, and I guess that whoever owned the ball that made it to the bottom first would win some sort of prize. Having a ball make it to the bottom, however, is not as easy a task as one would assume. This isn't exactly the smoothest of streets (how often would you want to resurface something as steep as this?), so there are plenty of treacherous cracks and bumps that made the Jaffas bounce into the fence (and spectators). There were a lot of dead soldiers, too. And little kids ate them. Gross (apparently dead soldiers taste like chocolaty orange). If you want to see a crappy video I shot of the whole spectacle, go here. Don't worry, it's only sideways at the beginning.

The festival isn't only the Jaffa race; it actually goes for a whole week. Unfortunately a lot of it is paid stuff, but it's all kinda cool. On Saturday the festival kicked off with a free street concert thing at the Octagon with a chocolate fountain (Death by Chocolate, anyone?) and music and best of all, heat. It was pretty great, and below you can see St. Paul's Cathedral on the left and the Dunedin Municipal Chambers on the right. Until next time...