"i don't like pears, bitch."

Right before I left Sydney I managed to get a massively annoying headcold/swine flu combo, which was really fun while being on an airplane and all that. Ian and I have decided to do some traveling on our own, so when I got to Auckland (the city I loathe), I had to buy my own car (I task which I abhor). Combined with my nasty illness, this made for an unhappy few days. But I knocked that thing out less than 24 hours after arriving in Auckland, so good job me. I got a '92 Subaru Legacy that's been "camperized"--ie has a mattress in the back over the seats. Her name is Rachel (not my choice), she has less than 200k kilometers on her and I paid around US$1400 or so. Not toooo shabby.

I drove down to Raglan Friday to meet up with Ian and sort out our stuff, and we ended up staying at a motor camp and not going more than about 200 yards away from our cars the whole time. I was too sick and didn't want to do anything but recuperate. So I read, watched crappy tv, slept, used 19230483 tissues, ate Tim Tams, and finally got better. It was actually rather nice. Ian left today and I met up with Enfys, a ridiculously kind person I met at the Buddhist Centre who lives here in Raglan, and I think tonight will be more sleeping. Raglan is a famous beach/surfing town--The Endless Summer was filmed here--but since it's the middle of winter it's pouring down rain. I do want to go drive around and at least look at some beaches, but I just can't make myself go outside and walk around too much in the rain. Hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow. I won't be so naive as to actually think it will be sunny, but less rain would be great. Or maybe I'll just have to walk along the beach in the rain! It wouldn't be the end of the world. :)

bye bye kangaroos, hello kiwis

I'm headed back to NZ tomorrow morning. My time in Australia (more specifically, Sydney) was great. I think that in some ways I like it better here than NZ, although I can't really say that since I was only in one city for a week. :D But it seemed like the people over here were much friendlier and easy to get to know, which was nice since I was traveling on my own. But I'm still happy to go back to NZ; either way, I can't complain.

The other highlights of this week were getting to see Lara lots, which was awesome. I also met some sorta cool enough to hang out with people from my hostel and went out drinking with them on Thursday night...which I don't remember at all. Oops. On Friday, I went to a wildlife exhibition here in Sydney and I got to see kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and got to pet a koala! I know, it wasn't in the wild so it wasn't all that cool, but I knew it was my only chance while I was here so I just took it. They are very soft and cute. :) Over the weekend I went to my friend Shannon's house, who I met in Vietnam, and went out to a great lesbian bar with her friends on Friday night, then spent the rest of the weekend walking around Newtown, the gay and lesbian district of Sydney. On Sunday we went to Bondi Beach with another friend we met in Vietnam, Emma, and that was great. It's one of the most famous beaches in Australia (although I'm not sure why). It was raining off and on but we walked around, got great food, and watched cute surfers. Today I finally got out of the city and went on a tour of the Blue Mountains, about an hour outside of Sydney. It was a really small group and we had a hilarious, dread locked, high hippie tour guide, so it ruled. We walked around a bit, smelled tea tree leaves, smooshed eucalyptus, and rode on the steepest railway in the world. I met some sweet girls, ate my first meat pie (even though mine was veggie), and got to see a little bit of Australia that isn't covered in pavement. And luckily enough, we had awesome weather today, which is lucky since it's been raining all week. So, yay!

I'm not sure what I'll do when I head back to NZ. I might stick around in Auckland a couple days, and if I can I'd like to head to Raglan and Waitomo..but I need to WWOOF soon cause I'm broke so I might do that farther south. I hope to be in the South Island by around August, which seems really soon! There's still lots I want to do and no time to do it...which is amazing since I've been here three months now. :P

Wonderful world of Oz

I love Australia so far. I'm staying in a party hostel, kind of, on the edge of Chinatown. There is good food everywhere, I got a free box of red wine from some random girl the first night I got here, Lara is here and we went to the aquarium yesterday and saw dugongs! This weekend I'm staying with friends I met in Vietnam. Before I go back I think I'll take a day trip to the Blue Mountains and do a wine tour. I'm going to see a koala and a kangaroo even if it's in a zoo, I don't care. It's raining and I don't think I'll be able to go to the beach but I don't care. Maybe I'll just go in the rain.

I've managed to lock myself out of my room twice already and last night some British guys I met and was hanging out with laughed at me because I ate carrots and hummus for dinner. They also didn't believe that I've only spent $1600 here in 3 months--they've spent FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS EACH in five weeks (that's about $12,000 US). They called me hardcore.

I wanna stay here forever.

"perhaps today, we will call it the Not-So-Great-Walk."

So Ian and I got back yesterday from doing our first of the nine "Great Walks" in New Zealand. I'm not sure exactly what the criteria are for being a Great Walk--pretty scenery, I guess? I think it would be hard to narrow it down. This one was a 47 km (about 22 miles or so) walk halfway around the perimeter of Lake Waikaremoana, which is a bit inland from the East Coast of the North Island. 

Overall, our experience was really great. I'm not sure if this was actually my favorite hike in New Zealand so far, but it was very beautiful. It kind of ended up being a very expensive ordeal, with some annoyances, but it was worth it in the end.

The first day we caught a water taxi from our motor camp to the starting point at around 10 or 10:30 AM, and did a 5 to 6 hour uphill trek to our first hut. This day was definitely the roughest, as it involved the most climbing. Plus, our packs were the heaviest they would be (all the food!). We took a LOT of breaks, took quite a few awesome pictures on Panekeri Bluff overlooking the gorgeous lake, and subsequently arrived a bit later than planned. We were lucky that we had greatweather that first day--that can be rare in that area during the winter. But it couldn't have been better. All blue sky, not too hot, and amazing views--it was great that we had the best weather on the day we were at the highest point, so we could see forever it felt like. We got to our hut around 4ish and amazingly had it all to ourselves, which was fantastic. We made a delicious dinner of top ramen and instant mashed potatoes, played a lot of Speed Scrabble, and saw one of the most beautiful sunsets over the lake I could imagine. 

The next morning was really really foggy--we could barely see out our hut door, we were so socked in. This was our easiest day, so we had a bit of a lie in and didn't get moving till after twelve, once the fog had cleared. Then we did a 3 to 4 hour walk through "undulating" forest. Calling something "undulating" makes it sound so pleasant and peaceful, but basically this meant going uphill just to go back down, about a billion times. The path was also VERY muddy, so it made for some slick downhill. The day was a lot harder than I expected it to be--I figured it would be a piece of cake because it was so short, but I was pretty sore from the day before and there was more uphill than I was suspecting. We stayed in an absolutely beautiful hut that night, impeccably clean, and shared it with one really nice French guy who was also WWOOFing. 

The next day was our long day--about 7 hours of walking. Luckily, it was also the flattest day. We walked right along the lake bed for quite a bit of it, and saw lots of bird life, including tons of black swans. This was a realllly muddy part--at times it was basically just marshland. It had also rained all night before, so that made it a bit worse. The day was mostly cloudy, with some rain at parts, and also some sunshine breaking through the clouds here and there. I was okay with it because I had amazing hiking boots, plus two layers of Smartwool socks, but Ian's boots didn't hold up as well, so his feet were pretty soaked. We stopped about 5 hours in to have lunch at a little hut, and then made it to the last overnight stopover, Waiharuru. This hut was something else. Seriously, people in New Zealand have no idea how lucky they have it--their hut system is ingenious and every one I've seen has been impeccably clean. This one was huge, and very new. We had a family of 6 kiwis and one German guy with us, and one of them snored, but it wasn't too bad. Supposedly you are able to hear kiwis (the bird, not the people) from this hut at night, but I have no idea what they sound like, so if we heard them I couldn't tell. :) 

The next day started out promising but ended up being pretty shit-tastic. Despite my awesome hiking boots which I've been wearing pretty often on this trip and which I thought were broken in, I got 4 massive blisters the size of quarters--one on each of my heels, and one in between my big toe and the next toe on each foot. It hurt pretty bad at first but once I got used to it and adjusted my pace, it was okay. My pack was pretty light, too, so that was nice, but I was really worn out from all the walking, and hadn't slept well, so I was feeling really sluggish and slow. We had started out early because we thought we had a 4 and a half hour walk to our water taxi pick up point, but it turned out it was only about 2 hours. This was nice in that we didn't have to walk as far, but also sucked because we were about 3 hours early at our pick up point with not a lot of food and anxious to have a real meal and get showered. 

But alas, it was not to be. We waited until 15 minutes after our water taxi was supposed to be there, and they hadn't shown up. We managed to find cell phone service and call them up, and some lady who had no idea WTF was going on told us that we were supposed to be at the end of the road, another 45 minute walk away. Apparently even though we took a boat over there, we were getting picked up in a van, and even though our ticket said to wait 45 minutes from the last hut, which is exactly where we were, in actuality we were supposed to be another 45 minutes away. So I decided to stay where I was and Ian booked it as fast as he could to the road end. Right after he left, I saw a van pull into the end of the road (you could see it from the beach I was waiting at), honk its horn a bunch and flash its headlights for a couple minutes. I waved over to them, thinking this might be our dude, but he just took off after about 5 minutes. I waited for a while and then a hiker and his kids came by and when I told them my predicament, they said they had just gotten a ride over with the guy picking us up and that we need to be over at the end of the road. So I took off, busted my ass through the mud with my blistery feet and made it to the road end in about 20 minutes. Eventually ran into Ian and he had found out from some fishermen that the van was for us but that it took off since we weren't there. We were pretty annoyed at that point and kinda worried that we wouldn't have a way to get back to our car, and had no food left. Luckily, the van came back for us, so we didn't have to cannibalize each other (which wouldn't have really helped, Ian's too damn skinny).

Although I was really happy to see the van and was trying to look on the bright side of all this, I just about flipped my shit when the van driver dude berated us for being so stupid as to not realize we were supposed to go somewhere completely different than what our ticket said. He insisted that we were told to go to the road end, not the water taxi pick up, because duh, didn't we realize that they only do the water taxi if they have 10 people? Umm, no, we didn't, because we got the fucking taxi over there (with less than 10 people, I might add), so we ridiculously assumed we would get the same one back....you know, like the ticket said. He said we were "the only two people out of 7,000" who hadn't figured this out all season. Umm yeah, maybe because you told everyone else and forgot one time?? I know I'm a forgetful person but I would have remembered if they had told us where to get picked up in a VAN, not a BOAT. He also insisted he had waited for us half an hour at the end of the road, then driven all the way back to the motor camp, talked to the DOC about us, and then gotten home and was about to leave for a fishing trip when the company called him and told him to come back. Which is complete and utter bullshit because I SAW his van at the end of the road, he only waited for 5 minutes, he didn't see me waving frantically for him, and there's no way physically possible that he got all the way back before having to turn around, because the timing doesn't work at all. I didn't even call him on that point because I didn't feel like arguing anymore. But the real shittiness is that after already paying $35 each for the round trip pick up (plus $25 per night for the huts), we had to pay an additional $50 because we weren't at the correct pick-up point. So basically, the 4 day hiking trip in the woods ended up costing us $155, not including food or the gas that we used to get out there in the middle of nowhere. A bit spendy for slogging through the mud, dontcha think? 

But anyway, I'm totally not bitter about this at all or anything. It's all over and it was a good experience on a whole, it was just the last day that sucked. And now I'm in the Auckland airport, waiting for my flight to Sydney. It's about 9 PM here and my flight doesn't leave till 5 AM, but I have books and snacks and I am a pro at sleeping in airports, so I don't care. I get to see my good friend Lara who I haven't seen in 2 years in just a couple days, and hopefully it will be sunnier there and I can go to the beach!!! I plan to do nothing but lay in the sun and not go on any hikes all week. 

please note for future reference:

If you spill powdered milk all over the inside of your backpack, it will NEVER COME OUT. 

the big question: will spilled powdered milk eventually curdle in the backpack? tune in next week to find out. 

(and before you berate me for having such a disgusting thing as powdered milk in the first place, let me just point out that when you're hiking for a few days at a time, it's the least gross option you have to put on your cereal in the morning.)

Ian and I are heading to do our first Great Walk tomorrow--Lake Waikaremoana. We'll be hiking for about 4 days, and then I'm leaving out of Auckland for Sydney on the 16th to visit a friend from college until the 24th. I'm not sure where we'll be after that--I might go down to Raglan and couch surf with someone I met at the Buddhist center. I would really like to find some temporary work somewhere, but so far haven't had any luck with that. I think I might need to WWOOF for quite a bit more over the next couple months in order to make my dollars stretch, but that's okay. There are some pretty cool WWOOF families in our book that I think would be fun to hang out with, so we'll see. For right now I'm really looking forward to our 4 day hike, and the weather on the eastern coast has warmed up quite a bit, so that's great. And I can't wait to see Lara in Sydney, so yay for that!

Hey yo, people. Nothing too exciting to report. After I got back from GBI, Ian and I drove to Rotorua and spent a few days there, which was fun. We went mountain biking through a Redwood forest, hiking, and to a Maori hangi (feast) and concert, which was lovely. We then spent a couple days trying to find jobs packing kiwis, to no avail, unfortunately. i would really like to make some extra cash to pay for my trip to Australia to see my Lara, but I guess I'll just have to make do. Then we went on a nice multi-day hike in the Kaimai Mamaku Forest Park, and then we spent the last week WWOOFing for a pretty sweet family in the Bay of Plenty. I chopped a ridiculous amount of wood, got covered in scratches from pulling out blackberry brambles, baked my first scones, and played with a very cute 4 year old girl who told me I was her best friend in the world. So, that was cool. We're leaving today and actually don't know where we're going yet. Oops. We might head inland to go to Lake Taupo, but I'm not sure if I'm feeling that at the moment cause it's fuckin cold. In fact, we saw our first NZ snow outside of Rotorua, and sleeping in the car was absolutely not fun at all. I had on 3 pairs of pants, 3 shirts, a hoodie, my fleece, two pairs of socks, a beanie, and gloves, in my Mountain Hard Wear 20 degree sleeping bag, and still froze. So the idea of heading into cold weather doesn't sit well with me. But we'll see, it's only going to get colder here throughout the next couple months, so we might want to just do it now before it gets worse.

That's it for now. xoxo!