Australia!!!

I finally made it. I have been waiting over a year for this semester abroad to begin and it’s finally here. Let me tell you, it is a lot less stressful not having to plan my life on a daily basis. It is also really comforting being with Oles again. Though I now miss being totally immersed into the English culture, being with the Americans is a relief. Before I begin describing how my first few weeks in AUS have been, I really should fill you in on the last of my adventures of NZ. Oh boy, they were eventful.

So, we woke up Monday morning at 5:30 and Bob drove us the three hours to Westport. We finally made it to the west coast! We start hitching after grabbing some groceries and hitched a ride down to Punakaiki with a Scottish couple. The drive was really interesting since the man is an author on the book of Revelation, having a book which was an Amazon best seller for the past three years (I think his name was Peter Heron if you want to check him out). He and his wife had some radical things to say, as they expressed their concerns for the US and the EU and talked about the new world order.

We were in Punakaiki by noon and headed straight to the start of the Inland Pack Track of the Paparoa Ntl. Park. Before entering, we talked to a ranger at the I-Site and she informed us that we had an eight-hour hike ahead of us if we wanted to spend the night in the park. By this time it was already one, so we decided that it was time to start hiking. The rainforest changed back and forth between fern trees and beech trees, and the majority of the trails were swampy. As we got deep into the forest, the trail turned into a riverbed. We followed the creek, which got larger as we followed it into a gorge, for the last three hours of our hike. At one point we stirred up three feral goats, so I guess we weren’t hiking the never-ending trail alone. Our turnoff to our campsite was in an area where the river was wide, fast, deep and cold. We tried forging through but once we got to our chests in water we had to rethink our plan. We were stumped since we had cliffs on both sides of us. At one point we even contemplated building a raft, and then bridge to get to the other side of the river. The sun was setting fast and we were cold since we had had to make more than 50 river crossings over the past few hours. Luckily we found an area to cross upstream, so we crossed and climbed a rock face to get to the other side.

We camped in a spot called the Ballroom Overhang and were surprised that we weren’t the only ones spending the night there. Right before we went to bed, a possum showed up at camp, and we were informed that they were NZ’s biggest pest. I thought we scared it off, but after going to bed Ian and I realized that our night spent in our sleeping bas was going to be a long night. We were sleeping outside, and there wasn’t any good place to hang our food so we keep it in a stuff-sack between our two sleeping bags. This was a mistake. The minute we went to bed until 4am was spent trying to kill/deter the possum from crawling over us to get our food. Once I woke up with him inches from eyes, right between our two heads. We decided to declare war and armed ourselves with rocks, sticks, knives and flashlights, but it took us until 4am to finally injure him enough to keep him off us.

We started off our Tuesday morning by hiking out of the park, but before we left we decided to take a detour to explore a cave, which was situated in the bluffs. This was my first time spelunking in a non-tourist cave, and I loved the feeling of not having anything but a flashlight to navigate the 25 min crawl deep into the cave. We spent the rest of Tuesday around the little town and slept in a hostel that was situated in the rainforest.

On Wednesday we woke up early to rain. It was pouring cats and dogs, but we still needed hitch to hike the 45 min south to Greymouth by 1:20 to make it to our bus. The two hours that we had to spend hiking/waiting for a lift in the cold rain were long, and may have even been the low point of the trip, but lucky for us we were able to get a lift. Some dude was driving alone and said he was bored and we were the first hitchers that he saw. He ended up know Bob Dawber, so we had a great time describing to him our time WWOOFing in NZ. We didn’t think we’d even get a ride, let along a ride from someone who used to work for the man we spent the last week with, so at this point our moods changed instantly. We made it to Greymouth with an hour to spare and rode the bus through the Southern Alps via Arthur’s Pass back to Chch.
We were finally back and ready to relax. Our bus made it to Chch by 6:30 and took the bus 45 min south to Natalie’s flat. Unfortunately she wasn’t there, but her flat mates found us the luggage that we had left behind and even allowed us to spend the night. We spent Thursday walking and bumming around the Chch centre and ended up spending another night at their house. On Friday we went to the Chch Museum and spent the night on the airport floor. Our flight departed NZ at 6:20am on Saturday and we were in Melbourne, AUS by 8am. At this point we were running on adrenaline and ready for our next adventure to begin.

We did this for roughly two hours, following the river which was also the path

A neat area of the gorge!

This was about 20 min into the cave (notice the water). We turned off the lights and just listened for a few min. Too bad there weren't any glow-worms. 

The view as we rode the bus over Arthur's Pass through the Southern Alps