Barbeque Area

Is it possible to have too many barbies? We have found an answer to that question over these past two weeks, and the answer is no, not when in Australia. We have made it our mission to find and use every bbq set in Brisbane, and I think as of yesterday we've done it. And we did it jsut in time, since today is our last day with the host families and our last day of living in civilisation. I am sad to leave the Land family as they have been nothing but welcoming to me (and even my friends), but at the same time I'm ready to get out of the city. It seems like I just got settled down and now I'm already packing my bag again. The experience has been excellent though, as it has allowed me to see the true Australia and to get to know the people who make this country great. A perfect example of life in Queensland happed yesterday, so I'll share my adventure of a day with you. This is one of the many stories which I'll never forget. (Only because I am keeping this blog. Just kidding.)

The whole thing really started on Friday night at my brother's birthday party, but I'll rewind a bit and let you know what proceeded these events. We started our causual Friday evening with a barbie, of course, in the South Bank park. From there our small group met up with the rest of our crew in King George Square and headed to a Queensland vs. South Africa rugby union game. I think the group enjoyed the action, which was way more than what we saw at the AFL game in Melbourne, but I'm still not sure if they understand the sport after my hopeless attempts to explain it. From the game, seven of us headed back to my house for the birthday party and we were happy to see that there was still beer left in the fridge. A couple of beers later Todd, Ian and I decided with one of my brothers friend's, who happened to own a boat, that we were going to get up at seven in order to be on the road for a day of fishing by eight. I woke up in the morning at eight anf found that the trip was still on. Though we shifted the plans by a few hours we were on the water by ten and actually ocean fishing. We first cruised up and down the mangrove swamps of the Brisbane River estuary which flows into Moreton Bay, but didn't have much luck. Around one we beached the boat on a sand island and pumped the beach for shrimplike crustaceans that live in the sand called yabbies. Brad, my brothers friend, assured us that the yabbies would work better than our frozen prawns and whitebait, and he was right. After a few minutes of casting from shore Brad hooked onto something big. Ian grabbed the net and waded into the water only to realize that he hadn't hooked onto a fish, but a not so happy sting ray that was a couple of feet long. We kept fishing here for the next couple of hours and caught quite a few small whitings, but nothing worth mounting. A pelican realised that he could get an easy meal out of us and stayed within a few feet of us begging for the rest of the time. We decided to call it a day around three but made a quick stop before heading back to the city at a prawn farm a few km away from the boat landing. After leaving the farm, Brad noticed that something was wrong with one of the trailer tyres and pulled over on the side of the road to check it out. We soon realised that the bearings of the wheel were busted and after jacking up the trailer we were able to pull the whole wheel right off. Good thing we noticed this before we made it to the highway. So we spent the next three hours here on the side of the road in sugar cane country Queensland eating prawns and waiting for a mate of Brad to come and replace the bearings. By the time the wheel was fixed it was nearly dark and there was a pile of prawn shells on the ground outside each door of the truck. We were able to devour 1.5kg pretty easily in all that time. I got home, told the story to my family, and then headed two train stations down the tracks to Skiba's house for yet another barbie. And that basically sums up an average day in Queensland.

We are sad to leave our families, but we have a adventure packed month ahead of us. From here we're heading to Lamington Ntl. Park, which is a preciously preserved snapshot of what the world looked like 200 million years ago. Prehistoric plants (and possibly animals) still thrive in Lamington today that are found nowhere else on earth. From there we're heading farther into the bush to Canarvan George. We're spending a week here in the mountainous forests and then heading to cattle country. After our stay on a cattle ranch in Biloela we're taking a twelve hour bus ride back to the coast, and then a few hours on a catamaran to the Great Barrier Reef, where we'll spend eight days on Heron Island at a marine research station. If you want to see what paradise looks like, just google Heron Island. Apparently there are bioluminescent dinoflagellates that colonize the waters off the island, so if we happen to take a night swim our bodies will be surrounded by a blue glow. It's a shame we'll have to be studying for finals during this time.

This is probably going to be one of my last posts as television, let along the internet, has barely made it to the places that we're heading next. I might get a chance during the few days of finals in Brisbane after Heron to chime in and make a final post, but that wont be until the 15th or 16th of May. So it's goodbye for now. I have less than a month to go! Wish me luck!

Just your average barbie. Onions, sausages and beer at South Bank's BBQ area

Us and 31,000 other fans watching the Queensland Reds lose to the South African Stormers

Brad with his stingray. We had to cut the line to avoid it's giant barb.

Our pelican friend who willingly ate all that we caught

Replacing the bearings on the boat wheel.

Brisbane, QLD

Queensland is Australia’s Florida. I have been in and around Brisbane for the past two weeks now and have been told that if today’s weather is beautiful, then tomorrow’s will be perfect. We are sitting at 27 degrees south of the equator here, so four degrees away from the tropics. Upon arriving in Brisbane, Ian, Todd and I found our way to The Brisbane Backpackers hostel with the help of a local hobo. We arrived at the train station at six in the morning and while looking for a map this bloke approached and told us that he’d show us the way. He turned out to just be a nice guy, but as we walked into Brisbane’s suburbs we were a little skeptical of where we were actually going. Our next five days of break were spent at the hostel and the South Bank Lagoon, a man-made pool and beach. We walked there in the early afternoon with our hostel mates and spent the rest of our days relaxing, swimming and soaking up the sun.

We met back up with the group on Tuesday the 3rd and headed to North Stradbroke Island on the 4th. We boarded the ferry on our bus and crossed Moreton Bay in a little under an hour. The remainder of the week on the island consisted of us studying the geology of sand islands and the ecology of mangrove systems. Straddie is one of six or seven sand islands that boarder the east coast of QLD. It was formed over the past four ice ages when lower ocean levels allowed westward winds to cross the barren sand flats and build up dunes behind the rock outcroppings that are the remains from ancient volcanoes. The topography of the island therefore consists of a series of dunes that run north and south, some reaching near 75m at their peaks. Today the island is used as residential property and for mining. The majority of Straddie is leased to a sand mining company that sifts through the grains in search of rare metals and compounds. The mines also supply the world with its finest silica granules. This process is fairly controversial, as the island is a pristine wildlife habitat which is being overtaken by ever increasing spoils that can be seen from mainland.
     We spent Thursday and Friday developing and conducting research products off the coast of the research station, where we were lodged for our stay. My group of five decided to determine the differences in abundance and diversity of mollusks and crustaceans (so basically shellfish, snails and crabs) between the habitats that the mangrove and seagrass systems provide. A mangrove is a tree that can live in hyper saline water, so basically at the interfaces of salt and freshwater. These plants provide shade and retain leaf litter in their tangled roots and branches, and therefore they attract scavengers during low tide and act as a nursery for fish during high tide. Seagrass are flowering plants that have adapted to living in a marine environment. They are the sole diet of dugongs, the Australian cousin of the manatee, and also a nursery for many other animals. We spent all of Thursday in the mud of low-tide exposed sands flats taking samples and sifting through core plugs of these two systems. We determined after the two days work that the seagrass actually both provides more diversity and abundance of life than the mangrove. Though this research just allowed us to dip our toes into the water, it was fun to design and analyze and a good way to learn group presentation skills. It definitely beats spending the day in some random Uni lecture room, which is a better representation of our normal school days.
   
    On Easter Sunday we left the island, took the ferry back to mainland, and drove into Brisbane to meet up with our Aussie homestay families. My host parents are Gary and Bev Land. They live in a suburb named Sunnybank and have a 20 year old son who also lives at home, but studies forensic science at the uni some fifteen minutes away. On our ride home from the bus stop my dad asked me if I liked beer and then proceeded to tell me that he drinks beer for a living. I laughed, thinking this was a cheeky Aussie joke, but then he told me “No seriously, I own a micro brewery.” Since that first day I have been doing my best to sample his finely crafted brews. He has a mini-fridge on the verandah with two kinds of beer on tap, so running out is not a problem. He told me that I could have friends over whenever for a drink or a barbie, so I have already taken him up on that offer a few times. The barbie is a necessity for an Aussie family. So far all of our meals have been cooked on it, so you would be safe in saying that Aussies love their meat.
     As for school, I am taking the public transit into the city to meet up with my classmates for lectures on a daily basis. It takes me roughly thirty minutes to get into the city and our lectures are generally done a little after lunch, so I have had time to explore the city with the guys. We have this weekend free to spend with the family, but I think I am going to a local rugby union game with friends, as my family is going to be away playing lawn bowls. They told me that it’s too boring to watch, but they love playing their bocce-esk sport.

The S. Bank Lagoon, where Brisbane's hostel residents spend their weekdays.

Free climbing with Tim, the German from our hostel

Skiba, Julia, Ann-Marie and Paul riding the ferry to Straddie

Slushing our way through the mangrove muck. Todd lost the sole of his shoe a few min after this photo was taken.

 

A bull ring snail (found in the seagrass beds)

DiDi and Carly sifting through a core plug in the mangrove pneumataphores.

Gary, my host dad, in his brewery in the Gold Coast

Welcome to Country

We’re back near Sydney and midterms are over. If you thought St. Olaf students were serious when it comes to studying for exams, then you thought right. For the week before exams every free second was spent preparing. I, along with a few others, felt that the rest of the group was going a bit overboard, because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned about Australia it’s that Australia is no worries. We still spent most of our time studying though. We would just spend two hours instead of five every night, and that would be in the sauna, and we got up right before breakfast in the morning instead of waking up in the wee hours to get a head start. For me this technique paid off, as I was very pleased with my results.

            Now that we’re done with our exams we have started studying cultural anthropology in depth. An aboriginal lawyer taught us about the history of the aboriginal people since white colonisation of AUS, which began in the late 1700s. You may know this, but AUS is a very young country, being formed in 1901, and since then the aboriginal people have had their culture and country stripped from them. It wasn’t until the late 70s that AUS revoked “The White Australia Policy” from legislation, which only allowed white immigrants into their boarders, and it wasn’t until a few years later that aboriginal people were considered citizens of the country. It took as recent as 2008 for parliament to apologise for the atrocities committed by the government on the aboriginal people. They are still recovering from these, which include massacres and the stolen generation, where children were taken from their families and sent to missions in order to remove their “barbarian culture” and to learn the ways of the west. Most aboriginal people nowadays try to assimilate into modern society, but a few, mostly into the Northern Territory, still hold onto their own cultures and live completely traditional lives in the bush. We also received a lecture on “dreamtime,” which is a poor description but the easiest way to describe the aboriginal’s religious connection to the earth and their sense of space and time. We visited the AUS Museum of Sydney and toured through their aboriginal artifacts. The next day we toured The AUS Art Museum and observed aboriginal art, which is their way to record the stories of their ancestors, which have been passed down orally for thousands of generations. To us the paintings just looked like patterns painted in ochre, but to an aboriginal person the art will reveal both the clan who painted the piece and the spiritual significance that it depicts. I find this incredibly impressive, as there were more than 600 aboriginal languages, and therefore an equal number of unique stories, that existed in AUS prior to British colonisation. But then again it’s understandable that they’d be able to recognise the art since colonisation happened only a few generations ago, while their people have been in AUS and passing on the stories for somewhere around 50,000 years.

            We left the heart of Sydney on Wed. the 21^st, and headed to The Royal National Park, which is located just south of Sydney. Here we paddled canoes up the Kangaroo River while learning about native plants and animals. We cooked beef and roo bangers (sausages) for lunch and learned how to throw spears. While we were eating a few sulfur-crested cockatoos came up to us and begged for a bite. Even though there were signs that said feeding the birds would result in a $500 fine, we snuck them a few pieces of break. After lunch we headed to the beach spent the afternoon there.

            On Thurs. we met another aboriginal man and learned more about the native plants that were utilised by the native people. My favorite plant was the coastal acacia. Its use came from when you crush the leaves in your hands, add water, and then if you scrub hard enough you get a soapy substance that gives your hands a deep clean. We learned to make twine out of tree bark and all of us sat in silence making bracelets and necklaces for about thirty min. We also learned how to throw a boomerang, which was awesome until I threw a bad throw and hit an Asian guy’s ankle. He and his family were angry, and I felt really bad and apologised, but I don’t know if they could understand English. Then in the afternoon we went snorkeling in Chowder Bay. I saw a small stingray, a few crabs and fish, and many sea urchins. Some people found some sea horses, but I couldn’t find them since they were camouflaged in the kelp.

           

            On Friday we helped out the National Parks Service by excavating an old military tunnel near our accommodation. Where we are staying used to be a military base, so there are tunnels that connect lookouts on the bluffs all around the harbour. Once the tunnels were abandoned some thirty years ago, they were filled in to keep hoodlums out. Before we started our volunteer work an aboriginal man named Les welcomed us to his country. This was a spiritual ceremony where he placed three white ochre marks on our foreheads and hands, which sybmolised us listening, looking and learning about his land. He was a very lively man, and later let us eat some “bush tucker” that he collected and even taught us to play the didgeridoo. We moved about 20 wheelbarrow loads out before lunch, which once again consisted of bangers. After work we decided to go to a hidden beach, which turned out not only to be a nude beach, but also a gay nude beach. It was a little awkward for the group of 10 or so of us that went, but we were still able to catch the last of the rays before the sun set below the trees.

           

            We are heading back into the heart of Sydney on Sunday, which is a free day. A girl from our group surprised us by letting us know that her dad rented a 40’ catamaran for us to ride around and snorkel from on Sunday afternoon for four hours. Then in the evening we are going to “The Hunger Games” movie. I think just about all of us have read the book by this time. We are in Sydney until Wednesday, the 28^th, and then we have our second holiday. I just bought my ticket to Brisbane, which is a 14-hour ride away from Sydney Central. I am not sure what we’re going to do there, but I guess we still have five days to figure that out!

This is a picture of aboriginal art (the rainbow serpent)

Emily, Hilary and Todd on the ferry back from Manly Beach

Excavating the old military tunnel at Middle Head

Driving on the Left

Our holiday was a success. We spent Sunday through Wednesday at a hostel in Kings Cross, the backpacker central of Sydney. The hostel wasn’t the cleanest place that I’ve stayed, meaning there were roaches, flies in the fridge, the showers smelled like sewage, but the stay only cost me $22/night and breakfast was included, so I didn’t really care. At least we were able to meet a lot of nice people in our twelve share bedroom! But seriously, we met a lot of nice Europeans. In Kings Cross there were supposedly 1,500 other backpackers, so both the day and night life was lively. Monday night we were invited by a few other flatmates to a barbie at a bar across the street. We received free food after we purchased a beer, so we jumped right on that deal. Two Aussies from the bar joined us for dinner, one old retired navy vet and a guy in his thirties, so we had fun listening to them tell stories about Oz as we watched the rugby league game that was on tv. After dinner we entered in a pool competition of 20 people or so. Ian and Todd were eliminated right away, and I only made it to the last six people, so we didn’t win any of the prize bar vouchers.  During these three days we spent most of our days walking around the city and exploring the botanical gardens in the park adjacent to the opera house and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We really just bummed around and relaxed, which was exactly what our holiday was supposed to be.

We bussed to Botany, a nearby city, around noon on Wed to pick up our campervan, the Jucy Grande.  It came with its own fridge, stove, sink, dvd player, and water pump in the trunk, and was big enough to seat four. Up top there was a pop-up “penthouse” that could sleep two, but only one of us and some gear slept up there. We departed the rental shop and headed to the Blue Mountains, which are just west of Sydney. I made sure that I drove in the city, as I didn’t trust the other two’s capabilities to navigate traffic on the left, and found it pretty easy. It was a little nerve wracking at first, but as I got more comfortable with right turns and merging right into the fast lane on the highway it was fun. We spent the afternoon literally in the rain and clouds up in the mountains and found a nice lookout pull-off to spend the night. We cook a mean stir-fry in the back and watched a movie in the back of the van. During the whole night only two other vehicles drove by us, so I guess our spot was pristine. We got up Thurs morning and the rain had stopped. It was still a little cloudy, but we cooked breakfast and brought our tea out to the edge of the lookout. We visited a variety of waterfalls and lookouts during this day and found a campervan park nestled in a valley of the mountains. Here we met a few other travelers like us, and enjoyed talking to them at the dinner table. One guy was traveling across Oz in his van for a year, and was only three months into his trip. He normally would have been with his wife, but she had to go home for a wedding, so we kept him company this night. After talking to him it hit me how Australian he was and that Australia is not the US. We had to explain to him what college was, and he was amazed that kids leave their parents at 18 and decided what they’re going to do the rest of their lives. Here most people keep living at home and travel to “Uni” any time after their secondary school. We were going to go south of Sydney for Fri, but Dean convinced us to go north instead. We headed off to Terrigal Fri morning, and spent the afternoon relaxing on the beach. We found a coffee shop with free WiFi afterwards and booked our bus tickets to travel to Canberra the next day, which is where we were supposed to meet up with the group. We found a nice car park near a Little Beach in Boudi Ntl. Park south of Terrigal and spent the night there. We feasted this night, finishing off all the food that we had purchased for our car trip. Sat morning the cockatoos woke us up bright and early, and I drove us again back through Sydney and dropped Ian and Todd off by the train/bus station in the heart of the CBD. I then drove the car back to the Jucy Rental shop and bussed back to them. We rode a greyhound bus five hours down to Canberra and moved into our last hostel of the eight day vaca, which was much nicer than the one in Kings Cross.

We are spending this week in Canberra, which is comparable to D.C., visiting museums and lecturing a little on environmental policy. Then on Fri we are making our way back to Sydney to have our midterm exams… yay! Those will be on Fri and Sun, so this week is going to be a pretty laid back and studious week. On a different note, I received my first haircut of the trip today from Dr. Skiba. It took me a few nights to think it over, but I finally decided that different can be good. The mohawk will be gone in the next day or two so don’t worry, but for now the rest of my hair is at 3/10 of an inch.   

Resting on our way up to Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mtns 

Dinner in the Jucy Crib

One of many falls that we visited. 

We had our cuppa out on the rocks before taking off Thurs Morning

On top of the parliament building with my new hairdo. 

Eight Day Vaca!

Hello! I am writing to you from Sydney! I know Sydney wasn't in the plans, but after Ian, Todd and I were dropped off in rainy Melbourne yesterday morning and all the Jucy Cribs down in St. Kilda were taken, we did the next best thing we could think of: we jumped on a train and headed to Sydney. Our train left Melbourne at 8pm and arrived in Sydney at 8am this morning. We now have the next three days to relax at a backpackers, which costs us $22 a night, and then on Wed we are scheduled to pick up a campervan at 10am and begin our adventure. We are thinking about going to the Blue Mountains or even heading out towards the outback, but we aren't for sure yet. We will figure it out on the go.

So, Sydney is a lot like Melbourne only a lot bigger/urban and a lot more social. There are heaps of bars and clubs and everywhere we walk there are empty beer and wine bottles. Maybe this is just because yesterday was their mardi gras celebration, or maybe that's just the way the city is. This morning we went to the botanical gardens by the opera house and in it found some giant spiders and a flock of bats. An Asian marching band scared the "flying foxes" out the tree as they passed by. The bats didn't like the music too much, but we thought it was great!

We spent last week on Phillip Island, which is just east of Melbourne. The highlights of staying on the island were visiting the nesting sites of the penguins and shearwater birds. They estimate that there are over a million shearwaters nesting on the island, which the birds do by digging burrows a few metres deep for their single egg. When the chicks hatch they make easy targets for pacific gulls and copperhead snakes. This just reminded me that we saw a Kookaburra two days ago catch a copperhead, kill it,  swallow it whole and then brag to the other Kookaburras by laughing away. As for the penguins, they are the biggest tourist attraction for the island. Every night the birds come out of the ocean and parade back to their burrows in the hills. One night after sunset we were able to go down to the parade and watch them. We spent and hour watching group after groups of penguins make their way up the rocky beach and back to their burrows. A ranger counted 650 birds come onto the beach that we were at, but there are thousands that nest on the island. The afternoon before we watched the parade we actually made homes for the penguins. We constructed little boxes for them and placed them in a site that had formerly been someones house, but had been purchased by the park. Reclamation of the land is happening all over the island as they realize how important it is for the nesting migratory birds. The ranger told us that the boxes that we made would be occupied by penguins within two or three days. We made sure to let the penguins know that Oles from the US made their box by decorating the inside with an American Flag and "ole sayings".

Wish us luck as we travel. I'm looking forward to the freedom, and driving on the left side of the road of course. It has been nice being with the group, but at the same thing every hour of our day is planned out for us, so we haven't had much free time to explore on our own and relax. It was quite the change of pace from NZ life, but its good! I'll upload some pictures when I can!

Up in a light house of the Otways! David Richard Skiba, David Richard Wett (and Katie)

Hanging out at the Twelve Apostles

Ke Han, Mary, Dr. Ba, Karen, a weirdo and Todd. This was supposed to be our party face. 

A eucalyptus forest is not a bad place to live as a Koala

Australia: Week One and Two

Our first week in Melbourne was pretty laid back. The group spent the first day moving into our single dorm rooms at Mannix College, a dorm off of Monash University, and later spent the afternoon checking out Melbourne’s city centre. The city of Melbourne is big, having a population larger than all of NZ, so I felt a little out of place on the trams and trains. Regardless, the Queen Victoria Markets were fun to meander through and it was fun to spend time with the other Oles.

            While at Mannix we were fed breakfast, we received a $10 stipend for lunches, and we had to fend for ourselves for dinner. Skiba, Todd, Ian and I got creative from day one and starting up our own restaurant in the small kitchen of the dorm. For the next week we “borrowed” fruits from the caf to go along with our peanut butter/nutella toast for lunch. We ate homemade stir-fries every dinner, which looked and tasted so good that we had people asking us if they could buy some off of us. We ended up only spending $15 each for the whole week of food. This was good because we were therefore able to fund our past time of choice: Dooley’s. This was an Irish bar at a hotel-motel in the furniture district of Melbourne which catered to people over the age of fifty that like country and mid-nineties music.

            During the week we had various lectures on anthropology and ecology. At times they were pure review and boring, but a few were very interesting. One professor spoke to us about the 30 years he spent living with an aboriginal community in northern AUS, documenting their language and culture as he went. He is currently one of three people left to know the language fluently, but he is having success with the younger generations in reinstalling their culture into the community, which was formerly forbidden to practice their beliefs by the whites of the area. On Wed. we went to an animal sanctuary in Healesville. We were able to see many animals, which included; emus, koalas, roos, wallabies, various birds and even two baby Tasmanian devils.  On Friday we went to a small biodynamic vineyard and winery, which was fun to compare to Seresin Estate. Though they practiced some of the preparations characteristic to biodynamic practices, the owners were scientists and therefore a little skeptical.

            We left Melbourne on Sunday and bussed down to Queenscliff. We are spending this week studying marine biology at The Marine and Freshwater Discover Centre. Monday was spent listening to lectures, Tuesday we had our first field research, in which we investigated inter-tidal species and their distributions along the shore. In one tide pool we found a Maori Octopus, which was exciting since the people from the centre said they had only seen one before. We started Wednesday off by canoeing through Swan Bay. I was able to catch not one, but two bandjo sharks with my bare hands in the shallow water of the bay. They look a lot like sting-rays, but are a harmless member of the shark family. We saw bigger ones, but the ones I caught were probably around two feet long. On Thurs. we went on a boat tour of St. Phillip Bay. We collected a sample of floating debris in the bay and analyzed the contents. We found many feather stars, a few crabs, wandering anemones, sea squirts and even three or four sea horses. On Fri we are going snorkeling at what they call "Pope's eye", and we are planning on diving during our free time on Saturday. After this, we're heading back to Melbourne for the week. 

         Now that we are actually out in the field I am really enjoying the trip. The first week spent in a foreign school classroom wasn't that much fun, but as long as I am able to break up the lectures with field work, I think I'm going to have a good semester. 

Todd made a new friend. 

Classy blokes sampling wine

Oles at work. We are looking through the brown algae that we collected behind the boat. We found feather stars, anemones, brittle stars, sea horses, crabs, and even a few little fish. 

Team Footscray: Disection Champions. 

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