New Zealand

aIt's been so long since I've posted anything, I almost don't know where to begin. Not that so much has happened. As boring as this sounds, I have pretty much been a paper-factory since my last post--today, I handed in my seventh paper in as many weeks. I did manage to go on couple of great "bushwalking" (hiking) trips, though.

The major highlight over the past few weeks was my trip to New Zealand, which I took during my week off for Easter. With only six days, I traveled only to the south island, which is supposed to have the more spectacular scenery. My first two days, I had the pleasure of traveling with my friend Sylvia, whom I met at Teachers College and who is teaching in Hong Kong right now. We happily discovered that we'd be overlapping by two days and that we are great travel buddies. It was great to have her with me, especially after we discovered that the car that I rented cheaply only had a cassette tape player. For better or for worse, the car company lent out cassettes for the road and the best Sylvia could fish out were titles like "80's hits" (bad covers of them), the Village People, "Sounds like Abba", and Ultima Kylie. Let me tell you, I was getting pretty desperate on my seven-hour drive days after Sylvia left. The only saving grace was that I bought a cassette tape adapter to plug into my Ipod nano. That lasted me about 6 or 7 hours throughout whole trip, and only that long because I borrowed someone charger at a hostel. Aside from that glitch, it was an amazing trip.

If I had to describe New Zealand in one word it would be "enchanting." I have not seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy (hard to believe, I know), but I can see why they filmed it there. In the south island, it's all about the mountains and lakes, which were probably the most beautiful I have ever seen. An ethereal mist seemed to cover the whole place, and I felt as if I could believe in fairy tales there--I half-expected to be greeted by Shrek characters wherever I went.

Though that pleasure wasn't to be granted, there was a sweet small-town innocence that reminded me of another age. The entire country only has 4.2 million people spread across many lakeside towns. One of the days, I took a tour with this company, and on the 1.5 hour van ride from Te Anau to Milford Sound, where we took a boat tour, we delivered three newspapers, picked up a mail bag, and checked up on a man whose wife wanted to know if he was still out hunting. Unable to get cell phone reception on the road to deliver the message, our driver decided to stop by a local's house to use his phone and in the driveway of the man's pickup truck was a dead deer that we were later informed was shot by the man's boy Matthew the day before. The driver didn't end up making the call because the owner of the house said he would pass along the info. That was probably one of my favourite parts of the trip!

Anyway, enough of my commentary. There are links to pics and videos on the right sidebar, plus some videos of Tasmanian devils from my trip in December. (I just now got onto the YouTube thing.)