just thought i'd let you know i'm still alive here in new zealand :-)

ok so, i warned you that i wouldn't be very good at keeping up with these emails before i left. now you know it's true.

i've been really busy and i've done a whole lot since then the first email i sent out...september 14...so here's the next chapter to this novel i'm living. it's going to be longer than the first one just because so much has gone on and i'm writing this almost like a diary entry--thoughts, feelings, and detail. hopefully you can make it all the way to the end.

the weekend after waitomo and taupo, our group went as a program to rotorua and rotoiti which is just about 45min-1hour away from taupo, so same area. on the way there, we stopped at matamata for lunch which sounds like your ordinary funky name new zealand town except this is the town where peter jackson filmed the scenes from the shire and hobbiton! i know i know, i'm a huge dork. i've accepted that. the set for hobbiton was actually made on a private sheep farm and after filming, the owners decided to leave up the main parts of the set and sell tours of it. smart folks. you have to take a bus over to where the area is so we didn't have enough time do it then.  hopefully we'll be able to get over there in the time we have left.


after lunch, we went on to rotorua. first stop there was zorb rotorua. so zorbing. pretty much you change into these uniforms and they drive you to the top of this hill. at the top, you get into this huge beachball/hampsterball type thing and they fill it around 5 inches deep with warm water. then they kick you through the gate, and you roll down the hill sloshing around inside with 2 other people. it was hilarious. way over-priced and a complete tourist trap, but hilarious. when you get out of the ball at the bottom, you have to slide through these little holes with the water and from the outside, it seriously looks like you're getting birthed by a giant beachball.  next up was street luging. what this one is, is you ride in a gondola to the top of a mountain. at the top, you get a bike helmet and these go cart like sleds with handle bars and you slide down these narrow swervy roads down the mountain, ride back up on a ski lift and then slide again. there were three levels of difficulty and by the third ride, we were all going down the advanced and trying to race each other around these curves that literally went straight down off the sides of them. in retrospect, i'm amazed no one fell off with all tokyo drifting that was going on.


after the street luging, the bus took us to the maori marae where we stayed. we had to be ceremoniously welcomed in order to enter it. girls had to wear skirts and no one was allowed to speak until we sang a song in maori. i wouldn't have minded the skirts if it hadn't been next to the lake and ridiculously cold and windy but it was only for a little while anyway. after we settled in, we went to the hall where they fed us dinner. the ceremonial welcome was like making us part of the family that owned that marae and with it, we were supposed to feel like home and be comfortable. it also meant that we had to help clean up and with dishes after dinner so we washed 30 people's worth of dishes in assembly line style in the kitchen. fun stuff.  


the for the rest of the weekend, the director took us to the rotorua hot pools which you can only get to by boat. they're literally these man-made pools that are naturally filled with the hot springs water that runs into them from the side of this mountain across the lake from town, completely secluded. the water in the pools was almost boiling and and the water in the lake was a drastic freezing opposite so a lot of us had some fun shocking our bodies by jumping from the pools into the lake over and over. after, we were set loose in the town of rotorua for the afternoon. it was pretty quiet since it wasn't tourist season but still interesting. that evening, we took a bush walk which is a hike through the thick new zealand forest. the trees and flora are so thick that you only see glimpses of the sky once in awhile until you emerge from it. it was almost jungle-like and very cool. you can do walks like these much easier in new zealand because there are very little predators, dangerous insects and ticks. the trail ended right at the lake and we came out as the sun was setting over it. it was so surreal looking with the colors of the sunset over the water, hills, and clouds that it looked almost like a painting.


the next weekend, seven of us flew to the south island for a super-fast-squeeze-as-much-as-we-can-into-four-days road trip fromchristchurch down to queenstown. we flew into christchurch which is on the northern side of the east coast and rented cars for the drive.  most of the scenes from lord of the rings were filmed in the south island so if you saw the movies, you can imagine how beautiful it is everywhere you turn. as soon as we drove out of christchurch, we headed inland straight toward the mountain ranges. we drove across the country from christchurch to greymouth on the west coast, via arthur's pass, a mountain passage in the center of the island. the road was curvy, often along cliffs in the valleys but still a good amount above sea level. and there was always something to look at. at arthur's pass, my car stopped and hiked up one of the mountains there. the trail itself was really rocky, steep, and actually a running stream so a lot of the tramping (hiking) was through water.  it got drier higher up but more steep and rocky. all four of us were pretty deadset on making it to the summit so eventually we got up to where there was snow on the ground and didn't stop there. the view, by the way, was fantastic since we could see up and down the mountain valleys, the snow caps, and all the hidden waterfalls on other mountains. we were only a couple hundred feet from the top when we finally turned around and booked it back down the mountain cause there were threatening clouds rolling in. 

we reached greymouth that night and found our hostel.  the next morning we moved on to drive down the west coast of the island. the road was sandwiched between the tasman sea and the southern alps so both sides were easy on the eyes for the trip. our next stop was the town of franz josef, home of franz josef glacier and fox glacier. the town offers countless glacier tour companies but the weather was drizzly and we were still tired from the hike the day before so we didn't do it but saw franz josef glacier from the lookout point. we did run into the other car from our group who had split from us after arthur's pass.  they had done the heli-hike, being taken up to the higher part of the glacier by helicopter and hiked around up there. from what they told us, the experience was once in a lifetime.  when we reached haast down on the southern central part of the west coast, we veered back inland towards wanaka where we were staying for the night. between haast and wanaka is 75 kilometers of complete wilderness so you have to make sure you fill up on gas before you enter it. we were thinking as we went through that if we ever got in an accident or broken down, we would be helpless since there was no one for miles around, it was thunderstorming, and we didn't have cell phones. luckily we made it through unscathed. we drove this stretch in overcast weather and at dusk, just after the sun was behind the horizon. this was one of my favorite and most memorable things i've done since i've been here. haast pass is a curvy mountain valley road high above sealevel. the clouds were so low and we were so high up that we were actually driving through them. those low clouds in patches around mountains, mixed with the dark green and plush upward slopes on both sides (think of scenery in jurassic park or gorillas in the mist), running blue streams criss crossing through sandy plains and waterfalls all over the mountain sides made the drive almost mystical and really sort of magical. when it got really dark, add an intense lightning storm in the middle and you've got an atmosphere that probably can't ever be replicated again. we also just missed hitting a few cows hanging out in the road in the dark.


wanaka is this small town on lake wanaka, tucked somewhere between mountains in the southern alps. the atmostphere there is much like that of a ski town, which is what it is during the winter, really inviting, cozy, and relaxed. that morning we rented kayaks and paddled across the lake surrounded by mountains. it was windy so it was a little rough paddling against the current and i definitely got a good arm and ab workout. there's a tiny island in the middle of the lake--no more than 10 minutes to walk around the circumference of it. we made it there tired and each found our own little spot on it to nap in the sun for a few hours. after we paddled back to town, we ate lunch and hit the road again towards queenstown.

this next stretch of road was through rocky gray hills covered in short shrubs, some patches of trees here and there, and rivers running below the cliffs through the valleys. we stopped at a bridge off the side of the road over one of these rivers, home of aj hacket bungee, the world's first bungee jump. it was closed so there was no one jumping but it was still cool to see it. the rest of the way to queenstown was during sunset so there were pink, purple, and yellow clouds behind the peaks.


in queenstown, we met up with one of my roomates, kali, who had stayed the whole weekend in queenstown at the flaming kiwi hostel. queenstown is the adventure sports capital of new zealand and possibly the world (not to be mixed up with the real capital, wellington). it also had wanaka's feel of a ski town on a lake except bigger and more touristy but still very pretty. the next day, the other three from my car went whitewater rafting on shotover river. kali and i went and did the shotover canyon swing. our guide "chrispy" drove our group into the mountains on this tiny dirt road until we made it to the canyon site where the swing was. the canyon swing is similar to bungee jump in the free fall sense except when the you reach the bottom of the cord, instead of bouncing up and down, you swing over the shotover river at the bottom a few times. the company offers you ten ways to fall from the platform so that each jump gives you a different view of falling. i did two of them, the first one i picked so that i could step off under my own power and the second one i picked so that i would be released by chrispy but also could see the ground coming at me the fastest headfirst. there's nothing more satisfying than being able to jump off the ledge on your own. it was awesome.

after the canyon swing, kali had to catch the shuttle for her flight back to auckland so i hung out by myself in queenstown for a few hours while i waited for the other crew to get back from whitewater rafting.  it's a really nice place to be alone in, to just walk around and take in all the scenery and people. when we met up again, we returned the car and headed to the airport for our flight back to auckland.  i've taken a lot planes to a lot of places and even the take off from queenstown is the most beautiful one i've seen.  meanwhile, the other car that came with us but split off again after the glaciers, went and did a lord of the rings tour on a large farm outside of queenstown. they got to drive their car up to this high hill that overlooked the town, lake, and mountains where a bunch of scenes of the escape from edoras through rohan to helm's deep were filmed. there are lots of amazingly tame animals all over this farm and people who come get a bucket of pellets and these animals eat from your hand. after this, they drove to dunedin, a small irish college town, and saw penguins and seals on the pacific east coast beach . 


i posted some of the pictures they took so you can see.  the south island is just a mix of every kind of landscape in one place: long green fields, thick forest, towering snowcapped mountains, royal blue lakes, rocky hills, criss crossing river valleys, huge blue and white glaciers, steep river canyons, and sea shores. i wish we had had more than four days to see it. since we had so little time, we didn't get to stop for a lot of things i would've liked to have some more time to take in. we also didn't get to see the east coast, northern section where abel tasman national park is(famous for white sand beaches and sea kayaking), the central section, and the very southern part (where milford sound and all the other sounds are). i definitely plan on coming back here for a longerperiod of time in the future.

i still have a whole week in the cook islands to tell you about but i'll wait for the next email to do that since i think this one is long enough.  it was an unforgettable experience and could probably take the length of this whole email to tell about this one trip. so i'll save it.

anyway, besides these weekend trips, work has started four days a week, eight hours a day and is a lot of work and my boss is really tough. i really have the most difficult and demanding internship in my program but i know i'll learn a lot from it. that last day of each week, i have an ecology class. we have class from 9am to about noon, then we take field trips each week to study that week's topic, and then head back to the lab to examine and analyze. so far we've done rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds and have the ocean, shoreline, and terrestrial ones coming up. the ocean one is this weekend and we're taking a snorkling trip for it :-).

that's it for now. hope everything's great at home and that you're all enjoying fall in new england. you don't realize how great it is until you have to miss it. have a happy halloween and i'll talk to you soon!

~h

PS. i'm here in auckland until dec 6 (dec 5 for you). it takes about 5-10 days for mail to get to me. my address is:

Heather Tang
The Railway Campus
209/1
Private Bag 106 601
Downtown Auckland 1030
New Zealand

not that i'm hinting at anything...just in case you like writing people's addresses in your address book or something like that... :-)