Top of the South Island!

Yay! I'm done with school and now I'm all set to go on an awesome trip up to the North Island! My last two finals....ehhh... not the best. I'm fairly certain I passed all of them, but the real question is whether I got a B or better in Heat & Mass Transfer, because I need that to get Mudd credit.... and that final (80% of the final mark!!) was not a fun exam. I'm just hoping everyone else did poorly too, and brings the curve down. Yay.

But enough of that, now its on to fun vacation! The day after my last final, Erin and I woke up at the crack of dawn to get down to the train station. I nearly missed it too, we had to catch the first Orbiter bus of the day to make it to the station on time, so I went out to the bus stop a couple minutes before the timetable said the bus would come through, but it was early! It turned down the road running past my flat, so I was at least able to wave him down, and he was nice so he let me get on.

From the train station, we rode the TranzCoastal train up from Christchurch along the coast, past Kaikoura up to Blenheim. The ride was pretty cool, although nothing spectacular. They did have one train car that you could walk out too that was open to the air, so that was pretty cool to stand out there and watch. So we got to Blenheim, a small, rather boring little town with 30 min or so until the Intercity bus came that would take us along the northern edge of the South Island to Nelson. It was about lunch time, so we walked across the street to a BP and got some lunch. I picked up a bacon and egg pie. For those of you that don't know, New Zealand has a very interesting type of fast food called a meat pie. It is just what it sounds like, a small (5-7 cm diameter) pie crust filled with a type of meat (like steak, or mince AKA ground meat). It can be tasty at some times, but like all fast food, too much and it gets kinda nasty.

So the Intercity bus to Nelson came, and we took off. The bus driver told a little bit about some of the things in the region. We arrived in Nelson about 2 in the afternoon and took a walk through town to our hostel on Trafalgar Square. Turned out in the middle of Trafalgar Square was a large cathedral on top of a hill, ironically called Christ Church Cathedral. After we had settled in a little bit we took a walk through the city to see what else was around, and walked around the Cathedral and took some pictures up there too. That night we made dinner (only time so far actually...), then took some time to read before going to bed. Its turned out to be a pretty good trip for doing reading. If i avoid the TV and the computer, turns out I have a lot of time to read!

The next morning we woke up waaaaaaaayyy too early to meet an Abel Tasman Coachlines bus out by our hostel at 6 AM. After some loops around the city picking up people at other hostels and places, we were on our way around the Tasman Bay to Abel Tasman National Park! It was interesting to see the effect of the tides, the combination of very level ground and a tide of 3-4 meters makes for a really big, impressive estuary. At low tide, there was hundreds of meters of exposed land with maybe millimetres of water extending out into the bay. The driver pointed out how on that land, people had gone out at low tide and left messages made with rocks. These messages would be covered up with the tide, only visible at low tide.

We made it out at last to Motueka, the last reasonably-sized town before the national park. We did sea kayaking with a company based there. We had originally booked a trip where we paddled out from Marahau to Anchorage, then take a water taxi back, but we were the only people booked on that trip, so they bumped us up to a bigger trip, that took us to Anchorage by water taxi, then we paddled up further to Onetahuti Beach, to take another water taxi ride back to Marahau. It was quite an exciting trip, I don't think I've ever been sea kayaking before. It was the whole deal with neoprene skirts that we had to wear that went over the hole for the seat. Since they were sea kayaks, they were pretty large and were fitted with a rudder I controlled from the rear seat. At one point we paddled into a river inlet that was only available at high tide, and went up the river a bit to see a swingbridge that was part of the Abel Tasman Coastal Walk. We stopped for lunch at Bark Bay and enjoyed some beautiful weather out in the sun. After a little while hanging out there and eating cake the guides brought, we got all set in the kayaks again and went up toward Onetahuti beach, going around Tonga Island and its seal colony on the way. On the way from Tonga Island to the final beach, it got to be a little less fun because the wind started picking up and making a rough sea. Erin and I made it to the beach a pretty long way ahead of everyone else, I'm sure because we were ready to get out of those waves. It was a good trip though, must have been about 6 hrs of paddling total. We're gonna get buff from all this exercise we're doing!

When we got back to Nelson that night, we were both exhausted and didn't want to cook dinner, so we walked down to Little India and got some delicious Indian food for takeaway. Someone has to let me know if there are any good Indian food places around back home, because thats one thing they have a LOT of everywhere in New Zealand. After dinner I watched this British show on this short guy (~5 ft) trying to deal with life as a short person, and talking with other short people having difficulties. It was pretty funny, even if some of it was a little ridiculous. So in one part, he's saying that he has trouble sometimes using a urinal. He goes to talk to a guy in the urinal business, who then goes on to describe a design for a urinal that uses an infrared beam to sense height, and a movable urinal to adjust to the necessary height for the user....OR.... put the urinal lower on the wall. Which sounds like the more reasonable solution to you?

Thursday was a day mostly of traveling. We woke up early (again!) to catch the Intercity bus to Picton, north of Blenheim. In Picton, we had about 2 hrs free until the ferry left, so we wandered around a little bit, and stopped for brunch at the Dutch Bakkerij. Highly rated!! Great sandwiches and awesome desserts too. Then in the early afternoon we got on the Interislander ferry that took us from Picton, through Queen Charlotte Sound, across the Cook Strait, then up into Wellington! Yay, I'm in the North Island, and not just in Auckland Airport waiting for my connecting flight!