We have arrived in Nelson for a solid three days and four nights. We all are SO excited about being in one place, with real beds and showers and electricity for such a long stretch. It is amazing what I appreciate these days!
Again, I don't have our pictures from this week yet, but hopefully I can get some up before I leave Nelson.
Anyways, I last wrote from Wellington, which is my favorite place in New Zealand, I think. I loved being there, but we only had one short day. As I was walking around and visiting the city, I made a promise to myself that I would come back some day and spend more time there.
On my one free day there, we started out at Te Papa Tongawera, The Museum of New Zealand. I was only marginally interested in going there, because I am usually not super into museums unless they are particularly exciting, but it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the trip. I think my experience was totally different because I had actually been immersed in what I was learning about at the museum. We have been so involved with the wildlife and Maori culture, that I was so interested to learn more about everything. We had a guided tour, which really focused a lot of some of the Maori exhibits in the museum, and then we could leave. I ended up staying for another hour and a half, just looking around at all the exhibits and pictures, trying to soak everything up. I felt like I should be taking notes or something, but I just let myself be interested in the moment without worrying that I might forget it later on.
After the museum, I met up with a contact I had made through friends of Sam's family, a really nice man named Trevor, who used to work in the NZ police force. He had offered his contact information to me in case of emergency, and also mentioned it would be great if we could meet when I passed through Wellington. He took me out to lunch and then showed me around Wellington. We had a really great time and I got to ask him a ton of questions I had from coming out of the museum. He drove me up to Mount Victoria, which overlooks Wellington and the surrounding land. It was a really beautiful view. We also got to drive by all these houses that are perched way up on the cliff. Families can only get to these houses by parking at street level and then getting in a little gondola and riding up to the house! We also stopped by Weta Caves, which is a tribute store to Peter Jackson's production company. There was a tiny little museum and lots of little figurines and such that were hundreds of dollars. I felt like I couldn't visit New Zealand and not see SOMETHING to do with Lord of The Rings!
The rest of the day I spent getting in touch with everyone back home and then wandering around the city. It is always fun to get a little lost when I am trying to find some store and then just sort of wander until I get back. But only if I have a map and somewhat of an idea of where I am... Wellington seems to be a pretty friendly city and I managed to find my way around just fine.
The Rugby Sevens were being played in New Zealand that weekend, so it was quite a crazy time in Wellington. Everyone dresses up in costumes to go and see the game, and so there were a ton of people out on the town at night. They closed off the street right by our hostel for a street party, with music and everything! We had a great time going out and checking out everyone in the crazy costumes: we saw clowns and pirates and crossdressers... it was like Halloween!
Then on Sunday we set out for our week of volunteer work, which is where I have been for bulk of the last week. We got up early to catch a ferry to the South Island, but unfortunately I was out for most of the ferry ride. If you are reading this and knew me as a kid, you might know that I used to not do so well on ferrys. In fact, I remember once going to see the puffins with the whole family on a ferry, and not seeing many puffins...just over the side of the boat. So I took some Dramamine and was totally knocked out for the 3 hour ride, so I didn't get to see the sights.
When we got to the South Island, we drove a few minutes to Picton, where we met with our DOC guide, Josh, and went through quarantine. Blumine Island, where we volunteered, has been declared free of pests such as rats, possums, and stoats, and is almost completely native flora and fauna. The DOC (Department of Conservation) really wants to keep it that way, and so we had to make sure we weren't carrying any stowaway animals or seeds.
Our week on the island was pretty relaxed. We camped right on the beach, along with Josh, who was 22 and could easily have just been another of the group. We spent our free time swiming, singing, and doing crossword puzzles (which I think might be our new group activity - I pulled out my crossword book one afternoon and we have been zooming through the puzzles ever since!). The work we did was much more interesting than our last volunteer project! Also, there are these funny little birds called wekas, that have no wings and are intensely curious. Anything loose left out on the campsite would get stolen away and hidden in the bushes by these little birds!
Here is how the week went!
Monday:
We started out by hiking around the whole island, which Josh said was about a day's hike. It was VERY uphill (as is EVERYTHING in New Zealand, I should really just stop being so surprised), but a pretty nice hike. We were keeping an eye out for these little birds called Tom tits, which we were supposed to feed worms in hopes to get them to be a little less shy around humans, since DOC wants to capture some and transport them to another island where there is only one lonely Tom Tit. We saw some but weren't able to feed them. When we reached the summit, Josh said we could take a trail back down the the campsite, or "bush bash" straight down from where we were. Now if you read my post from a few weeks ago, you know that we spent a few long days in Waitomo bashing through the bush, but it had been a while since we had had an exciting adventure, so I had to go and pipe up, "Let's go through the bush!" So we headed away from the track and made our way down through the trees and rough terrain. Personally, I actually enjoyed the challenge, after having some time away from it while on the river last week! We all made it through much faster and I think we are improving as a group at getting through these tough situations!
Monday afternoon we had a quick swim and then set about getting rid of some weeds and such around the campsite. I was set to cut down cherry trees with a few others, which was great, because the other job was just boring weeding. But the cherry trees were growing in the middle of the bush, on nearly vertical hillside. So it turned out to be incredibly tough work! But we got them all cut down, which was good, since they are not a native tree.
At night, we set off on a hike to a stream that we were going to survey. This stream had never been surveyed before, which means noting all the fish and aquatic life along the stream. It was a really hard hike to the steam, up a really steep track and then down through untracked bush to the stream. Since the fish come out at night, we left around 7:30 pm, and it was getting dark when we were making our way down through the trees. When we finally reached the stream, it had dried up! That was pretty discouraging, after such a hard hike, so we decided to continue down the stream to see if there were any pools or flowing water further down. It was a long way down, and Josh found a couple of things to document, but pretty much it just turned into a long, treacherous hike down a stream bed in the dark. We all had headlamps, but it was slippery and hard to see where we were stepping! When we finally made it down to the beach, our joy was cut short by the realization that the high tide was fully upon us. We had been intending to just walk back to our campsite by following along the coast, but there was no dry land to walk on. We were not about to turn back and hike back up the creek, or wait 6 hours for the tide to change, so we set out walking in the edge of the water.
It was pretty slow going and we were all exhausted. It was about 10:30pm and we were now wet and cold. The rocks were incredibly slippery, and the rocks on the side of the coast were sharp and crumbly, making it hard to hold on to anything. Most of us had packs, so we were trying not to get wet past our waists. I was having some major problems with the arch in my foot from the hike down the river, and was having a lot of trouble walking across the uneven rocks. Then suddenly, I felt this shooting pain in the back of my knee and couldn't bend my leg without this sharp pain. Everyone else continued on except Scott, our program leader, who stayed with me while I hoisted myself onto a rock to try to stretch out my hamstring. It was a pretty scary feeling, because my knee was feeling all stiff and I had never felt anything like it before. Eventually the pain started to go away and we could continue slowly for another 30 minutes or so back to camp. By the time we got back, my foot and knee both felt okay, but the pain had moved to a dull ache in my hip and back. The next morning I felt completely fine and haven't had a problem since. That was my first real "injury" on the trip and it was pretty scary! I still have no idea exactly what happened... But I seem fine now!
Tuesday:
Since Monday was such a big day, we slept in super late and had a really easy day on Tuesday. We only worked for a couple of hours, surveying these snails in a couple of areas off the track. This island was home to an abundant population of these giant, carniverous snails, about 3-5 inches in diameter. These snails are apparently pretty endangered in a lot of areas, so we were trying to monitor how many we could find in different areas. We had to mark out a 10 square meter plot and then get down on our hands and knees and sift through the leaves and brush to look for shells and measure each one we found. It was fun and not too hard, and we spent the rest of the day just hanging out.
The best part of the whole trip was Tuesday night, when we were hanging on the beach listening to Dom play his guitar at night, when our camping neighbors went out for a midnight kayak. When their boats went in the water, we realized we could see all this phosphoresence in the water, from this bioluminescent plankton (Sorry if any of that is incorrect, Tom!). They were these tiny golden flecks whenever the water moved and we started throwing pebbles in to watch the water spread out in these golden waves. I decided to go swimming and it was the coolest experience ever. I felt like the final scene in the Little Mermaid, when King Triton decides to give Ariel legs again. He sweeps his triton throught the water and all this gold goes through the water to where Ariel is and turns her into a human with this shining dress. It was exactly like that, I swear.
Wednesday:
On Wednesday we got up and headed off to clear some track. I was sort of dreading this, but it ended up to be pretty fun work. It was hard physically, since we were working up a steep hill and had these little hand saws and one pair of clippers to clear out lots of weeds and small trees, but we were able to chat a lot and hav some really interesting conversations. We took long breaks and just sort of enjoyed the day.
In the afternoon we just laid in the sun and relaxed, because at night, we went for another creek survey. This one was SO much better! The creek was just down the beach from our campsite, so we didn't have a huge hike. As soon as we got to the stream, we started seeing aquatic life. We were catching any big fish we saw to measure (I was record keeper, of course). We ended up finding over 40 fish and a ton of eels. Some of the fish were up to about 30cm! And we found an eel that was 2m long! These eels are amazing: they live in these creeks in NZ and one day, they get an urge to go spawn, so they swim all the way to somewhere near Fiji to have their babies and die. Then the babies turn around and swim right back to the NZ stream! The eels we saw were about 80 years old. I got to pick up a fish and touch and eel. Neither was as gross as I thought it would be. The fish had these rough fins that help them climb up the waterfalls and rocks when they want to move upstream. It was a pretty cool nighttime expedition, and we got to head home at a reasonable hour and get some sleep.
Thursday:
On this day we just got up late, packed up our gear, and headed back to Picton. It figures that on the one day we had to pack up our tents and gear, we would wake up to rain. So we were pretty quick getting our stuff together, and had a VERY wet ride back on the water taxi! But it felt great to get back into the van in Picton, in dry clothes and drive 2 hours to Nelson, where I am now.
In Nelson we all got hot showers and then went to meet Scott's family, since he lives in Nelson. He has a wife and a little 3-year-old son named Kahu, who is super cute! He has this precious accent and was not shy at all. He grabbed my hand and showed me his room where we played dress up for a little bit. It made me miss my little bros, especially when they were that age! We all went out to dinner at a near by pizza/burger joint. Scott's wife, Rachel, gave me all my mail from home (this was our main mail drop), so it was great to get the letters from my family! I spent the rest of the night doing laundry and catching up on some emails.
Today, we were supposed to go on this big mountain bike ride, but it is still raining so it is postponed for the moment. I walked into town to find an ATM and, although I had an excellent breakfast of hot chocolate and french toast at a little cafe, got caught in a torrential downpour on the 15 minute walk home. I am all dry and toasty now though, and am going to go read in my warm bed until we figure out plans for biking! I think this is going to be a fun weekend: I am going to go skydiving, and we are going to go to a wine and food festival before we leave for our next week of volunteering. It is nice to have a little break from our tents and sleeping bags!!
That's all for now! I miss you all!!
Love, Katie
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