peace.

Our adventures with Susie are now over... we visited Moeraki Boulders, Allan's beach (again), Tunnel beach (again), walked through the gardens and cemetery, investigated Dunedin's old churches, and ate venison burgers and meat pies.

It's been another stressful week with the kiwi host, maturity level: 7 year-old. I know my 7-year-old boys, and he functions at approximately that level of respect and patience. As a result, my shoulders are so tightly knotted that they hurt to touch and crunch audibly when massaged.

The plan, starting tomorrow, is as follows...

28 March: begin geology field trip in Borland, Fjordlands

1 April: go directly from Borland to Queenstown in Paul's vehicle, Black Thunder. Overnight and find food for the next several days.

2 April: shuttle in to the Rees-Dart trailhead for a good long tramp with Missers Trexler and Trogstad-Isaacson

7 April: shuttle from the end of the Dart track back to Queenstown, overnight.

8 April: bus from Queenstown to Dunedin

9 April: unofficial field trip up the west coast with the same demonstrator who gave us shots after we turned in our lab reports earlier in the semester.

11 April: return to Dunedin

12 April: start classes again.

I'll be back after that!

peace

After much waffling by other group members, Chad, Drew, Hillary, and I decided to take the situation into our own hands. We weren't about to base our weekend on people who would rather be doing homework. By the time Susie (Chad's sister) arrived on Friday we had a car rented (named Fang after Hagrid's bumbling dog), food purchased, and at least a vague idea of where we were going and what we wanted to do.

We made it to Queenstown uneventfully and after talking to a friendly Canadian in an outdoor shop (he was much nicer than the people in the Department of Conservation office which is where you're supposed to get park information) we decided to camp at Moke Lake, a locally known and free campground.

TIM TAM SLAM: activity of the week. Pepperridge Farms may make a timtam-like cookie. Procedure: bite two opposite corners off the rectangular, chocolate-covered cookie. insert one corner into a hot drink, preferably hot cocoa or milo (similar to cocoa, but not chocolate), and suck the other corner to bring the liquid up through the cookie. This liquefies the biscuit inside the chocolate-dipped coating. Just before the cookie disintegrates into your mug, you shove the whole thing in your mouth. Chocolate may get everywhere. you also may be the happiest person in the world when your mouth is filled with squishy chocolate goodness.

We slammed some timtams after dinner and then blithefully drove back into town to look around the touristy wonder that is Queenstown, but could just as easily be Park City, UT or Jackson Hole.

We had delicious oatmeal for breakfast. it was infused with rehydrated fruit that Drew and Chad splurged on. Did a bit of leisure driving up towards Paradise and eventually ended up at a short walking track to Sylvan Lake. We ambled through what appeared to be the forest that surrounds Lothlorien but may have just been a bunch of lovely beech trees. Cute bird of the day: Rifleman. looks like those little cork birds that are Christmas tree ornaments. We visited 12 Mile Delta after lunching and ended up napping on the beach not 500m from where Frodo and Sam ate a brace of conies in stew without taters (po-tay-toes... ).

Upon our early return to camp we discovered that we had new neighbors who intended to party. hillary and i went for a swim in the lake to the detriment of an unsuspecting mountain bicyclist. cooked dinner, slammed timtams, gnawed on gingernuts, stargazed, crammed 4 people into a 3-man tent and attempted to sleep in spite of the blaring music that lasted until 3am.

we were up around 6:30 to break camp and set out to do a big chunk of the Routeburn Great Walk. not much sleep, but once we were underway everything rolled along nicely. The walk is beautiful--follows the river up the valley through turquoise (or mouthwash-blue) pools and golden flat grasslands right up to a waterfall and a posh hut. we only did the first 10k, but it was all beautiful and looked a lot like the PNW in places. my favourite were the talkative beech forests.

rolled back into queenstown to cook dinner on the beach, dropped hillary off, and set out to drive back to dunedin. Four hours, several rounds of 20-questions, and a pack of gingernuts later we were back at uni.

Monday: went out to Allan's beach (again) with the Trexlers for a windy walk that was DEFINITELY better than doing homework. More adventures to come this week, as Susie needs entertainment before she leaves on Friday.

The weather is starting to lean towards fall... with a little luck, our field trip to Borlands this weekend (starting Sunday) will be moderately dry and cozy! After the field trip is Easter break and hopefully yet another tramp.

What weekends are made of

Friday afternoon Hillary rolled into Dunedin on the nakedbus, only to receive the greeting "so glad you're here! We're going backpacking. for the weekend. starting right now." Carried by our rental van, Voltron, we set out for a couple days away from academia.

Mt. Cook is New Zealand's tallest peak. It's surrounded by glaciers and national park and it's nigh impossible to get a bad view of it. As we approached our trail, each photo stop was better than the last, filled with rugged and ever more present mountaintops and their accompanying ice falls.

We hiked into the Hooker Valley on Friday night, set up camp, and crashed shortly after dinner. During the night I woke up a couple of times to what sounded like thunder in a cloudless sky, but was most likely glaciers calving or settling, as the valley was ornamented with frozen-bed glaciers high up on the walls and peaks.

The next morning we trekked in a bit further, passing kias (alpine parrots that are notorious for chewing the rubber off car windows), "poky bitch plants" (more than one of our number bled from more than one stab wound on more than one occasion), a proglacial lake riddled with stagnant ice and icebergs. Our resting place at high noon became our second campsite, looking up the valley at the entire Hooker Glacier and over at its toe calving into the lake. Actually, it didn't calve as much as we wanted it to.

For the remainder of the afternoon we meandered up the valley for more phenomenal views sitting on fresh moraines, a short walk up to a waterfall, brief moments of investigation into the tiny fruits that someone dubbed "alpine pomegranates," and general geogasms and disbelief that we were surrounded with such present mountains and glaciers. Upon our return to camp we pushed some big rocks down a steep slope and sat watching the glacier until it got dark. It looked like it was about to lose a bus-sized chunk into the lake but it never did.

Dinner both nights was followed shortly by boxed wine, so easy to pack out. Only one blister this time! New Zealand scenery is breathtaking. we drove just 4 hours, hiked less than 10k, encountered only three other people on the trail, and interacted with only one of them.

Queenstown next weekend?

Good enough for government work

This week:

I ate half a pumpkin. the other half is in the oven right now.

We had a field trip from 8am to 9pm on Saturday. we came back and did two hours of homework after dinner and then went to a club downtown where a geology friend was working as a bouncer. He let us skip the long line (AWESOME) and we each had a big glass of organic NZ beer before dancing until we were drunk with fatigue.

In a haze of stress and mental exhaustion, Paul drove Chad and I to the beach and we made drip castles for a study break.

Because we started the academic term off with a huge assignment our social group is built around geology homework.

Our big geology project was due this morning... shortly after handing it in our lecturer approached a group of us loitering in a daze of sleep deprivation and relief and offered us a shot of Croatian liquor. 9am monday: drinking with a demonstrator. yes.

P.S.

Resuming student life

Before uni classes officially started Geol252 had a week-long field trip to Maerewheneua for field camp... there are 80 students in the class, nine of them Whitties. Overall the trip was a good time, but I think we all came to appreciate Whitman geo and realize what it is we're actually getting out of that little school in Walla Walla. In general, lectures were slow-paced, directed towards the unfortunate souls who were taking it as their second-ever geo class. The demonstrators (only one was actually a professor) were frequently disorganized and redundant, and they dangled the beer carrot in front of our faces for the whole week and heartbreakingly never followed through with a trip to the pub. As a whole I felt thoroughly prepared for the ordeal... Whitman geology made this a cake walk, though I do now have a lot of busy work to do (make a geologic map, cross-section, strat column, write a report, etc).

In spite of at least half-assed efforts, Whitman students frequently worked together. In one such group Janna and I followed directions and went off to explore the lower margin of a layer of basalt (as though we haven't seen enough basalt to last us a lifetime or two) only to find out afterwards that the group leaders decided to keep everyone together. It was refreshing to go on a faster-paced hike in search of baked Tapui (the rock formation we were supposed to find.

Classes at Otago are not like Whitman, but I'm aware of the fact that I'm far away from home, this is a different school, and I've got high expectations, having taken Whitman for granted. I'm enrolled in Field Studies, a class on hydrocarbon basins (from a super cool professor who knows where Olympia is! this'll be a fun class because it's stuff I probably won't learn at Whitman), and physics. physics is strange because we do reading and some homework outside of class, only to do a bunch of practice final test problems when I would normally expect to be lectured.

Allan's beach: got chased by a big seal and found some cool rocks. the shoreline itself is picturesque and secluded and wonderful.

Botanical gardens: went for a run and it turns out the gardens are far more extensive than I imagined... there are tons of trails, a gorgeous old cemetery that may or may not spawn zombies, an aviary, and designated park-y areas for weddings or eating or any of those sorts of things.

Flat: layout is excellent, fellow Americans are super nice and wonderful, kiwi host is sort of hard to get along with (we're working on that).

Our toast of choice (we say it every time we drink) is "to f***'n New Zealand"

Rock on.