I Come From the Land Down Under

Hello everyone out there!

I'm back on the blogging band-wagon once again, and it's nice to finally have time and energy to sit down and detail the adventures from the past month online. Over the past month, Shannon and I have been out of Korea and been travelling throughout New Zealand and Australia, seeing the countryside, catching up with old friends and meeting a few new people along the way.

I suppose I'll start at the beginning, but I make no promises regarding the chronological continuity of the following story. I will however try to litter it as best as possible with exciting quips and adventures, and hope I can inspire a few restless, stagnant souls to venture out into a part of the world they haven't been (or at least haven't been in a while).

I'll start by mentioning that Shannon and I are generally unable to agree on anything we're doing until the last possible second. So, when we finally arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand at 11pm on New Years day, we were still trying to sort out currencies, travel methods, where to go, and of course, where we were going to sleep that night. We managed to find an amaaing little hostel that was the former town jail (sleeping in a jail cell is an unusual and exciting experience), and the next day, we sat down to sort out our plans for the next while.

We decided to travel around with a camper van, which was a pretty cool way to get around (we got a little sick of it by the end). They don't really ask for much when letting you operate a vehicle on the other side of the road, as I've had more trouble renting a car in Canada than we did with this thing. But it didn't take much doing to get used to, and pretty soon we were cruising down the highway, gripping the wheel and breaking into a sweat every time a big vehicle came barrelling towards us on what seeemed like the wrong side of the road.

Our first stop was Kaikoura, a tiny town that started up as a whale-watching community. We took some surfing lessons, toured through a cave and around a waterfall, basically just seeing whatever we could around town. What we really wanted to do was go on a dolphin swim, where they take you out on a boat, give you some snorkelling gear, and let you swim with anywhere from 20-300 dolphins, depending on how many are in the area. But, it was about the most popular thing in the whole country, and was booked up for weeks. We did manage to find some dolphins later though, but I'll get to that.

Our next stop was Abel Tasman park, probably the most sceninc and generally enjoyable time we had on our trip. We rented a two-man kayak for two days, and did an overnight kayak and camping trip into the most amazing national park I've ever seen. Massive cliffs draped with trees and ferns dropped down into the ocean all along the coastline, with huge white sandy beaches spattered between them running along the coast for 40 or more kilometers. We kayaked into caves, saw penguins and seals, spent the days swimming in private lagoons and spent the night right on the beach. It was a little exhausting in the end, as we wanted to get in as much as possible, and so on our second day we plowed through what's normally a 4-hour kayak in 1 1/2 hours. I'm still kicking myself in the pants for only spending one night here, but at the time we thought "hey, there's still lots of country to go see, we should probably get going." Well, yeah there was other good stuff, but it was never quite so amazing as Abel Tasman.


Our next stop was around a little town called Charleston. Charleston was at one time a massive population centre of New Zealand, with 100 hotels lined up down it's main drag. Now, there's hardly more than 100 people in the whole town, most of whom are employed in the caving or white water rafting business. We were there for the caving, though we were told it was more "cave rafting" when we first signed up. The caving itself was pretty exciting, as we got to walk (mostly upright) through a massive limestone cave system that the river had cut into the mountain some X million years ago. It was a little awkward due to the inner tubes we were carrying around, but worth the trouble in the end. What we really came for were the glow worms, 5-15 cm worms that excrete a green glowing substance out there bums. This may sound rather gross, and to see one up close in the light is pretty nasty, but lying on your back, floating through a river in a cave, lit up green by hundreds of thousands of these glow worms is amazing. When you first turn off your light, it looks like a night time sky lit with green stars instead of white. As your eyes adjust, you can see the water around you reflect them and ripple green when you move. Eventually, everything around you has a slight green glow to it, and you can almost make out the shape of the cave and your body just by the light these worms give off.

Coming out of the cave was, without a doubt, the most picturesque scene I have ever witnessed. The opening of the cave had suffered a collapse long ago, and now, forest ferns and moss were trailing down the rocks through the opening, the river could be soon snaking through, and sunbeams (just like those picture-perfect ones you see out of a movie) sliced down into the cave just enough to light up your way out. We mentioned to our young guide that this would be a great place to take a girl on a first date, and he did his best to laugh as though it were something he's never thought of or done.

Our next few days were rather dull, at least relative to those we had just come through. It rained most of the time, and the camper was getting a little cramped and uneventful. We did find ourselves staying in some strange places though, including this one tiny European run campground in the middle of nowhere. They only charged us $10 to stay there, and there wasn't anywhere within 50 km that had a population more than 200, yet this campground had it's own little nightclub, a live outdoor music stage, and semi-functional sauna complete with middle-age European skinny dippers in the river next to it. We spent the evening there with 9 retired German-American tourists who, together mostly, had travelled to such an amazing amout of places in the world, they actually gave each other a hard time for not seeing such "regular" tourist spots like Venice ("How could you not go to Venice?" they would say, "Everybody has been to Venice, why I was there 2 times just last year").

I'll bring this entry to an end for now, and save the second and third parts of the trip for later. Our next stop (sort of) was Queenstown, which was probably the most adrenaline-pumping, nocturnally charged part of our trip. Thanks everyone for stopping by, and my apologies for the long break in blogging, I'll try to keep 'em coming and interesting.

Rich

Oh, and in case I forget - a month away from Korea doesn't happen without a few house-hold hazards. They turned our gas off while we were away and while we have it back on again now, it has been a cold, cold day and night with no heating here! Brrrrr!