Cities are fun.
Quite fun, although tiring. I've had very full days here in Brisbane, all of which I go to sleep too tired to be stressed about all the homework I'm not doing.
Oh, and I finally posted all the pictures up to now on Picassa web. The link is in the "about me" section directly to your right of what you are reading right now.
The first day, Monday, (well, first full day) was just work. Work work work, some eating, some ALIAS watching, and more work. Despite that, I didn't get much done, which I've decided to contribute to the fact that I hadn't done any schoolwork whatsoever in three weeks. My mom downloaded her main email account, which meant 987 new, unread messaged to deal with, but eventually got through most of them. By then, however, people started realizing she was emailing so sent her a million more messages. Our hosts didn't have work that day (well, one of them had a very early appointment but was home after that), so took us on a walk by a stream where we saw numerous water dragons and ducks right by their house. That day was uneventful, but relaxing.
The next day was much more exciting. My dad had a meeting in the city and our hosts (C and W) had work, so the three of us decided to take the bus down there, my mom and I walk around while me dad went to his meeting. The bus was very easy, although a little intimidating at first. I think it was also the first day of school for students, so there were people on the bus and walking around in wonderful little polos, knee socks, and dresses (no, not all together, although that would be quite a uniform). Once we got into the city, we walked around through streets crowded with hoards of tourists, students, and business people dressed in collared blouses, blazers, and heels. My parents thought we were lost a couple times (I, being so superior to them, of course knew exactly where we were the whole time), but we eventually got the the university where my dad's meeting was. It was painful walking there, because every couple steps we walked though either the draft of a heavily air conditioned store taunting us to escape the sticky heat to go buy expensive jewelry, or a small hole-in-the-wall kebab or Vietnamese place with odors of hot meat and vegetables wafting out into the street. Eventually, though, we got there, and after dropping him off my mom and I headed back towards the main square where we got off the bus. It was still pretty early in the morning, so although the amazing smells weren't torture it was still pretty hard not to lead myself into a restaurant. Once we got back to the main square, we searched a little and saw multiple food courts below every mall. We, of course, had to look at them all, to pick the best place to eat, and eventually got so hungry we settles for very yummy foccatia pizza (a little silly to get Italian food in Australia, but still delicious). It was difficult to find a seat in the buzzing enclosure, but eventually we found one. Lunch was very yummy, and after roaming around fascinated by the size of everything and buying books and more adapters, we went to the predetermined meeting place to find my dad. It turned out the meeting place we picked was the same meeting place that everybody picked, so it took a little while to find him through the masses of people standing looking hopefully into the distance, but eventually we found him and caught the bus back home.
When we got home, we looked for the dogs (Buddy and Holly). We couldn't find Buddy, and were worried what C had said might happen came true. The day before she was saying how recently Buddy had been getting out during the day (he absolutely adores people, especially C. They actually got Holly to be a companion for him, but it hasn't helped much. Now they just fight over C's attention). Later, when C got home, she listened to the message on the machine and went across the highway-street to the house Buddy was often at, slightely annoyed at him for running away. The next day she didn't let them be in the yard during the day and set up a giant barricade into one of the rooms with chairs, rolled up rugs, and a bright yellow sheet (which was all on top of the wooden fence W had build for just this purpose, but wasn't working as Buddy had figured out how to get around it). Buddy hasn't gotten out since. Anyways, that afternoon we then worked some more, watched some more ALIAS, weren't very productive. Same old.
The next day my dad had a full day of meetings back in the city, so he left pretty early. After some discussion, my mom and I decided to go to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary on the other side of the city. We caught the same bus into Brisbane, then walked to another giant underground bus terminal to catch a different bus to the Sanctuary. That bus was longer, but eventually we got there. We knew it would be a little touristy (although not as bad as the Steve Irwin zoo about 10 miles north that we went to last time we came here), but it was still very fun. It wasn't much of a sanctuary, as the animals (which were only partially koalas, also kangaroos, wombats, birds, etc) mostly had very small cages and were marketed to interact with the humans. This included being able to hold a koala (which I must admit was very fun. It was extremely soft and it felt like it was hugging me) and feed kangaroos (we got free food from people leaving who had bought too much, so we were able to go into the giant "kangaroo reserve" to go torture the poor animals by annoying them with temping food and pictures. That was again very fun, because they were very soft and seemed to appreciate the food most of the time). We had plenty of time until the bus was due, so we ate some grapes we bought earlier and battled with a wild turkey over territory. Once the bus came we got back on and went back home.
That night my mom went to a dinner meeting with W, so I cooked for my dad and C. It was pretty good-- a veggie stir fry with pine nuts and pasta, very different from what we have been eating (which has been very good-- they are very good cooks).
The next day, Thursday, yesterday, our hosts took us to a very fancy Thai restaurant out in the country. The food was very good, and very different from the Thai food in Eugene. It was quite expensive, and again they were so amazingly generous and paid the bill before we even had a chance to offer. C also bought me a cook book from the cooking school attached to the restaurant, which I am very excited to make something from (everything in it is spicy-- mm mm mm mm mm!). That basically took our whole day up, because of the long drive and being at the restuarand for awhile, so by the time we got back it was about 5. My mom and I took a walk down by the stream again, and after that watched and ALIAS. That night was Chinese New Year, and our hosts have a tradition for all of their respective kids, their partners, and a couple friends get together with them at a local small Chinese restuarant for a banquet. They brought us along, which turned out to be very fun. I was stull full from the large lunch, and Chinese food isn't my favorite food in the world, but the atmosphere was fun and it was nice to see all of them together. There were millions of courses-- they just kept bring out more and more food. A lot of it turned out to be very yummy. We were exhausted by the near end of the evening, as was C, so got a ride with her back home.
Today my dad had another full day of meetings, so my mom and I had a similar day to Wednesday. We caught the same bus into the city, the bus driver now recognizing us, but instead of leaving we stayed downtown all day. We bought some more books, got lunch in yet a differnent food court, and walked across the river to the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). They had an exhibit that populated most of the museum called Optimism, which was various peices of art that were made to make the viewer/experiencer happy. It was quite amazing-- some were funny (bizarre videos of a random guy dancing, but hilariously constructed), comforting (a whole room of white, fuzzy, pillow trees), or cute (wonderful sculptures of Vespas crated to look like snails-- one of the cutest things I have ever seen). We stayed there for awhile, but eventually got museumed out and headed back through the main square of the city to catch the bus back home. I was thinking of getting a haircut today, because my hair is getting very long (I can see it above my eyes sometimes-- deffinately time for it to be shorter), but that seemed too hard and we ran out of time. I may to that tomorrow or on Stradbroke (the island we're going to).
Anyways, we got home, and I started writing this post.
I should go now. Homework, food, ALIAS... the most important things in life (well, the latter two at least).
Bye.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
AU Qs
Just a couple more things I didn't talk about in my last post. IHSers, this is for you. Remember freshman year? Australia unit?
The first event to note was on the Air New Zealand plane from Christchurch to Brisbane. The flight attendant asked us, "are you returning home now?" Hah. They thought we were Australians. Shows you that NZ and Aussie accents are very different. On that note, I forgot how much unlike Steve Irwin and Hollywood Aussies people here talk. Those extremely strong, particular accents are mostly for TV, but come from a place near Brisbane. The accents here are actually in some ways less strong than the Kiwi accents.
Second, is that today is Australia day. That means many things are closed, and most people don't have work. Australia day celebrates the first European settlement of Australia, which clearly is cause for some turmoil. Our hosts aren't too into it, although many cars have AUS flags on the wires. Apparently the overall view is that the Aborigines as a whole aren't so keen on the holiday, but that is of course generalizing extremely.
The other holiday I asked about was National Sorry Day (NSD). In IHS we talked about this a lot-- I'm not sure why this in particular, maybe we just liked the name. Anyways, I asked about it, and apparently it's similar to AUS day but not quite as widespread. I imagine that people who celebrate AUS day don't celebrate NSD as extensively, and vice versa. Apparenly the new Prime Minister just gave a very moving speech basically apologizing to the Aborigines, which was very appreciated.
If only other countries tried to apoligize. That's basically all AUS tries to do in terms of making up the sins, which may be just because there isn't much they can do, or because they only want to try the intangible stuff. The US, though, hasn't done anything like that, for Native Americans or black slaves (which is different, because they weren't the native people, but just as important). It seems like there should be some way to just make everything right and move on-- but nobody has come up with that yet. I think the country that's done the best job at keeping the native culture alive is NZ, who is extremely proud as a country for the Maori culture. Many of the road signs there are in English and Maori, and tourist shops love Maori symbols and emblems. Another reason why we should all move to NZ. That and that there's going to be a super volcanoe eruption in Yellowstone in the next thousand years that will imediately kill the whole US and slowly the rest of the planet, but the slowest NZ. (Sorry, that's a reference to a movie we saw in Geology with Chad Heidtke when I was in seventh grade.)
Enough procastinating. I'm off to write a paper. Or something. I'm not sure yet.
The first event to note was on the Air New Zealand plane from Christchurch to Brisbane. The flight attendant asked us, "are you returning home now?" Hah. They thought we were Australians. Shows you that NZ and Aussie accents are very different. On that note, I forgot how much unlike Steve Irwin and Hollywood Aussies people here talk. Those extremely strong, particular accents are mostly for TV, but come from a place near Brisbane. The accents here are actually in some ways less strong than the Kiwi accents.
Second, is that today is Australia day. That means many things are closed, and most people don't have work. Australia day celebrates the first European settlement of Australia, which clearly is cause for some turmoil. Our hosts aren't too into it, although many cars have AUS flags on the wires. Apparently the overall view is that the Aborigines as a whole aren't so keen on the holiday, but that is of course generalizing extremely.
The other holiday I asked about was National Sorry Day (NSD). In IHS we talked about this a lot-- I'm not sure why this in particular, maybe we just liked the name. Anyways, I asked about it, and apparently it's similar to AUS day but not quite as widespread. I imagine that people who celebrate AUS day don't celebrate NSD as extensively, and vice versa. Apparenly the new Prime Minister just gave a very moving speech basically apologizing to the Aborigines, which was very appreciated.
If only other countries tried to apoligize. That's basically all AUS tries to do in terms of making up the sins, which may be just because there isn't much they can do, or because they only want to try the intangible stuff. The US, though, hasn't done anything like that, for Native Americans or black slaves (which is different, because they weren't the native people, but just as important). It seems like there should be some way to just make everything right and move on-- but nobody has come up with that yet. I think the country that's done the best job at keeping the native culture alive is NZ, who is extremely proud as a country for the Maori culture. Many of the road signs there are in English and Maori, and tourist shops love Maori symbols and emblems. Another reason why we should all move to NZ. That and that there's going to be a super volcanoe eruption in Yellowstone in the next thousand years that will imediately kill the whole US and slowly the rest of the planet, but the slowest NZ. (Sorry, that's a reference to a movie we saw in Geology with Chad Heidtke when I was in seventh grade.)
Enough procastinating. I'm off to write a paper. Or something. I'm not sure yet.
Land of Oz
We're in Australia now, staying at a friend's house. They are the nicest people, letting us stay here for a week. After this we're going to stay at their beach house for three weeks which they said we should stay at, and they are lending us a car and maybe a computer. It's crazy-- I feel like we're getting too much. They also plan to cook us dinner every night (we're going to take them out once, although thtis is silly because we don't have a car other than theirs and we don't know about the restaurants here. Well, at least we'll pay), and have given us rooms with air conditioning (the main couple's room doesn't even have ac). I'm using one of their computers now, so the time that blogger says it is should be the actual time. If not, it's 7:20 am here.
The family is a couple and about a million kids, all now in their twenties or older. They each had prior marriages, so one has four kids and the other three, but most of them spend most of their time here. I think. The father is a psychiatrist and works with my mom, so that's our connection. Last time we came to AUS we stayed here also. This house is clearly the place to be, because of what I remember from last time and how it is this time friends of the kids are always over. Last time there were much smaller kids, even younger than me (I think they may have been younger siblings of the friends of the kids). I'm so confused who's who. At meals there seem to always be many many people there, sometimes that the parents down't even know that well. Last night there were I think three kids and three not-kids (one of them is living here because her partner is one of the kids, but they actually just bought a house together yesteday), and everyone was extremely sweet. The food was delicious also (homemade Thai curry--- mmmmmmmmm).
We woke up super early because of the time change, so most people are still asleep. I don't have much more to say right now, because we haven't really done anything yet. One thing is that I actually have to start doing schoolwork again, which is bizarre and vaguely stressful. Oh well, at least most of the work is pretty fun.
I'm going to leave now, because I should go answer questions about Persepolis. Or do Spanish. Or math. Hm.
The family is a couple and about a million kids, all now in their twenties or older. They each had prior marriages, so one has four kids and the other three, but most of them spend most of their time here. I think. The father is a psychiatrist and works with my mom, so that's our connection. Last time we came to AUS we stayed here also. This house is clearly the place to be, because of what I remember from last time and how it is this time friends of the kids are always over. Last time there were much smaller kids, even younger than me (I think they may have been younger siblings of the friends of the kids). I'm so confused who's who. At meals there seem to always be many many people there, sometimes that the parents down't even know that well. Last night there were I think three kids and three not-kids (one of them is living here because her partner is one of the kids, but they actually just bought a house together yesteday), and everyone was extremely sweet. The food was delicious also (homemade Thai curry--- mmmmmmmmm).
We woke up super early because of the time change, so most people are still asleep. I don't have much more to say right now, because we haven't really done anything yet. One thing is that I actually have to start doing schoolwork again, which is bizarre and vaguely stressful. Oh well, at least most of the work is pretty fun.
I'm going to leave now, because I should go answer questions about Persepolis. Or do Spanish. Or math. Hm.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Camper days 4-7
Saturday, Jan 24 5:53 pm, and again the next morning
Location: outside of Christchurch, in a bizarre motor park stealing internet from the house next door.
This is going to be another long post, so go get the popcorn now. We have such long days in the camper that I have so much to talk about! Hmm.. I left off in Kaka point, right? Well, that's where I'm going to start.
So the next morning (Thursday, I think?) we drove down the road to Nugget Point, which was very pretty. We walked some, saw some baby seals playing in the shallows (the cutest little black wormy tadpole-like squiggly things ever), a lighthouse, and M even spotted a penguin. That was very nice, and by about 10 or 11 we went on our way towards Dunedin.
We mostly bypassed Dunedin to go out to the Otago Peninsula (the harbor created by the peninsula is Dunedin's port). That was utterly terrifying. The main road along the peninsula was about 10 feet across, a two-way highway that was right next to (I really mean _right_ next to) the bay. This meant that the extremely curvy road with a speed limit of 70 km/h had a shoulder of about 3 inches, another inch of grass, and then dropped straight down four feet to the water below. Every curve we went around (which was the whole road) I clenched my teeth and strangled the window crank until my knuckles were far past white. By the time we finally got to our first destination, which happened to be the very end of the peninsula, the back of my shirt had streaks of wetness from so much nervous sweat. It didn't really help that it was about 90 degrees outside and our car doesn't have air conditioning, and that D has been very close to the edge of the road the whole trip (the steering wheel is on the other side, so he's not used to sticking out on the left). Eventually, after the most terrifying hour in my life, we got to the Great Royal Albatross colony at the end of the road. Albatross are giant sea birds that only live on the tiny spot where we were and, where most of them are, a tiny island somewhere in the South Pacific. We didn't see many, but they were pretty neat.
After we saw those, we drove back half way along the scary road (although not as scary this direction, because instead of being four inches from the ocean we were four inches from cliffs) to the holiday park we wanted to stay at in a town named Portobello. The park itself was okay, not great, with a grumpy woman working at the desk and very difficult internet access, and later had loud neighbors (the first ones of the trip-- two down from us were out-of-country-ers and were playing annoyingly loud music, and right next to us a big family with loud rough-housy kids), although we had a pretty nice spot right at the end among Eucalyptus-like trees. The most amazing part of that site we found that night after dinner, when we decided to walk to the end of the road. We thought that was going to just be hundred or so meters, and it was, but after the road ended there was a trail between fenced paddocks (one with sheep the other with horses) that went up a hill. We then decided to just go to the top of the first hill, because it looked pretty, but after four more "just at the top of that hill" spots we got to the highest point of the trail. From there we could see all the way to either side of the peninsula. It was gorgeous. On the way down I convinced my 'rents to stop at a swing we saw on the way up. It was on the other side of the sheep fence, hung 45 feet in the air from a giant knotty tree. Sheep baaed in annoyance at us waking them up as M and I climbed over the fence. It was very hard to get on the swing at first, but once I figured out which tree root to stand on the hop on it was amazingly fun. The scenery was gorgeous and the swing swung far into the air. After a minute or so, some dogs started barking from the house at the bottom of the hill that was connected to the paddock we were in, which was our queue to leave. I was considering what I'd say when the people who lived in the house came out to find us tresspassers ("I hope that's okay.. It was so much fun and beautiful, I didn't think it would be too much of a problem..."). We walked back down the hill, and saw the two dogs barking at us at the bottom of it. On our way in we had seen an adorable sign made by little kids that said "this is the home of two friendly dogs and a friendly family," which gave us hope that one, the people wouldn't prosecute us for trespassing and two, the dogs wouldn't eat us alive. It turned out that when we walked down there talking to the dogs in that weird high-pitched oogly voice people use to talk to pets and babies that the dogs were very nice. Right when M came up to them, one rolled on her back asking for a belly rub. We pet them for a little bit, then went back to our camper.
The next day, after going back to the swing once more, we drove into Dunedin. There, we spent 20 stressful minutes finding parking, then walked around the downtown area. There was a giant chess set in the main square (well, it's actually an octagon), which D and I played at for a little bit. We ran out of time before we could finish, but he was about to win. I haven't been good at chess since first grade, and he has been good at chess since high school. It was funny because tourists would walk by, stop to watch for a little bit or just long enough to take a picture. I felt like a tourist attraction.
Next we moved the car so we wouldn't get a ticket, then set out walking again. We were headed towards the University of Otago, and on the way stopped for lunch at a Turkish kebab place. It was so good-- I learned to love Turkish street food when we were in Australia seven years ago, because there was an amazing kebab place across the street from our apartment. After eating we got to the university, which had a gorgeous campus, walked around a little, then headed back to the car.
We drove out of Dunedin north towards Christchurch, stopping on a beach to see natural spherical boulders lined up in the surf. The joke theory of their existence is that they are prehistoric alien eggs, which pretty much describes how they look. It was very nice to walk along a soft, warm beach and take a break from driving. After a couple more hours we got to Oamaru, where we wanted to stay next.
The motor park was okay. It was big, but we got a pretty nice spot in the shade by the edge. One annoying and tragic thing is that they finally had a trampoline, but it had 8 padlocks lining up the mesh door because of a rip in the trampoline. Well, at least I got a little closer.
That night, we had a booking to see little blue penguins down by the beach. Before the actual penguin viewing, we were on a small (the three of us were half of it) tour showing how the colony worked. People had build small wooden boxes perfect for penguin-nesting, and we got to look into them and see little chicks waiting for their parents with food to come home. They were adorable, our group was very sweet, and our tour guide friendly. After that we joined 100 other people (mostly Asian tour bus tourists) to sit in stands made for viewing the penguins and waited for darkness. About an hour later, penguins started to climb out of the water and work their way up the ramp to their box-houses. They were so adorable-- less than a foot tall with blue feathers on their backs. We left after most of them had come onto land, drove back to the site and went to bed (by then it was WAY past when we had been going to sleep recently).
The next day we drove up to Christchurch. It was extremely stressful in the car, because there were no trees to provide shade, my arms were sunburned from the previous day, and we were all overheated. Finally we found a shady spot to pull over and have lunch, which turned out to be very pleasant. A couple hours later we got into Christchurch. We got lost on our way to the holiday park (which is actually in a suburb of Christchurch), and had to stop and ask in a giant liquor store for directions. Eventually, though, we got here. Getting plugged into our site was also a challenge, because the first couple plugs we tried kept tripping the circuit. All this time a woman who lives in her trailer here right next to our spot was trying to help us. This park is very bizarre-- most of the sites are occupied by trailers that serve as people's housing. The woman next to us is very interesting, first coming from the Czech Republic but moving here for personal freedom. She is very opinionated and wonderful, in a lonely-but-free kind of way. She has two pet chickens, a motor bike, a normal bike (which she rides hundreds of miles a day when she's not working, such as now), a car, and her trailer. It's interesting, because she seems to have such a different outlook on life than I do-- we agree to some extent on some things like money and pollution, but she has decided that she can't do anything for the world. She likes living here, just going about her life, working sometimes with menial jobs and sometimes not (she used to be a counselor back in the Czech Republic, but now has jobs like delivery). Maybe it's just my upper-middle-class upbringing, or IHS's you-can-change-the-world-vibe, but I've always been told and believe that I can do anything I want in life (which she definitely agrees with), and part of that is I could really change something and have an impact on the world. That's something that seems looked up upon in my family, school, and culture, but something she has decided is not important in her life, something she doesn't want. She seems perfectly happy going about her simple life. She's very sweet and talkative.
Later that afternoon we went on a goose chase looking for a grocery store, that the woman next door gave us walking directed to. It was a very weird walk, first going on street, then on a weird empty path by a little stream. To get to the grocery store we had to go through an opening in a fence and through the back of a giant Mitre 10 (kind of like Home Depot), and walk across parking lots to get to the grocery store. The store itself was bizarre-- it was giant, and felt like an IKEA of grocery stores because of the long industrial isles and people hired to smile while they were packing up your not-so-fresh white fish. Eventually we bought some supplies for dinner (venison burgers, which turned out to be very good) and walked back to our camper.
Once we got back M and I took a swim in the small, unheated pool here. It was cold but fun, especially when I tried to go down the small slide at the end build for 7-year-olds. I couldn't sit down all the way on the slide because it was so small, and I was so scared I would fall off and break my bones that I tried to slowly lower myself down it. Half way down the slide, though, I lost my grip, and went swooping into the water with a shriek. It turned out to be pretty fun.
I slept well with the windows open and a breeze coming through, and now am sitting at the wobbly table trying to avoid being dragged away to do dishes. We're leaving for Australia today, which I am excited for. I think I like NZ overall better than Australia, but I'm ready to go over there for a month. I think we're going to get so bored of Aussie though, after living on a beach house on a not-very-populated island for three weeks. Well, hopefully I won't get too burnt.
It's going to be hot in Brisbane, where we're staying with friends next. Oh well, I guess that is one of the reasons we came down here. Y'all get the annoying endless Eugene not-quite-spring-but-not-winter-anymore months when the world is taunting you with early bulbs but too cold and dreary for shorts, while I get summer and the beginning of fall when we come back to Christchurch.
I should pack. My clothes have all migrated out of my suitcase under the table bench, and without any room to pack it's going to be difficult to find every last sock.
I'll post next in Brisbane, where hopefully I will have fast enough internet to post some of my 1436 pictures. Bye.
Location: outside of Christchurch, in a bizarre motor park stealing internet from the house next door.
This is going to be another long post, so go get the popcorn now. We have such long days in the camper that I have so much to talk about! Hmm.. I left off in Kaka point, right? Well, that's where I'm going to start.
So the next morning (Thursday, I think?) we drove down the road to Nugget Point, which was very pretty. We walked some, saw some baby seals playing in the shallows (the cutest little black wormy tadpole-like squiggly things ever), a lighthouse, and M even spotted a penguin. That was very nice, and by about 10 or 11 we went on our way towards Dunedin.
We mostly bypassed Dunedin to go out to the Otago Peninsula (the harbor created by the peninsula is Dunedin's port). That was utterly terrifying. The main road along the peninsula was about 10 feet across, a two-way highway that was right next to (I really mean _right_ next to) the bay. This meant that the extremely curvy road with a speed limit of 70 km/h had a shoulder of about 3 inches, another inch of grass, and then dropped straight down four feet to the water below. Every curve we went around (which was the whole road) I clenched my teeth and strangled the window crank until my knuckles were far past white. By the time we finally got to our first destination, which happened to be the very end of the peninsula, the back of my shirt had streaks of wetness from so much nervous sweat. It didn't really help that it was about 90 degrees outside and our car doesn't have air conditioning, and that D has been very close to the edge of the road the whole trip (the steering wheel is on the other side, so he's not used to sticking out on the left). Eventually, after the most terrifying hour in my life, we got to the Great Royal Albatross colony at the end of the road. Albatross are giant sea birds that only live on the tiny spot where we were and, where most of them are, a tiny island somewhere in the South Pacific. We didn't see many, but they were pretty neat.
After we saw those, we drove back half way along the scary road (although not as scary this direction, because instead of being four inches from the ocean we were four inches from cliffs) to the holiday park we wanted to stay at in a town named Portobello. The park itself was okay, not great, with a grumpy woman working at the desk and very difficult internet access, and later had loud neighbors (the first ones of the trip-- two down from us were out-of-country-ers and were playing annoyingly loud music, and right next to us a big family with loud rough-housy kids), although we had a pretty nice spot right at the end among Eucalyptus-like trees. The most amazing part of that site we found that night after dinner, when we decided to walk to the end of the road. We thought that was going to just be hundred or so meters, and it was, but after the road ended there was a trail between fenced paddocks (one with sheep the other with horses) that went up a hill. We then decided to just go to the top of the first hill, because it looked pretty, but after four more "just at the top of that hill" spots we got to the highest point of the trail. From there we could see all the way to either side of the peninsula. It was gorgeous. On the way down I convinced my 'rents to stop at a swing we saw on the way up. It was on the other side of the sheep fence, hung 45 feet in the air from a giant knotty tree. Sheep baaed in annoyance at us waking them up as M and I climbed over the fence. It was very hard to get on the swing at first, but once I figured out which tree root to stand on the hop on it was amazingly fun. The scenery was gorgeous and the swing swung far into the air. After a minute or so, some dogs started barking from the house at the bottom of the hill that was connected to the paddock we were in, which was our queue to leave. I was considering what I'd say when the people who lived in the house came out to find us tresspassers ("I hope that's okay.. It was so much fun and beautiful, I didn't think it would be too much of a problem..."). We walked back down the hill, and saw the two dogs barking at us at the bottom of it. On our way in we had seen an adorable sign made by little kids that said "this is the home of two friendly dogs and a friendly family," which gave us hope that one, the people wouldn't prosecute us for trespassing and two, the dogs wouldn't eat us alive. It turned out that when we walked down there talking to the dogs in that weird high-pitched oogly voice people use to talk to pets and babies that the dogs were very nice. Right when M came up to them, one rolled on her back asking for a belly rub. We pet them for a little bit, then went back to our camper.
The next day, after going back to the swing once more, we drove into Dunedin. There, we spent 20 stressful minutes finding parking, then walked around the downtown area. There was a giant chess set in the main square (well, it's actually an octagon), which D and I played at for a little bit. We ran out of time before we could finish, but he was about to win. I haven't been good at chess since first grade, and he has been good at chess since high school. It was funny because tourists would walk by, stop to watch for a little bit or just long enough to take a picture. I felt like a tourist attraction.
Next we moved the car so we wouldn't get a ticket, then set out walking again. We were headed towards the University of Otago, and on the way stopped for lunch at a Turkish kebab place. It was so good-- I learned to love Turkish street food when we were in Australia seven years ago, because there was an amazing kebab place across the street from our apartment. After eating we got to the university, which had a gorgeous campus, walked around a little, then headed back to the car.
We drove out of Dunedin north towards Christchurch, stopping on a beach to see natural spherical boulders lined up in the surf. The joke theory of their existence is that they are prehistoric alien eggs, which pretty much describes how they look. It was very nice to walk along a soft, warm beach and take a break from driving. After a couple more hours we got to Oamaru, where we wanted to stay next.
The motor park was okay. It was big, but we got a pretty nice spot in the shade by the edge. One annoying and tragic thing is that they finally had a trampoline, but it had 8 padlocks lining up the mesh door because of a rip in the trampoline. Well, at least I got a little closer.
That night, we had a booking to see little blue penguins down by the beach. Before the actual penguin viewing, we were on a small (the three of us were half of it) tour showing how the colony worked. People had build small wooden boxes perfect for penguin-nesting, and we got to look into them and see little chicks waiting for their parents with food to come home. They were adorable, our group was very sweet, and our tour guide friendly. After that we joined 100 other people (mostly Asian tour bus tourists) to sit in stands made for viewing the penguins and waited for darkness. About an hour later, penguins started to climb out of the water and work their way up the ramp to their box-houses. They were so adorable-- less than a foot tall with blue feathers on their backs. We left after most of them had come onto land, drove back to the site and went to bed (by then it was WAY past when we had been going to sleep recently).
The next day we drove up to Christchurch. It was extremely stressful in the car, because there were no trees to provide shade, my arms were sunburned from the previous day, and we were all overheated. Finally we found a shady spot to pull over and have lunch, which turned out to be very pleasant. A couple hours later we got into Christchurch. We got lost on our way to the holiday park (which is actually in a suburb of Christchurch), and had to stop and ask in a giant liquor store for directions. Eventually, though, we got here. Getting plugged into our site was also a challenge, because the first couple plugs we tried kept tripping the circuit. All this time a woman who lives in her trailer here right next to our spot was trying to help us. This park is very bizarre-- most of the sites are occupied by trailers that serve as people's housing. The woman next to us is very interesting, first coming from the Czech Republic but moving here for personal freedom. She is very opinionated and wonderful, in a lonely-but-free kind of way. She has two pet chickens, a motor bike, a normal bike (which she rides hundreds of miles a day when she's not working, such as now), a car, and her trailer. It's interesting, because she seems to have such a different outlook on life than I do-- we agree to some extent on some things like money and pollution, but she has decided that she can't do anything for the world. She likes living here, just going about her life, working sometimes with menial jobs and sometimes not (she used to be a counselor back in the Czech Republic, but now has jobs like delivery). Maybe it's just my upper-middle-class upbringing, or IHS's you-can-change-the-world-vibe, but I've always been told and believe that I can do anything I want in life (which she definitely agrees with), and part of that is I could really change something and have an impact on the world. That's something that seems looked up upon in my family, school, and culture, but something she has decided is not important in her life, something she doesn't want. She seems perfectly happy going about her simple life. She's very sweet and talkative.
Later that afternoon we went on a goose chase looking for a grocery store, that the woman next door gave us walking directed to. It was a very weird walk, first going on street, then on a weird empty path by a little stream. To get to the grocery store we had to go through an opening in a fence and through the back of a giant Mitre 10 (kind of like Home Depot), and walk across parking lots to get to the grocery store. The store itself was bizarre-- it was giant, and felt like an IKEA of grocery stores because of the long industrial isles and people hired to smile while they were packing up your not-so-fresh white fish. Eventually we bought some supplies for dinner (venison burgers, which turned out to be very good) and walked back to our camper.
Once we got back M and I took a swim in the small, unheated pool here. It was cold but fun, especially when I tried to go down the small slide at the end build for 7-year-olds. I couldn't sit down all the way on the slide because it was so small, and I was so scared I would fall off and break my bones that I tried to slowly lower myself down it. Half way down the slide, though, I lost my grip, and went swooping into the water with a shriek. It turned out to be pretty fun.
I slept well with the windows open and a breeze coming through, and now am sitting at the wobbly table trying to avoid being dragged away to do dishes. We're leaving for Australia today, which I am excited for. I think I like NZ overall better than Australia, but I'm ready to go over there for a month. I think we're going to get so bored of Aussie though, after living on a beach house on a not-very-populated island for three weeks. Well, hopefully I won't get too burnt.
It's going to be hot in Brisbane, where we're staying with friends next. Oh well, I guess that is one of the reasons we came down here. Y'all get the annoying endless Eugene not-quite-spring-but-not-winter-anymore months when the world is taunting you with early bulbs but too cold and dreary for shorts, while I get summer and the beginning of fall when we come back to Christchurch.
I should pack. My clothes have all migrated out of my suitcase under the table bench, and without any room to pack it's going to be difficult to find every last sock.
I'll post next in Brisbane, where hopefully I will have fast enough internet to post some of my 1436 pictures. Bye.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Camper Van days 1-3
Wednesday, Jan 21 8:11 pm
Location: Kaka Point, NZ, inside our camper while the rain trickles down outside
I love camper vans. They are so amazing-- it's like being in a hotel, but in the woods by ourselves. After I last posted, T, B, and P left (sad... I won't see them until spring break) and M, D, and I picked up our camper.
Our van is pretty small: it's a Toyota Hiace (which is normally a car somewhere between a van and a mini van), but who's roof has been raised about a foot. It has a little stove, fridge (which we learned only works when the car is on, which is somewhat annoying being that we only use the refrigerator when the car is parked), sink (which, it turns out, drains straight to the ground right below the car), and table/bench area that turns into a bed at night. We also got a tent from the sweet people who own the small home-grown company we rented from, where my dad has been sleeping. We exiled him (it was a little nicer than that. Three people just don't fit inside the van unless one of them is a tiny kid), but he has an air mattress I spend 30 minutes pumping up every night. They also loaned us three very thin, very short sleeping bags, which also useful, are way to small. It doesn't help that my feet hang off the bed even when I'm not in a sleeping bag, but if my feet are at the bottom of the sleeping bag the top comes up to my stomach. There are three seats in the front, which means it's a little squished, by my mom has kindly taken to sitting in the uncomfortable middle seat so my dad can see better and because she feels slightly less terrified there. I love this so much, though. Last time we came to NZ we rented a much much bigger camper (there were five of us) and drove down the west coast. One thing I miss from that trip is that then every single site we went to had at least one giant trampoline. Although most of the places we've stayed so far have had playgrounds or ones nearby, nothing compares to trampolines.
Our first night we didn't have much time to drive anywhere, and wanted to figure out how to use the camper (one more complication is that it is a manual, which my mom doesn't know how to drive. That means my dad has been driving, which I'm not used to, and manuals are terrifying on hilly curvy roads), so we stayed in a town near Queenstown (where T, B, and P flew out of) called Arrowtown. It is an incredibly touristy town, so the holiday park was huge, had pretty small spaces, and very crowded. Part of that is when normally camping we veto any site where we can see another person, although I've been thinking of the camper much more as as a hotel room than camping equipment. The first place we stayed had many showers and a big shared kitchen and very mowed flat grass. We slept well anyways, and I had a very good time. That night for dinner we had the J-F infamous tomato, feta, and garlic on penne pasta. My mom actually invented that dish on the Banks Peninsula by Christchurch during our last camper van excursion 7 years ago, so it was a fitting meal to have.
The next day we drove for about seven hours to our next site, all the way on the southern coast. For the whole trip before the camper we had been staying in very mountainous areas with dramatic scenery, but soon into that long drive everything changed. We shifted from sharp sky-scraping mountains to rolling hills of farms, every other one filled with sheep. We drove though areas that have hardly any tourism industry, unlike where we have been where that is the only industry. I had so much fun on that drive, despite the many times we barreled down hills at 115 km/h, supposedly so we didn't have to downshift as we were going up the next hill (so, they invented automatics for a reason...). We stopped many times at various fruit stands getting boxes and boxes of juicy, flavorful, amazing plums, apricots, and cherries. One stand that we stopped at to buy cherries, the woman who came out staff the stand decided to show us her factory (we had looked back into the factor earlier looking for somebody to give money for fruit, and saw it, commented, so she decided to show us). She was very sweet, and seemed very proud of her factory. She commented that it was one of the most modern cherrie factories in the area. The one-room barn-like building had a giant machine in the middle, which cherries being carried up a white conveyor belt, then sorted into size. About a dozen teenagers with hair nets and gloves were lined up on the side sorting though the berries, who we learned were sorting for quality and shape so the nicest ones could be exported (that batch of cherries was headed towards Korea and Taiwan). Everybody who worked there seemed very happy and smiled at us when we were there. After five or ten minutes, though, we got back in the car and drove on (with our two-kilo box of giant amazing cherries).
After stopping in the town Alexandra (yes, it was named after me. And yes, I took many pictures in front of various signs, such as the Alexandra Fire Dept.), driving though almost empty paved back roads and stopping at a tiny gas station where a man in a blue mechanic suit explained that there wasn't cell phone coverage in that area, we came to the camping ground we were planning to. It was right on the ocean, with small sheltered sites and rusty pipes. It was much less touristy, although there were other people there. The woman who worked there was extremely friendly. For dinner that night we had the most amazing lamb chops I have had in my whole life. I am so glad I gave up the whole vegetarianism thing. Meat is good. Red meat is good. Mmmmmm. I think that shift happened in Fiji, when my body felt threatened by floods and lack of food and so told me to order the steak. Sorry all you veggie- readers, but that lamb was goo-ood. NZ lamb just does not compare.
Before that, though, we walked five minutes down the road to a national-parky area of petrified forests. That basically meant a big area of rock that the ocean was lapping over the edge of (the area is only accessible at low tide) with 160 million year old tree stump fossils sticking up in places. An amazing thing happened then though-- we saw penguins!! Two little black and white penguins with yellow designs above their heads. Those were our first wild penguins. My mom loved them.
The next morning, after a difficult sandy shower that felt like a prison cell but a much better sleep, we had bacon for breakfast. Bacon used to be one of my favorite foods before I became a veggie. It was soooo good. We should probably stop eating like that, though, because I don't really want die of heart failure. It was really really yummy though.
One amazing thing was that there was a pair of bike-packers camping in the site next to us. I can't imagine that. Later, the next day, we saw them many times on the road. They went very very fast. We stopped for longer and slightly more often, but we still kept passing them. That takes some major in-shape-ness.
Today we left that site and started driving NE, stopping a couple times to take beautiful walks and have a picnic. At a tiny store we bought small meat pies, which are popular here, to have for lunch. They were pretty gross. After last night's lamb, they just weren't very impressive. I can see why somebody would find them comforting if they grew up eating them, but not having that experience they weren't so yummy. At one point, near where we wanted to stop for the night, we stopped to get gas and ask a mechanic about something about the car-- on the dashboard a light had been flitting on and off since lunch. We weren't sure what it was, but after the engine cooled down (it was so cool-- the engine was below the front seats) a twenty-something mechanic in a blue suit with grease stains on his face and hands (who, while we were waiting for him, called to the teenager working the store counter inside to ask for some tea with two sugars) looked at the car. He said the problem was with our radiator, that it had oil in the water. He said that it was really bad, and that we should call the rental company and ask for a new camper before this one "explodes" ("could it really explode?" my mom asked with a worried expression on her face. The mechanic laughed a little, and explained, "no, this camper can't be a terrorist van. Yet, anyways."). He topped off the water and send us one his way. Everybody in that whole area was so laid back-- nobody rushed to everything. The mechanic was nice and seemed competent, however we decided to drive a little and see what happened. The light hasn't come on again since.
Now we're staying in a motor camp on a hill by the ocean. This is my favorite place yet. For one thing, hot showers are free (the first place was one dollar for 8 minutes, the second 2 dollars for 5), but we also have a spot basically all by ourselves. The woman who works here is very nice, and said she would send other people other places because we liked the secluded-ness. It has been raining basically nonstop, but that's not too bad. Even though the site is secluded and right next to "the bush," there are many warm, CLEAN showers, laundry, and a huge kitchen where we can wash dishes. This is why I love traveling in a camper so much-- ammenities, but still outdoorsy. It also helps that the camper van esthetic in NZ is not nearly as gas-guzzling republican as the RVs in the states are.
Aahhh...... I'm so comfy.
Well, this is way too long of a post. I'll be surprised if anyone gets this far.
Goodnight.
Location: Kaka Point, NZ, inside our camper while the rain trickles down outside
I love camper vans. They are so amazing-- it's like being in a hotel, but in the woods by ourselves. After I last posted, T, B, and P left (sad... I won't see them until spring break) and M, D, and I picked up our camper.
Our van is pretty small: it's a Toyota Hiace (which is normally a car somewhere between a van and a mini van), but who's roof has been raised about a foot. It has a little stove, fridge (which we learned only works when the car is on, which is somewhat annoying being that we only use the refrigerator when the car is parked), sink (which, it turns out, drains straight to the ground right below the car), and table/bench area that turns into a bed at night. We also got a tent from the sweet people who own the small home-grown company we rented from, where my dad has been sleeping. We exiled him (it was a little nicer than that. Three people just don't fit inside the van unless one of them is a tiny kid), but he has an air mattress I spend 30 minutes pumping up every night. They also loaned us three very thin, very short sleeping bags, which also useful, are way to small. It doesn't help that my feet hang off the bed even when I'm not in a sleeping bag, but if my feet are at the bottom of the sleeping bag the top comes up to my stomach. There are three seats in the front, which means it's a little squished, by my mom has kindly taken to sitting in the uncomfortable middle seat so my dad can see better and because she feels slightly less terrified there. I love this so much, though. Last time we came to NZ we rented a much much bigger camper (there were five of us) and drove down the west coast. One thing I miss from that trip is that then every single site we went to had at least one giant trampoline. Although most of the places we've stayed so far have had playgrounds or ones nearby, nothing compares to trampolines.
Our first night we didn't have much time to drive anywhere, and wanted to figure out how to use the camper (one more complication is that it is a manual, which my mom doesn't know how to drive. That means my dad has been driving, which I'm not used to, and manuals are terrifying on hilly curvy roads), so we stayed in a town near Queenstown (where T, B, and P flew out of) called Arrowtown. It is an incredibly touristy town, so the holiday park was huge, had pretty small spaces, and very crowded. Part of that is when normally camping we veto any site where we can see another person, although I've been thinking of the camper much more as as a hotel room than camping equipment. The first place we stayed had many showers and a big shared kitchen and very mowed flat grass. We slept well anyways, and I had a very good time. That night for dinner we had the J-F infamous tomato, feta, and garlic on penne pasta. My mom actually invented that dish on the Banks Peninsula by Christchurch during our last camper van excursion 7 years ago, so it was a fitting meal to have.
The next day we drove for about seven hours to our next site, all the way on the southern coast. For the whole trip before the camper we had been staying in very mountainous areas with dramatic scenery, but soon into that long drive everything changed. We shifted from sharp sky-scraping mountains to rolling hills of farms, every other one filled with sheep. We drove though areas that have hardly any tourism industry, unlike where we have been where that is the only industry. I had so much fun on that drive, despite the many times we barreled down hills at 115 km/h, supposedly so we didn't have to downshift as we were going up the next hill (so, they invented automatics for a reason...). We stopped many times at various fruit stands getting boxes and boxes of juicy, flavorful, amazing plums, apricots, and cherries. One stand that we stopped at to buy cherries, the woman who came out staff the stand decided to show us her factory (we had looked back into the factor earlier looking for somebody to give money for fruit, and saw it, commented, so she decided to show us). She was very sweet, and seemed very proud of her factory. She commented that it was one of the most modern cherrie factories in the area. The one-room barn-like building had a giant machine in the middle, which cherries being carried up a white conveyor belt, then sorted into size. About a dozen teenagers with hair nets and gloves were lined up on the side sorting though the berries, who we learned were sorting for quality and shape so the nicest ones could be exported (that batch of cherries was headed towards Korea and Taiwan). Everybody who worked there seemed very happy and smiled at us when we were there. After five or ten minutes, though, we got back in the car and drove on (with our two-kilo box of giant amazing cherries).
After stopping in the town Alexandra (yes, it was named after me. And yes, I took many pictures in front of various signs, such as the Alexandra Fire Dept.), driving though almost empty paved back roads and stopping at a tiny gas station where a man in a blue mechanic suit explained that there wasn't cell phone coverage in that area, we came to the camping ground we were planning to. It was right on the ocean, with small sheltered sites and rusty pipes. It was much less touristy, although there were other people there. The woman who worked there was extremely friendly. For dinner that night we had the most amazing lamb chops I have had in my whole life. I am so glad I gave up the whole vegetarianism thing. Meat is good. Red meat is good. Mmmmmm. I think that shift happened in Fiji, when my body felt threatened by floods and lack of food and so told me to order the steak. Sorry all you veggie- readers, but that lamb was goo-ood. NZ lamb just does not compare.
Before that, though, we walked five minutes down the road to a national-parky area of petrified forests. That basically meant a big area of rock that the ocean was lapping over the edge of (the area is only accessible at low tide) with 160 million year old tree stump fossils sticking up in places. An amazing thing happened then though-- we saw penguins!! Two little black and white penguins with yellow designs above their heads. Those were our first wild penguins. My mom loved them.
The next morning, after a difficult sandy shower that felt like a prison cell but a much better sleep, we had bacon for breakfast. Bacon used to be one of my favorite foods before I became a veggie. It was soooo good. We should probably stop eating like that, though, because I don't really want die of heart failure. It was really really yummy though.
One amazing thing was that there was a pair of bike-packers camping in the site next to us. I can't imagine that. Later, the next day, we saw them many times on the road. They went very very fast. We stopped for longer and slightly more often, but we still kept passing them. That takes some major in-shape-ness.
Today we left that site and started driving NE, stopping a couple times to take beautiful walks and have a picnic. At a tiny store we bought small meat pies, which are popular here, to have for lunch. They were pretty gross. After last night's lamb, they just weren't very impressive. I can see why somebody would find them comforting if they grew up eating them, but not having that experience they weren't so yummy. At one point, near where we wanted to stop for the night, we stopped to get gas and ask a mechanic about something about the car-- on the dashboard a light had been flitting on and off since lunch. We weren't sure what it was, but after the engine cooled down (it was so cool-- the engine was below the front seats) a twenty-something mechanic in a blue suit with grease stains on his face and hands (who, while we were waiting for him, called to the teenager working the store counter inside to ask for some tea with two sugars) looked at the car. He said the problem was with our radiator, that it had oil in the water. He said that it was really bad, and that we should call the rental company and ask for a new camper before this one "explodes" ("could it really explode?" my mom asked with a worried expression on her face. The mechanic laughed a little, and explained, "no, this camper can't be a terrorist van. Yet, anyways."). He topped off the water and send us one his way. Everybody in that whole area was so laid back-- nobody rushed to everything. The mechanic was nice and seemed competent, however we decided to drive a little and see what happened. The light hasn't come on again since.
Now we're staying in a motor camp on a hill by the ocean. This is my favorite place yet. For one thing, hot showers are free (the first place was one dollar for 8 minutes, the second 2 dollars for 5), but we also have a spot basically all by ourselves. The woman who works here is very nice, and said she would send other people other places because we liked the secluded-ness. It has been raining basically nonstop, but that's not too bad. Even though the site is secluded and right next to "the bush," there are many warm, CLEAN showers, laundry, and a huge kitchen where we can wash dishes. This is why I love traveling in a camper so much-- ammenities, but still outdoorsy. It also helps that the camper van esthetic in NZ is not nearly as gas-guzzling republican as the RVs in the states are.
Aahhh...... I'm so comfy.
Well, this is way too long of a post. I'll be surprised if anyone gets this far.
Goodnight.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Starry Mountains
Sunday, Jan 18 6:09 pm
also 10:20 pm
We went on two amazing tour-things the last two days. One was in a boat along Milford Sound, and the other was to a glow worm cave. They were both stunningly amazingly beautiful.
Yesterday we woke up at 7 am to drive two hours up to the port at the end of Milford Sound. It was raining a little, and the six of us were decked out head to toe in waterproof clothing (nobody else there had rain pants. We're just that cool). The boat we were on was very pretty-- although it was a motorboat, it had huge masts with sails rolled up along the bottom, with large outdoor decks. We went up to the top in the rain right away, and were the only people to stay outside the whole time. The mountains were so amazing-- they were cliff-steep directly out of the water looming above to amazing heights, with clouds and mist circled around the tops. The water would have been crystal clear save for the rain and breeze. In the distance we could see mountains with glaciers on the top. Driving along the road and on the boat there were thousand feet tall waterfalls trickling down the mountainsides, with larger but shorter ones gushing down to the water. Because the mountains were so steep, the water was very deep close to the mountains. That meant that the boat could creep up to right next to the cliff. Our captain ("skipper" as they call it here) and other person who talked on the loudspeaker (we made friends with her early on, and she made fun of us into her microphone for being the only tourists outside) were very funny and playful, so twice drove up into the waterfall so the front of the ship was blasted with gallons of water. I never went all the way to the front, but T did, and got soaked through his rain jacket and pants. We got a fair amount of spray where we were as well. I think that boat ride was the prettiest place I have ever been. That's a pretty big statement.
Today, we took a boat right from Te Anau (where we're staying) to the glowworm caves. We were again the only people outside for most of the time, although the boat went much faster so the rain and wind stung. It was fun though, and multiple times I said "I'm flying Jack, I'm flying!" The entire boat (about 75 people) was filled with German tourists, who turn out to be much pushier than NZers or USers, which was amusing. After about 30 minutes, we got off the boat and went into a building where we waited to go on tours of 14 into the cave. Walking into it was exhilarating-- there were nicely build strong walkways, but in places we had to almost crawl because of the rocks (the tour guide told us before we left that we may have to "watch our heads"). As we got deeper the crashing of water got louder-- it was going amazingly quickly down the underground waterfall. Soon we got to the point where we weren't allowed to talk (it was so loud we wouldn't be able to anyways). Our guide (who was very the very nice, quite, outdoorsy-- well, undergroundsy-- type) got the tiny rowboat sized boat that went into the a completely black and quiet dark chamber, the end of the cave where thousands of little glowing dots on the ceiling. That was so amazing-- I had no depth perception, and the only way I could see the guide walking around our boat and ropes was the vague outline of missing stars. It was also terrifying, because we couldn't see our own noses, and at one point the boat stopped for another boat to pass, but on the side we were on we had no idea what was happening (there weren't any glowworms in front of us either, so it was very, very dark. Overall, that trip was fantastic.
Tonight, after dinner, we watched the most amazing 30 minute video in the local cinema. It is an award winning doco-type (but without narration) that has amazing music and cinematography of Fiordland. Most of it is shot from helocopters flying above the mountains. The places it showed were so stunningly, breathtakingly gorgeous that the beauty was emotional. For anyone who wants to see it (which I deffinately say everybody should) it's called Ata Whenua: Shadowland, by Murihiki FIlms (which is based in Te Anau, the town we are staying in). It was so amazing. Red snow, humongous cliffs, giant waterfalls.....
Anyways, it is amazingly late (almost 11!!!), and we're leaving Te Anau and taking the boys to the Queenstown airport tomorrow. I will miss them very very much, but I am very excited to get a camper van and travel with just my parents. I'm off to bed, night.
also 10:20 pm
We went on two amazing tour-things the last two days. One was in a boat along Milford Sound, and the other was to a glow worm cave. They were both stunningly amazingly beautiful.
Yesterday we woke up at 7 am to drive two hours up to the port at the end of Milford Sound. It was raining a little, and the six of us were decked out head to toe in waterproof clothing (nobody else there had rain pants. We're just that cool). The boat we were on was very pretty-- although it was a motorboat, it had huge masts with sails rolled up along the bottom, with large outdoor decks. We went up to the top in the rain right away, and were the only people to stay outside the whole time. The mountains were so amazing-- they were cliff-steep directly out of the water looming above to amazing heights, with clouds and mist circled around the tops. The water would have been crystal clear save for the rain and breeze. In the distance we could see mountains with glaciers on the top. Driving along the road and on the boat there were thousand feet tall waterfalls trickling down the mountainsides, with larger but shorter ones gushing down to the water. Because the mountains were so steep, the water was very deep close to the mountains. That meant that the boat could creep up to right next to the cliff. Our captain ("skipper" as they call it here) and other person who talked on the loudspeaker (we made friends with her early on, and she made fun of us into her microphone for being the only tourists outside) were very funny and playful, so twice drove up into the waterfall so the front of the ship was blasted with gallons of water. I never went all the way to the front, but T did, and got soaked through his rain jacket and pants. We got a fair amount of spray where we were as well. I think that boat ride was the prettiest place I have ever been. That's a pretty big statement.
Today, we took a boat right from Te Anau (where we're staying) to the glowworm caves. We were again the only people outside for most of the time, although the boat went much faster so the rain and wind stung. It was fun though, and multiple times I said "I'm flying Jack, I'm flying!" The entire boat (about 75 people) was filled with German tourists, who turn out to be much pushier than NZers or USers, which was amusing. After about 30 minutes, we got off the boat and went into a building where we waited to go on tours of 14 into the cave. Walking into it was exhilarating-- there were nicely build strong walkways, but in places we had to almost crawl because of the rocks (the tour guide told us before we left that we may have to "watch our heads"). As we got deeper the crashing of water got louder-- it was going amazingly quickly down the underground waterfall. Soon we got to the point where we weren't allowed to talk (it was so loud we wouldn't be able to anyways). Our guide (who was very the very nice, quite, outdoorsy-- well, undergroundsy-- type) got the tiny rowboat sized boat that went into the a completely black and quiet dark chamber, the end of the cave where thousands of little glowing dots on the ceiling. That was so amazing-- I had no depth perception, and the only way I could see the guide walking around our boat and ropes was the vague outline of missing stars. It was also terrifying, because we couldn't see our own noses, and at one point the boat stopped for another boat to pass, but on the side we were on we had no idea what was happening (there weren't any glowworms in front of us either, so it was very, very dark. Overall, that trip was fantastic.
Tonight, after dinner, we watched the most amazing 30 minute video in the local cinema. It is an award winning doco-type (but without narration) that has amazing music and cinematography of Fiordland. Most of it is shot from helocopters flying above the mountains. The places it showed were so stunningly, breathtakingly gorgeous that the beauty was emotional. For anyone who wants to see it (which I deffinately say everybody should) it's called Ata Whenua: Shadowland, by Murihiki FIlms (which is based in Te Anau, the town we are staying in). It was so amazing. Red snow, humongous cliffs, giant waterfalls.....
Anyways, it is amazingly late (almost 11!!!), and we're leaving Te Anau and taking the boys to the Queenstown airport tomorrow. I will miss them very very much, but I am very excited to get a camper van and travel with just my parents. I'm off to bed, night.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Wanaka and Te Anau
Friday, January 16 7:37 pm
I love New Zealand. We're in Te Anau, a touristy but nice town on the edge of Fiordland. We drove here yesterday from Wanaka, where we were staying for the two nights before. It was wonderful there, and although we only got to stay there two nights instead of three we still had fun. The first day there we didn't have much time to do anything after the six hour drive from Christchurch except grocery shopping and walking around town, but the next day was eventful. We took a long but beautiful hike through sunny mountains near town, then later went swimming in the freezing lake in front of our house and the town (Lake Wanaka). I was amazingly out of shape for the hike (we haven't really hiked since September, and since I'm not playing volleyball anymore I don't have the same cardiovascular strength I did a year ago), so the five miles round trip and 1000 feet of elevation gain that would normally be relatively easy was near torture for my weak muscles and pounding heart. It was gorgeous though, because we got so high we could see the town and much of the lake. It was hot though, and sunny, so after the hike swimming sounded even more refreshing. Swimming was amazingly fun, because although it was freezing at first after about 20 minutes of creeping into the water it was actually bearable (well, everybody else in my family wimped out before then, but not I, the strong and valiant Sasha.).
The next day, we drove southwest to Te Anau. Our house here is bizarre-- it's the only house on a gravel road that runs closely parallel to the town's main (and only real) street that is filled with cafes, pharmacies, and outdoor clothing stores (my favorite kind:)). I think the only point of this street was so people who work at the businesses can park and access work. That means our street has a park on one side and the back of stores on the other (the supermarket has amazing orange milk crates, the same kind that M stole from the back of stores when she was in grad school and we still use for camping). It's also bizarre because there are beds for 10 plus two more couches that turn into double beds, and everything is arranged strangely arranged. One of the rooms with a bed in it also has a pool table, and it's part of a triangle of bedrooms where one of them can only be accessed through one of the others. It's fun to play pool, though. Anyways, today we took a very nice hike that was the fist three or four miles of one of the Great Walks, about 8 or 9 three to six day amazing hikes around the Fjords. We walked about 3 miles in on the Kepler Track to a spot with two picnic tables where we could eat. The tramp (in NZ instead of hiking on trails, people tramp on tracks) was gorgeous, hiking along the Te Anau Lake through lush, green forrest. The forrest was like Oregon coast forrest, but even greener-- hard to believe, I know. There were these amazing fern trees-- ferns that were on top of tall trunk like things, some getting to about 20 feet tall.
Tomorrow we're driving two hours up to Milford Sound, then getting on a tour boat. Tours are not a normal desired activity by the J-Fs, but Milford Sound is supposed to be one of the most beautiful spots in NZ. It started raining today, and although I was still sick of water falling from the sky and landing in big puddles on the ground from Fiji, the rain was refreshing. It was much more like Oregon rain-- I don't know what it is about it, but Oregon (and apparently NZ) has amazing rain that is different from other places. Or maybe it's Fiji that has the different rain. Anyways, it was nice.
I'm going to go sort through photos that I just uploaded. I have about 500 of the last week and a half. I'll try to post this post and some photos either tonight or tomorrow.
I love New Zealand. We're in Te Anau, a touristy but nice town on the edge of Fiordland. We drove here yesterday from Wanaka, where we were staying for the two nights before. It was wonderful there, and although we only got to stay there two nights instead of three we still had fun. The first day there we didn't have much time to do anything after the six hour drive from Christchurch except grocery shopping and walking around town, but the next day was eventful. We took a long but beautiful hike through sunny mountains near town, then later went swimming in the freezing lake in front of our house and the town (Lake Wanaka). I was amazingly out of shape for the hike (we haven't really hiked since September, and since I'm not playing volleyball anymore I don't have the same cardiovascular strength I did a year ago), so the five miles round trip and 1000 feet of elevation gain that would normally be relatively easy was near torture for my weak muscles and pounding heart. It was gorgeous though, because we got so high we could see the town and much of the lake. It was hot though, and sunny, so after the hike swimming sounded even more refreshing. Swimming was amazingly fun, because although it was freezing at first after about 20 minutes of creeping into the water it was actually bearable (well, everybody else in my family wimped out before then, but not I, the strong and valiant Sasha.).
The next day, we drove southwest to Te Anau. Our house here is bizarre-- it's the only house on a gravel road that runs closely parallel to the town's main (and only real) street that is filled with cafes, pharmacies, and outdoor clothing stores (my favorite kind:)). I think the only point of this street was so people who work at the businesses can park and access work. That means our street has a park on one side and the back of stores on the other (the supermarket has amazing orange milk crates, the same kind that M stole from the back of stores when she was in grad school and we still use for camping). It's also bizarre because there are beds for 10 plus two more couches that turn into double beds, and everything is arranged strangely arranged. One of the rooms with a bed in it also has a pool table, and it's part of a triangle of bedrooms where one of them can only be accessed through one of the others. It's fun to play pool, though. Anyways, today we took a very nice hike that was the fist three or four miles of one of the Great Walks, about 8 or 9 three to six day amazing hikes around the Fjords. We walked about 3 miles in on the Kepler Track to a spot with two picnic tables where we could eat. The tramp (in NZ instead of hiking on trails, people tramp on tracks) was gorgeous, hiking along the Te Anau Lake through lush, green forrest. The forrest was like Oregon coast forrest, but even greener-- hard to believe, I know. There were these amazing fern trees-- ferns that were on top of tall trunk like things, some getting to about 20 feet tall.
Tomorrow we're driving two hours up to Milford Sound, then getting on a tour boat. Tours are not a normal desired activity by the J-Fs, but Milford Sound is supposed to be one of the most beautiful spots in NZ. It started raining today, and although I was still sick of water falling from the sky and landing in big puddles on the ground from Fiji, the rain was refreshing. It was much more like Oregon rain-- I don't know what it is about it, but Oregon (and apparently NZ) has amazing rain that is different from other places. Or maybe it's Fiji that has the different rain. Anyways, it was nice.
I'm going to go sort through photos that I just uploaded. I have about 500 of the last week and a half. I'll try to post this post and some photos either tonight or tomorrow.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Christchurch!
Today we got to Christchurch. I am so happy. It feels like I suddenly have so many amenities I feel I shouldn't have. It wasn't even to hot by the time we got here, in fact it was pretty cool. I changed out of running shorts and into jeans and a sweatshirt. It's also so much drier here.
This morning we left the dorm motel place (which actually turned out to be slightly nicer than I thought. The showers in the main building actually had pressure, which I hadn't had for a week. Also, my parents and I found a little room at the end of the building we were in that had clearly previously flooded, but was dry. So we had a little privacy and quiet (no doors, of course, but still nice). Anyways, so the cab came, we piled in, and went to the airport.
The airport was swarming with tourists that finally were able to get through. There were humongous lines (that we managed to avoid, actually) and many upset Australians. Finally somebody came to the check-in counter for Air New Zealand, and we managed to get boarding passes. We had been rebooked so many times we weren't sure if they would give us tickets, but we got them. M was still stressed, although a little better in comparison. Security was very easy, with only three people there and they were very casual. After a couple hours waiting for the plane to arrive we got on. It was amazing to be in a NZ airplane-- it felt so comforting. Only after we took off did M finally start to relax. Which, again, is still relative. I watched the Little Mermaid (basically only classic Disney movie I'd never seen) and the first part of the Duchess, which I'd already seen and loved.
Finally, we got to Auckland. I was almost singing and jumping with joy. We tried to rush through customs, because although we didn't know what flight we were on we thought it would take off in about 30 minutes. Suprisingly, getting through customs and to a check-in counter with no line at all was very fast. The woman working at the counter had a little trouble getting us boarding passes because we didn't have any paper tickets, but eventually we did. At one point she called a superior to ask what to do, and reffered to us as "Fiji disrupts" which had clearly become the catch phrase at the airport. She even booked us on a flight 30 minutes later.
The Auckland airport was very comforting. Eventually we got on the flight to Christchurch, which felt even more like a miracle. As we were deplaning (for some reason we went a very odd way-- following other people-- that took us behind much of the airport scene and by administration offices. It was bizarre) I was imagining Halleluyah playing in the backroung (with the full chorus and symphony, even with the timponee at the end). We got a rental car (the woman working there was extremely nice and efficient), got our bags, and packed up the very strange minivan we got (all the instructions on the car are in Japanese). In the planned itenerary we were supposed to already be out of Christchurch and in Wanaka, so we didn't have a house to stay in. Instead, we went to a motel run by a couple (one of them works in Psychology at the University, so we had connection). This is the hotel and couple that picked P up from the airport and have been taking care of us while we tried to get here. The motel is so nice-- so much room, water pressure, and the owners are incredibly sweet. I actually had culture shock at that moment, although it was a very comforting one. It's so nice to be able to drink the water and not be sticky and wet. We went to a very J-F-y restaurant-- a veggitarean and mostly vegan Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall, which felt very much like we were in Eugene or Berkeley. Not having frozen fish and chips was a great change. Also, the tap water tastes very good.
I should go to bed. By the way, the times are all off on the blog because the computer is still set to Eugene time, so now it's 3 hours before whatever time it says (and a day later. Fiji was four hours behind but a day later). We're leaving for Wanaka tomorrow.
It is pretty amazing we got out when we did-- and important. The storms were supposed to get worse, and scares of Typhoid and food/water shortages were everywhere. Below are some links to news stories. The second and third have pictures.
http://www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read&id=44113
http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/fiji-poised-another-downpour-2438772
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/12/2464201.htm?section=justin
well, I'm off to bed. Good night.
This morning we left the dorm motel place (which actually turned out to be slightly nicer than I thought. The showers in the main building actually had pressure, which I hadn't had for a week. Also, my parents and I found a little room at the end of the building we were in that had clearly previously flooded, but was dry. So we had a little privacy and quiet (no doors, of course, but still nice). Anyways, so the cab came, we piled in, and went to the airport.
The airport was swarming with tourists that finally were able to get through. There were humongous lines (that we managed to avoid, actually) and many upset Australians. Finally somebody came to the check-in counter for Air New Zealand, and we managed to get boarding passes. We had been rebooked so many times we weren't sure if they would give us tickets, but we got them. M was still stressed, although a little better in comparison. Security was very easy, with only three people there and they were very casual. After a couple hours waiting for the plane to arrive we got on. It was amazing to be in a NZ airplane-- it felt so comforting. Only after we took off did M finally start to relax. Which, again, is still relative. I watched the Little Mermaid (basically only classic Disney movie I'd never seen) and the first part of the Duchess, which I'd already seen and loved.
Finally, we got to Auckland. I was almost singing and jumping with joy. We tried to rush through customs, because although we didn't know what flight we were on we thought it would take off in about 30 minutes. Suprisingly, getting through customs and to a check-in counter with no line at all was very fast. The woman working at the counter had a little trouble getting us boarding passes because we didn't have any paper tickets, but eventually we did. At one point she called a superior to ask what to do, and reffered to us as "Fiji disrupts" which had clearly become the catch phrase at the airport. She even booked us on a flight 30 minutes later.
The Auckland airport was very comforting. Eventually we got on the flight to Christchurch, which felt even more like a miracle. As we were deplaning (for some reason we went a very odd way-- following other people-- that took us behind much of the airport scene and by administration offices. It was bizarre) I was imagining Halleluyah playing in the backroung (with the full chorus and symphony, even with the timponee at the end). We got a rental car (the woman working there was extremely nice and efficient), got our bags, and packed up the very strange minivan we got (all the instructions on the car are in Japanese). In the planned itenerary we were supposed to already be out of Christchurch and in Wanaka, so we didn't have a house to stay in. Instead, we went to a motel run by a couple (one of them works in Psychology at the University, so we had connection). This is the hotel and couple that picked P up from the airport and have been taking care of us while we tried to get here. The motel is so nice-- so much room, water pressure, and the owners are incredibly sweet. I actually had culture shock at that moment, although it was a very comforting one. It's so nice to be able to drink the water and not be sticky and wet. We went to a very J-F-y restaurant-- a veggitarean and mostly vegan Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall, which felt very much like we were in Eugene or Berkeley. Not having frozen fish and chips was a great change. Also, the tap water tastes very good.
I should go to bed. By the way, the times are all off on the blog because the computer is still set to Eugene time, so now it's 3 hours before whatever time it says (and a day later. Fiji was four hours behind but a day later). We're leaving for Wanaka tomorrow.
It is pretty amazing we got out when we did-- and important. The storms were supposed to get worse, and scares of Typhoid and food/water shortages were everywhere. Below are some links to news stories. The second and third have pictures.
http://www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read&id=44113
http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/fiji-poised-another-downpour-2438772
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/12/2464201.htm?section=justin
well, I'm off to bed. Good night.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Nadi!!!!
We finally got to Nadi today. I can't write too much right now because I only have about 15 minutes of internet left.
We woke up this morning to something we haven't gotten in days-- no rain. There was even a small batch of blue sky visible at one point. We left aboud 11:30 with Jai. There was some confusion because we met another guest who was trying to get to Suva, Fiji's capitol, for a UN peace meeting. He was a former member of parliament before the coup. He had arranged another transport for us, two 4-wheel cars. They didn't show up when planned, so we took the minivan instead.
All the floods were gone, hardly any water on the road, intil we got to Ba. That was the town that was under 12 feet of water a day ago, and the road was still flooded. We waited about an hour at the highway with hundreds of others, until Jai and a few others decided to try a back road around the flood.
We drove for seeminly hours on a tiny, muddy, bumpy dirt road through the mountains, which was terrefying. After having to get out to walk (my feet are still covered in mud) and have the minivan be towed by a different 4-wheel car, we finally got to the other side of Ba. It felt like a micarcle we got through it, because the whole time we thought we were on the wrong road. We then drove towards Nadi, and got to see the flood from the other side. No cars had gotten through it yet. I could right hundreds of pages on that journey, but I don't have time right now.
Apon arriving in Nadi after a 6 hour journey we went to the airport to see if there was a flight tonight, which there wasn't. We tried to get a room at multiple hotels for the night, but everywhere was completely booked up. We finally found space at the SkyLodge, a dormitory for kind of travel backpackers. We're staying in a group room with only one shower and one toilet for about 30 beds. We had to buy towels. Although it's kind of fun, I would so much rather a real hotel room.
I can't wait until we get to Christchurch.
We woke up this morning to something we haven't gotten in days-- no rain. There was even a small batch of blue sky visible at one point. We left aboud 11:30 with Jai. There was some confusion because we met another guest who was trying to get to Suva, Fiji's capitol, for a UN peace meeting. He was a former member of parliament before the coup. He had arranged another transport for us, two 4-wheel cars. They didn't show up when planned, so we took the minivan instead.
All the floods were gone, hardly any water on the road, intil we got to Ba. That was the town that was under 12 feet of water a day ago, and the road was still flooded. We waited about an hour at the highway with hundreds of others, until Jai and a few others decided to try a back road around the flood.
We drove for seeminly hours on a tiny, muddy, bumpy dirt road through the mountains, which was terrefying. After having to get out to walk (my feet are still covered in mud) and have the minivan be towed by a different 4-wheel car, we finally got to the other side of Ba. It felt like a micarcle we got through it, because the whole time we thought we were on the wrong road. We then drove towards Nadi, and got to see the flood from the other side. No cars had gotten through it yet. I could right hundreds of pages on that journey, but I don't have time right now.
Apon arriving in Nadi after a 6 hour journey we went to the airport to see if there was a flight tonight, which there wasn't. We tried to get a room at multiple hotels for the night, but everywhere was completely booked up. We finally found space at the SkyLodge, a dormitory for kind of travel backpackers. We're staying in a group room with only one shower and one toilet for about 30 beds. We had to buy towels. Although it's kind of fun, I would so much rather a real hotel room.
I can't wait until we get to Christchurch.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Update
The news are playing right now on the TV in the hotel lobby, where we have been the last six hours.
They say that the weather is supposed to just get worse, maybe turning into a cyclone by Wednesday. They also showed all the floods there are in the country, which is a lot. Thousands of people are being evacuated.
They also said the road is closed to Nadi because of flooding, and Nadi itself is heavily flooded in many parts. In many parts they are advising people to save food and water because of contamination and the problem with transportation.
Another couple who was watching the news with us are also trying to get to the airport to get to Wellington, and they said there may be helicopter coming tomorrow to take them. I'm not sure where it's headed, but I think they said if there is room we may be able to get on also.
Luckily, the hotel we're staying in is very comfortable. By now it feels like a house and home to us, the lobby area a living room, the restaurant connected to the lobby a dining room, the actual rooms the bedrooms, and the pool area with the ping pong table the family room. I haven't been wearing shoes around the hotel, and a few other people (the helicopter couple and the family from Wellington that's been here since we have) hanging out in the lobby with us, playing cards and waiting for the news to come on. There is even power, because the hotel has a generator. Everywhere else in the area has no electricity whatsoever. The hotel is, however, starting to turn off the generator in the day to save gas for the nights, and even starting to water down their soup. Most of the items on the short menu aren't there because food hasn't been able to be transported.
P, if you read this soon, know that we are OK and love you so much. I miss you and would really like to talk to you. Although I am scared, I really think we will get out of here soon and into New Zealand to see you. I hope you're okay and it's not too weird or scary when you get to NZ. I love you!
I need to get off so M can email.
I'm scared.
They say that the weather is supposed to just get worse, maybe turning into a cyclone by Wednesday. They also showed all the floods there are in the country, which is a lot. Thousands of people are being evacuated.
They also said the road is closed to Nadi because of flooding, and Nadi itself is heavily flooded in many parts. In many parts they are advising people to save food and water because of contamination and the problem with transportation.
Another couple who was watching the news with us are also trying to get to the airport to get to Wellington, and they said there may be helicopter coming tomorrow to take them. I'm not sure where it's headed, but I think they said if there is room we may be able to get on also.
Luckily, the hotel we're staying in is very comfortable. By now it feels like a house and home to us, the lobby area a living room, the restaurant connected to the lobby a dining room, the actual rooms the bedrooms, and the pool area with the ping pong table the family room. I haven't been wearing shoes around the hotel, and a few other people (the helicopter couple and the family from Wellington that's been here since we have) hanging out in the lobby with us, playing cards and waiting for the news to come on. There is even power, because the hotel has a generator. Everywhere else in the area has no electricity whatsoever. The hotel is, however, starting to turn off the generator in the day to save gas for the nights, and even starting to water down their soup. Most of the items on the short menu aren't there because food hasn't been able to be transported.
P, if you read this soon, know that we are OK and love you so much. I miss you and would really like to talk to you. Although I am scared, I really think we will get out of here soon and into New Zealand to see you. I hope you're okay and it's not too weird or scary when you get to NZ. I love you!
I need to get off so M can email.
I'm scared.
Still stuck, but internet.
D figured out how to hack into the hotel internet, so I can post these.
We're still stuck-- and the rain doesn't look like it will let up for weeks. We woke up this morning to loud thunder and bright lightening, and even more rain. Jai still took us in the tiny 4-wheel drive car this morning to try to get to Nadi. There was a new giant flood a little bit before where we turned around yesterday, and decided to wait until the tide went down to try to cross it. We waited three gruelingly wet and boring hours (it was pouring extremely hard and we didn't comfortably fit into the car. We have to sit on laps to just fit in there). We ended up turning around and going back, because we were afraid a new flood would form between us and the hotel and we'd be stuck. There were many new floods, but luckily none were too deep to get through.
I have no idea when we're going to get out of here. I feel so sorry for P. He's going to get the NZ and be all alone, even though M has set up some people to meet him at the airport and take care of him.
So many people are trying to help us, including people like the owner of the villa we were staying in earlier. It's crazy how little information we have about whats going on-- it makes it so stressful because we don't know if we should try to get to Nadi again, or if it's too dangerous. We've tried to put together small bits of info we have gotten, although that may not be very reliable.
Apparently, even though the roads flood every year, this is the most rain and flooding in at least 10 years. I hope we get out soon. I want to get to NZ.
We're still stuck-- and the rain doesn't look like it will let up for weeks. We woke up this morning to loud thunder and bright lightening, and even more rain. Jai still took us in the tiny 4-wheel drive car this morning to try to get to Nadi. There was a new giant flood a little bit before where we turned around yesterday, and decided to wait until the tide went down to try to cross it. We waited three gruelingly wet and boring hours (it was pouring extremely hard and we didn't comfortably fit into the car. We have to sit on laps to just fit in there). We ended up turning around and going back, because we were afraid a new flood would form between us and the hotel and we'd be stuck. There were many new floods, but luckily none were too deep to get through.
I have no idea when we're going to get out of here. I feel so sorry for P. He's going to get the NZ and be all alone, even though M has set up some people to meet him at the airport and take care of him.
So many people are trying to help us, including people like the owner of the villa we were staying in earlier. It's crazy how little information we have about whats going on-- it makes it so stressful because we don't know if we should try to get to Nadi again, or if it's too dangerous. We've tried to put together small bits of info we have gotten, although that may not be very reliable.
Apparently, even though the roads flood every year, this is the most rain and flooding in at least 10 years. I hope we get out soon. I want to get to NZ.
A Monkey and a Water Pump, Please.
Friday January 8 4:19 pm
We're stuck in Fiji.
That doesn't even begin to sum it up. Today has and continues to be so long, and the scariest and most adventurous day of the trip. I could write a 500 page book about it. Ok. Here it goes.
I was woken up this morning at 4:30 am, as planned, to get a ride to the Nadi airport. After a groggy climbing out of bed and eating a banana, the phone rang. It was our cab driver Jai, calling to say he was stuck in a flood outside of Rakiraki. Twenty minutes later a resort van drove up, and told us he would drive us to the flood, and had some plan to get across (everything was still very vague). Keep in mind that it was pitch black outside, and raining so hard I could hardly see my hand (the lack of light didn't really help that, either). It pours so much harder here then it does in Eugene, which I know is hard to believe. Eugene pouring is just considered plain rain here. Anyways, we got all the suitcases in, and rushed out to try and catch our flight. After forgetting something, turning around a couple times, and T ending up so drenched I couldn't remember the original color of his shirt, we were on our way. Sort of. I was so terrified-- I was really considering the idea that we weren't going to live through that day. Or at least that we would get stuck in the middle of nowhere in the dark and torrential downpours.
As the sky was lightening we got to the bridge over the river that caused the flood. Our driver called Jai, who said he was with the van on the other side of the flood, and we found out that to get across we were going to walk, carrying our giant suitcases above the water level. I was still stressed and thinking we needed to hurry to get to our flight. We then learned that it was too deep to cross. We waited an hour or so while other people showed up and sat in their cars behind us. A few people went up to see what was going on, some starting to try to cross it then giving up. One person (who we dubbed Machete Guy) actually got pretty far, then got stuck, then came back. Eventually our driver convinced us to go back to a hotel on the road, call Air New Zealand and reschedule out flight. After learning we couldn't do that until nine, the driver offered to take us to his house. We didn't really have a choice.
That was so amazing. The house was small, made of wood and corrugated metal as most houses around here are, with chickens walking around and banana and mango trees around it. At first it was awkward, but after they gave us tea and basically forced us to eat AMAZING curries on wonderful flat bread, it warmed up. We stayed there for a few hours, long enough for the Air New Zealand office to open and for Jai to drive through the flood in a 4-wheel drive vehicle (we were so close to the ocean that the amount of water was effected by the tide, which was low at noon). Being in that house was my favorite time of the day, because they were so nice and the food was soooo good. M got through to Air New Zealand, and found out the next available flight was Sunday morning, although there were others before then that were booked. T, B and I played Scrabble, while their two kids watched and laughed. Eventually, however, Jai came, and the five of us plus Jai and all the luggage piled into a four wheel drive car built for four people. After a short trip we did get to the other side of the flood, no problem (it was much lower by then). Then we switched to a minivan, like normal, and started driving towards Nadi.
That lasted about 50 minutes, until we came to another flood. The two policemen having fun driving in the water told us that although it was passable here (Jai didn't want to drive through it with the minivan) it wasn't soon after that, where the water was seven feet deep on the road. We turned around and drove back to the hotel we stopped at earlier, as the first impassible flood was by then very passible.
We got two rooms, and have been here ever since (that was about 11:30) except for a short walk. There is another family from Wellington who is also stuck, and who we first talked to here this morning when we stopped in to call Air New Zealand.
M has been on the phone all afternoon with our travel agent in Christchurch trying to figure out what to do, and stressing out about P. He is supposed to fly from LAX to Auckland to Christchurch and arrive Sunday morning. We were supposed to be there to meet him, which obviously won't happen (well, most likely won't happen).
Jai said the road will probably be passable tomorrow morning if it doesn't rain any more. Since he said that it's been pouring and just raining on and off. Well, maybe eventually we'll get out of here. It's really amazing in Fiji and this hotel is nice (it even has a pool and sort of restaurant), but it would still be nice to get to NZ.
It's 8:30 in Eugene right now. Woah I just realized school started a couple days ago. That means...
Happy math homework, dinosaurs.
We're stuck in Fiji.
That doesn't even begin to sum it up. Today has and continues to be so long, and the scariest and most adventurous day of the trip. I could write a 500 page book about it. Ok. Here it goes.
I was woken up this morning at 4:30 am, as planned, to get a ride to the Nadi airport. After a groggy climbing out of bed and eating a banana, the phone rang. It was our cab driver Jai, calling to say he was stuck in a flood outside of Rakiraki. Twenty minutes later a resort van drove up, and told us he would drive us to the flood, and had some plan to get across (everything was still very vague). Keep in mind that it was pitch black outside, and raining so hard I could hardly see my hand (the lack of light didn't really help that, either). It pours so much harder here then it does in Eugene, which I know is hard to believe. Eugene pouring is just considered plain rain here. Anyways, we got all the suitcases in, and rushed out to try and catch our flight. After forgetting something, turning around a couple times, and T ending up so drenched I couldn't remember the original color of his shirt, we were on our way. Sort of. I was so terrified-- I was really considering the idea that we weren't going to live through that day. Or at least that we would get stuck in the middle of nowhere in the dark and torrential downpours.
As the sky was lightening we got to the bridge over the river that caused the flood. Our driver called Jai, who said he was with the van on the other side of the flood, and we found out that to get across we were going to walk, carrying our giant suitcases above the water level. I was still stressed and thinking we needed to hurry to get to our flight. We then learned that it was too deep to cross. We waited an hour or so while other people showed up and sat in their cars behind us. A few people went up to see what was going on, some starting to try to cross it then giving up. One person (who we dubbed Machete Guy) actually got pretty far, then got stuck, then came back. Eventually our driver convinced us to go back to a hotel on the road, call Air New Zealand and reschedule out flight. After learning we couldn't do that until nine, the driver offered to take us to his house. We didn't really have a choice.
That was so amazing. The house was small, made of wood and corrugated metal as most houses around here are, with chickens walking around and banana and mango trees around it. At first it was awkward, but after they gave us tea and basically forced us to eat AMAZING curries on wonderful flat bread, it warmed up. We stayed there for a few hours, long enough for the Air New Zealand office to open and for Jai to drive through the flood in a 4-wheel drive vehicle (we were so close to the ocean that the amount of water was effected by the tide, which was low at noon). Being in that house was my favorite time of the day, because they were so nice and the food was soooo good. M got through to Air New Zealand, and found out the next available flight was Sunday morning, although there were others before then that were booked. T, B and I played Scrabble, while their two kids watched and laughed. Eventually, however, Jai came, and the five of us plus Jai and all the luggage piled into a four wheel drive car built for four people. After a short trip we did get to the other side of the flood, no problem (it was much lower by then). Then we switched to a minivan, like normal, and started driving towards Nadi.
That lasted about 50 minutes, until we came to another flood. The two policemen having fun driving in the water told us that although it was passable here (Jai didn't want to drive through it with the minivan) it wasn't soon after that, where the water was seven feet deep on the road. We turned around and drove back to the hotel we stopped at earlier, as the first impassible flood was by then very passible.
We got two rooms, and have been here ever since (that was about 11:30) except for a short walk. There is another family from Wellington who is also stuck, and who we first talked to here this morning when we stopped in to call Air New Zealand.
M has been on the phone all afternoon with our travel agent in Christchurch trying to figure out what to do, and stressing out about P. He is supposed to fly from LAX to Auckland to Christchurch and arrive Sunday morning. We were supposed to be there to meet him, which obviously won't happen (well, most likely won't happen).
Jai said the road will probably be passable tomorrow morning if it doesn't rain any more. Since he said that it's been pouring and just raining on and off. Well, maybe eventually we'll get out of here. It's really amazing in Fiji and this hotel is nice (it even has a pool and sort of restaurant), but it would still be nice to get to NZ.
It's 8:30 in Eugene right now. Woah I just realized school started a couple days ago. That means...
Happy math homework, dinosaurs.
Fiji days 3+4
Thursday, Jan 8 7:47 pm
Our power went out a couple minutes ago. It was very dark. Now I have the computer which is bright, and I think T and D are going to try turn on the generator. Silly silly.
There's a storm, hence the power outage, that's been going on the last day and a half. There was a cyclone about 100 miles from here, which is how the storm started, and then today it has been (according to the people at the resort) "just" a tropical storm. There have been moments every half hour or so when it rains literally buckets. Moments when it feels like we're in the shower.
My room smells like candle now, because M just lit one. Everybody else has been running around trying to get lights.
Let there be light! The generator started working.
Anyways, so my last two days have been pretty uneventful, but still very fun. We built a sandcastle two days ago before the storm got really bad, and since we've been playing a lot of scrabble and taking walks in the rain.
Well, I should go to bed, because we have to get up at 4 tomorrow to get to the airport. I'm so sad we have to leave. I love it here, even (actually especially) with the storm.
Sleep tight, dinosaurs.
Our power went out a couple minutes ago. It was very dark. Now I have the computer which is bright, and I think T and D are going to try turn on the generator. Silly silly.
There's a storm, hence the power outage, that's been going on the last day and a half. There was a cyclone about 100 miles from here, which is how the storm started, and then today it has been (according to the people at the resort) "just" a tropical storm. There have been moments every half hour or so when it rains literally buckets. Moments when it feels like we're in the shower.
My room smells like candle now, because M just lit one. Everybody else has been running around trying to get lights.
Let there be light! The generator started working.
Anyways, so my last two days have been pretty uneventful, but still very fun. We built a sandcastle two days ago before the storm got really bad, and since we've been playing a lot of scrabble and taking walks in the rain.
Well, I should go to bed, because we have to get up at 4 tomorrow to get to the airport. I'm so sad we have to leave. I love it here, even (actually especially) with the storm.
Sleep tight, dinosaurs.
Fiji day two
Tuesday, January 6 2009. 8:05 local time (I think).
Today was an amazing day. We went to town (Rakiraki), went snorkeling by the drop-off, and it was B's birthday.
The only bad part of today was that I woke up and spent the day with an allergic reaction. I think it's to the sunscreen I used yesterday (I _told_ my dad it wasn't hypoallergenic). My cheeks, arms and legs are all red and bumpy, and radiating heat. It's only gotten worse throughout the day, because now my body's on haywire and reacting to everything (chemicals in the pool, the good sunscreen, etc.). It's not nearly as noticeable as it sounds, but still annoying. Itchy and stingy.
Well, I'm sure you would much rather hear details about my allergic reaction than you would about Rakiraki and snorkeling, but just to torture you I'm going to move on to those.
Jai drove us to town this morning, drove around the main (and only) loop and dropped us off at a farmer's market. It was amazing. Each booth/family had amazing tropical fruits and vegetables in heaps on cloths on the ground or on wooden tables. The only way to buy anything was by the heap (incredibly inexpensive-- 7 mangoes for about 60 cents US) which was nice sometimes, but also meant we ended up with a lot of food (I bought a heap of spicy peppers thinking we'd use some of them, about 5 cups for 1 Fiji dollar, which is about 60 US cents. When we were making dinner I cut one open, touched it, ad licked my finger. I downed most of a bottle of water and my tongue still was on fire. We're using them for decoration now.) Everybody there was saying "bula" and offering us food. One woman decided to teach us some Fijian, explaining many times "Bula. Means good morning in Fiji," and what goodbye is (I forget, sorry). After we got a giant shoulder bag and everybody's hands full of bags of fruit, we went to lunch. On the other side of the loop there was a curry house (Fijian Indian restaurants) above a store. One extremely nice part was that it was semi-air conditioned, so although we were still hot it wasn't as unbearably sweaty. The food there was amazing. It was spicy and salty and sweet and strong. I love Indian food.
After everybody stared at the only five white tourists in town for a couple hours (that's actually not true-- we saw another couple in the supermarket that were caucasian), we came back to local home. After cooling off a little (trying to at least) and putting the food in bowls, we decided to don our masks, snorkels, and flippers and go out to the ocean. After walking/swimming a couple hundred yards, it started to get beautiful. There were bright blue sea stars, hundreds of little fish, sea cucumbers and bumpy grassy/corally mounds. That didn't even compare, however, when we got the the drop-off of the reef. Swimming out, suddenly the coral got brighter and the fish got bigger. It got deeper but where we could still see the bottom, very three-dimentional with coral and rocks. Then, just beyond that, there was nothing. Just blue haze for forever. It was terrifyingly fantastic. I can't even think of words to describe how beautiful the reef was, because it was so colorful and foreign and perfectly nerve wracking. I was constantly scared I would kick something that was poisonous, or be swept by the current into the blue abyss. That amount of adrenaline just made it better.
For dinner we were brought another giant fish, this time by Jai. He came with his wife and brother to clean it for us. It was delicious, even better than last night's. Again, we froze half of it, and still had leftovers of the fish we did cook. We also had taro root and long beans from market, which were fantastic. I like the food here. We have so much fruit in our house right now we could feed half a school. We have watermelon, mangos, limes, passion fruit, bananas, and many others. Some of it we have no idea what exactly it is, just that it tastes yummy.
I am exhausted, so I'm gong to bed. Pleasant dreams, ancient dinosaurs of the past.
Today was an amazing day. We went to town (Rakiraki), went snorkeling by the drop-off, and it was B's birthday.
The only bad part of today was that I woke up and spent the day with an allergic reaction. I think it's to the sunscreen I used yesterday (I _told_ my dad it wasn't hypoallergenic). My cheeks, arms and legs are all red and bumpy, and radiating heat. It's only gotten worse throughout the day, because now my body's on haywire and reacting to everything (chemicals in the pool, the good sunscreen, etc.). It's not nearly as noticeable as it sounds, but still annoying. Itchy and stingy.
Well, I'm sure you would much rather hear details about my allergic reaction than you would about Rakiraki and snorkeling, but just to torture you I'm going to move on to those.
Jai drove us to town this morning, drove around the main (and only) loop and dropped us off at a farmer's market. It was amazing. Each booth/family had amazing tropical fruits and vegetables in heaps on cloths on the ground or on wooden tables. The only way to buy anything was by the heap (incredibly inexpensive-- 7 mangoes for about 60 cents US) which was nice sometimes, but also meant we ended up with a lot of food (I bought a heap of spicy peppers thinking we'd use some of them, about 5 cups for 1 Fiji dollar, which is about 60 US cents. When we were making dinner I cut one open, touched it, ad licked my finger. I downed most of a bottle of water and my tongue still was on fire. We're using them for decoration now.) Everybody there was saying "bula" and offering us food. One woman decided to teach us some Fijian, explaining many times "Bula. Means good morning in Fiji," and what goodbye is (I forget, sorry). After we got a giant shoulder bag and everybody's hands full of bags of fruit, we went to lunch. On the other side of the loop there was a curry house (Fijian Indian restaurants) above a store. One extremely nice part was that it was semi-air conditioned, so although we were still hot it wasn't as unbearably sweaty. The food there was amazing. It was spicy and salty and sweet and strong. I love Indian food.
After everybody stared at the only five white tourists in town for a couple hours (that's actually not true-- we saw another couple in the supermarket that were caucasian), we came back to local home. After cooling off a little (trying to at least) and putting the food in bowls, we decided to don our masks, snorkels, and flippers and go out to the ocean. After walking/swimming a couple hundred yards, it started to get beautiful. There were bright blue sea stars, hundreds of little fish, sea cucumbers and bumpy grassy/corally mounds. That didn't even compare, however, when we got the the drop-off of the reef. Swimming out, suddenly the coral got brighter and the fish got bigger. It got deeper but where we could still see the bottom, very three-dimentional with coral and rocks. Then, just beyond that, there was nothing. Just blue haze for forever. It was terrifyingly fantastic. I can't even think of words to describe how beautiful the reef was, because it was so colorful and foreign and perfectly nerve wracking. I was constantly scared I would kick something that was poisonous, or be swept by the current into the blue abyss. That amount of adrenaline just made it better.
For dinner we were brought another giant fish, this time by Jai. He came with his wife and brother to clean it for us. It was delicious, even better than last night's. Again, we froze half of it, and still had leftovers of the fish we did cook. We also had taro root and long beans from market, which were fantastic. I like the food here. We have so much fruit in our house right now we could feed half a school. We have watermelon, mangos, limes, passion fruit, bananas, and many others. Some of it we have no idea what exactly it is, just that it tastes yummy.
I am exhausted, so I'm gong to bed. Pleasant dreams, ancient dinosaurs of the past.
Fiji day one
Monday 5 January 6:46 pm (I could be an hour or 24 off, because I don't have a clock for this time zone)
Today, after a 11-hour flight from LAX that left Saturday night (well, it ended up leaving Sunday morning), we arrived in Fiji. It is so beautiful here-- turquoise oceans, coconut palm forests, and mangrove trees make up much of the scenery. Today felt like an endless day-- or was it yesterday? I am so confused by now I just need to go to sleep and it'll all work out in the morning.
Our flight was okay. For an 11-hour flight, it was great-- we were flying Air Pacific, a branch of Air New Zealand that is based in Nadi, Fiji. The flight attendants were very sweet, and the six of them managed to keep 500 people happy. The bad part was that it was an 11-hour flight, which are never good. As everybody has heard and/or experienced before, it is IMPOSSIBLE to sleep on planes unless you a) have the whole row to yourself or b) are a super sleeper who can fall asleep anywhere. Neither of which, may I add, is true for me. I actually slept surprisingly well this flight, maybe even getting four hours. Normally my total sleep time for long airplane rides maybe inches up on a few minutes.
The owner of the villa we are staying in arranged a cab for us to get from the airport in Nadi to our villa outside of Rakiraki, about a 2.5 hour drive. After the shock of arriving in a hot, humid tropical island, the air conditioning of the van was very nice. Our cab driver, Jai, was very competent and sweet, which helped the whole experience. I tried all my might not to fall asleep during that ride so I could look at the scenery, but failed. I slept for about 5 minutes, the kind of sleep where even though I knew I wanted to be awake my eyelids just wouldn't open up.
Then we got to the villa. I could not believe how beautiful it was-- a huge open-air house with a giant kitchen in the middle of everything, a pool, and a spectacular view. The house itself shaped in a slight arc, around a stone patio with a table on it and a pool. Directly in front of all these (so everywhere on the property can see it) is the ocean. We're about 40 feet up, so there's an amazing view of clear blue water and green islands, but also have access to the water below. On the edge of the ocean, about 20 feet up, there is a thatched-roof gazebo with wooden lounge chairs. About 40 minutes ago my mom and I were out there, and at that moment life seemed just about perfect. With wind chill the temperature was about 69 degrees F, with the perfect amount of breeze and view and full stomachs. Tonight for dinner we were brought a giant fish fresh off the fishing boat by the house's care taker. It was humongous; at least three feet long. As he was going to give it to us, he thought a second and asked, "do you want me to clean this for you?" Ah, a blessing among blessings. There was so much fish we ended up only cooking half of it and still had leftovers.
Tomorrow is B's 26th birthday. I don't even think that has dawned on him. We haven't planned anything too special other than dinner (which we haven't actually planned yet, we just know there will be a special plan). According to him, a trip to Fiji is present enough.
My only complaint (I always have to have one) is the heat. During the day, standing or walking seems unbearable. Today we had lunch at the resort next door to our villa, and I was worried by the end that I would be glued to the seat because of sweat and sunscreen. Our house doesn't have glass on the windows, so most of it is basically like being outside (which is very nice in some respects), but I figured out how to close the wooden slats and turn the air conditioner on in my room. I am sort of a picky sleeper, which I know is not a good thing.
I hope by tomorrow I'm more acclimated.
The people here are so nice. Everybody smiles at us, waves, offers us help, and everywhere we go people say "bula," the Fijian greeting (meaning hello, good morning, welcome, etc.). The mix of cultures here is amazing-- the military government is run by the native Fijians, who have the highest status in the community. A large part of the population are Fiji-Indians, who are extremely oppressed legally and societally. Fiji-Indians by law aren't allowed to own land, or even call themselves "Fijians." It's almost like Apartheid, except much less one-to-one oppression (as far as I know). The people of Fiji are supposed to be a mix of Melanesians and Polynesians and because of the mix of so many cultures (also various European influences) everything is rich. The food is amazing, the people are beautiful, and the different languages are fascinating.
It's nice here. It's definitely a J-F tropical paradise, with some adventure (maniac driving, no caucasians anywhere except the resort, etc.). Friday, when we leave for New Zealand, is going to come very soon.
Well, I am exhausted and confused about the time/date. I should go to bed.
Today, after a 11-hour flight from LAX that left Saturday night (well, it ended up leaving Sunday morning), we arrived in Fiji. It is so beautiful here-- turquoise oceans, coconut palm forests, and mangrove trees make up much of the scenery. Today felt like an endless day-- or was it yesterday? I am so confused by now I just need to go to sleep and it'll all work out in the morning.
Our flight was okay. For an 11-hour flight, it was great-- we were flying Air Pacific, a branch of Air New Zealand that is based in Nadi, Fiji. The flight attendants were very sweet, and the six of them managed to keep 500 people happy. The bad part was that it was an 11-hour flight, which are never good. As everybody has heard and/or experienced before, it is IMPOSSIBLE to sleep on planes unless you a) have the whole row to yourself or b) are a super sleeper who can fall asleep anywhere. Neither of which, may I add, is true for me. I actually slept surprisingly well this flight, maybe even getting four hours. Normally my total sleep time for long airplane rides maybe inches up on a few minutes.
The owner of the villa we are staying in arranged a cab for us to get from the airport in Nadi to our villa outside of Rakiraki, about a 2.5 hour drive. After the shock of arriving in a hot, humid tropical island, the air conditioning of the van was very nice. Our cab driver, Jai, was very competent and sweet, which helped the whole experience. I tried all my might not to fall asleep during that ride so I could look at the scenery, but failed. I slept for about 5 minutes, the kind of sleep where even though I knew I wanted to be awake my eyelids just wouldn't open up.
Then we got to the villa. I could not believe how beautiful it was-- a huge open-air house with a giant kitchen in the middle of everything, a pool, and a spectacular view. The house itself shaped in a slight arc, around a stone patio with a table on it and a pool. Directly in front of all these (so everywhere on the property can see it) is the ocean. We're about 40 feet up, so there's an amazing view of clear blue water and green islands, but also have access to the water below. On the edge of the ocean, about 20 feet up, there is a thatched-roof gazebo with wooden lounge chairs. About 40 minutes ago my mom and I were out there, and at that moment life seemed just about perfect. With wind chill the temperature was about 69 degrees F, with the perfect amount of breeze and view and full stomachs. Tonight for dinner we were brought a giant fish fresh off the fishing boat by the house's care taker. It was humongous; at least three feet long. As he was going to give it to us, he thought a second and asked, "do you want me to clean this for you?" Ah, a blessing among blessings. There was so much fish we ended up only cooking half of it and still had leftovers.
Tomorrow is B's 26th birthday. I don't even think that has dawned on him. We haven't planned anything too special other than dinner (which we haven't actually planned yet, we just know there will be a special plan). According to him, a trip to Fiji is present enough.
My only complaint (I always have to have one) is the heat. During the day, standing or walking seems unbearable. Today we had lunch at the resort next door to our villa, and I was worried by the end that I would be glued to the seat because of sweat and sunscreen. Our house doesn't have glass on the windows, so most of it is basically like being outside (which is very nice in some respects), but I figured out how to close the wooden slats and turn the air conditioner on in my room. I am sort of a picky sleeper, which I know is not a good thing.
I hope by tomorrow I'm more acclimated.
The people here are so nice. Everybody smiles at us, waves, offers us help, and everywhere we go people say "bula," the Fijian greeting (meaning hello, good morning, welcome, etc.). The mix of cultures here is amazing-- the military government is run by the native Fijians, who have the highest status in the community. A large part of the population are Fiji-Indians, who are extremely oppressed legally and societally. Fiji-Indians by law aren't allowed to own land, or even call themselves "Fijians." It's almost like Apartheid, except much less one-to-one oppression (as far as I know). The people of Fiji are supposed to be a mix of Melanesians and Polynesians and because of the mix of so many cultures (also various European influences) everything is rich. The food is amazing, the people are beautiful, and the different languages are fascinating.
It's nice here. It's definitely a J-F tropical paradise, with some adventure (maniac driving, no caucasians anywhere except the resort, etc.). Friday, when we leave for New Zealand, is going to come very soon.
Well, I am exhausted and confused about the time/date. I should go to bed.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
LAX
Saturday, January 3, 8:29 PST
Our flight was delayed. The one to Fiji. THe five of us are sitting in the LAX international terminal, in a circle around a pole that has power plugs on it. It's like a shrine for our family of four laptops.
Being that LAX is not as civilized as EUG or PDX (Oregon is so much better, is it not?), I, as a passenger on an airplane, maybe even an important business person or politician, don't have internet access. So if I happened to be the new ambassador to the Federated States of Micronesia (West Wing reference, sorry) and needed to send an important email to the government telling them that I was delayed, I wouldn't be able to. I guess if I was that important I would have about five blackberries and three assistants flying with me with four blackberries each, but what if I wanted to play internet poker, or check my Twitter? Anyways, instead I'm typing into a text edit file on B's computer. I'll upload it in probably about a week.
As I said, our flight was, is, delayed. Instead of taking off 10:30 pm PST, it is scheduled to take off 12:30 PST. That means that we'll get to Fiji at 7:30 am Monday instead of 5:30. My parents are exhausted, which doesn't help, and it's hot here. I'm used to my 66-degree heated house with good air ventilation, not a 73-degree heated airport without windows that open. That always happens at airports, so I guess I should be used to it. I might as well, being that we're going to an island that will be 80 degrees with 98 percent humidity. It's fun being in the international terminal though, because every announcement they make they make is in about 6 languages. I can understand most of what they say on the loudspeakers in Spanish, but that may be to do with the fact that they're the same announcements that play in English every five minutes in domestic terminals. For your safety, blah de blah, security threat level orange, blah blah blah. Not too difficult vocabulary.
My mom's watching Alias, which I am very jealous of, but we only have one set of headphones. B and I will watch it after she's done. I am so addicted to that show. My aunt sent us a used version of the first season for Christmas, and ever since then I have been thinking about it non-stop.
Two people referred to me today as "him". Once asking "How old is he?" and another saying "sir, sir.." It was very funny. But, at the same time, refreshing. It's nice to escape the oppressive claustrophobic sense of femininity. I do have short hair (much shorter than last I saw anybody-- and more of a boy's cut), and am wearing a t-shirt (OBAMA!!!) and boy's trousers. Today was the first day ever that I remember anybody mistaking me for a boy, and then today twice.
Well, B is probably missing his computer by now, so I should probably stop. I wonder if next time I post, if I'm past the date line, the post date will say Monday or Sunday? Hm. Maybe it'll say Monday for me and Sunday for all you people back in time. I like that flying can be a sort of time machine, as we will experience 11 hours but be 32 hours ahead of when we departed.
Okay. I really am going to stop typing now.
11:37 I finally got internet, so am putting this up.
Our flight was delayed. The one to Fiji. THe five of us are sitting in the LAX international terminal, in a circle around a pole that has power plugs on it. It's like a shrine for our family of four laptops.
Being that LAX is not as civilized as EUG or PDX (Oregon is so much better, is it not?), I, as a passenger on an airplane, maybe even an important business person or politician, don't have internet access. So if I happened to be the new ambassador to the Federated States of Micronesia (West Wing reference, sorry) and needed to send an important email to the government telling them that I was delayed, I wouldn't be able to. I guess if I was that important I would have about five blackberries and three assistants flying with me with four blackberries each, but what if I wanted to play internet poker, or check my Twitter? Anyways, instead I'm typing into a text edit file on B's computer. I'll upload it in probably about a week.
As I said, our flight was, is, delayed. Instead of taking off 10:30 pm PST, it is scheduled to take off 12:30 PST. That means that we'll get to Fiji at 7:30 am Monday instead of 5:30. My parents are exhausted, which doesn't help, and it's hot here. I'm used to my 66-degree heated house with good air ventilation, not a 73-degree heated airport without windows that open. That always happens at airports, so I guess I should be used to it. I might as well, being that we're going to an island that will be 80 degrees with 98 percent humidity. It's fun being in the international terminal though, because every announcement they make they make is in about 6 languages. I can understand most of what they say on the loudspeakers in Spanish, but that may be to do with the fact that they're the same announcements that play in English every five minutes in domestic terminals. For your safety, blah de blah, security threat level orange, blah blah blah. Not too difficult vocabulary.
My mom's watching Alias, which I am very jealous of, but we only have one set of headphones. B and I will watch it after she's done. I am so addicted to that show. My aunt sent us a used version of the first season for Christmas, and ever since then I have been thinking about it non-stop.
Two people referred to me today as "him". Once asking "How old is he?" and another saying "sir, sir.." It was very funny. But, at the same time, refreshing. It's nice to escape the oppressive claustrophobic sense of femininity. I do have short hair (much shorter than last I saw anybody-- and more of a boy's cut), and am wearing a t-shirt (OBAMA!!!) and boy's trousers. Today was the first day ever that I remember anybody mistaking me for a boy, and then today twice.
Well, B is probably missing his computer by now, so I should probably stop. I wonder if next time I post, if I'm past the date line, the post date will say Monday or Sunday? Hm. Maybe it'll say Monday for me and Sunday for all you people back in time. I like that flying can be a sort of time machine, as we will experience 11 hours but be 32 hours ahead of when we departed.
Okay. I really am going to stop typing now.
11:37 I finally got internet, so am putting this up.
At the airport (EUG)
I am sitting on the floor of the Eugene airport waiting for the flight. It's surprisingly empty here-- even for Eugene, there aren't many people. Also, the airport gods ("They") are doing something weird with the layout of the seating; a whole side of the hallway from the cafe to the gates is boarded off. We got here at 10 for a 12:20 flight, because They told us to. It actually turned out semi-helpful, and if we were in an airport that wasn't the same size as our neighbor's mansion it would have been maybe even needed.
They think that Brian is a threat. It's amusing. His boarding passes are all printed with "SSSS" in the bottom, which means he is supposed to be frisked at security. He was patted down, his bag put though sniff testers, for about 10 minutes while the rest of us watched with bemused looks of worry.
I should write more, but they just called our flight.
They think that Brian is a threat. It's amusing. His boarding passes are all printed with "SSSS" in the bottom, which means he is supposed to be frisked at security. He was patted down, his bag put though sniff testers, for about 10 minutes while the rest of us watched with bemused looks of worry.
I should write more, but they just called our flight.
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