Since moving to Queenstown, I've been pretty much horrible at posting. Not just posting interesting things...just posting anything at all. So here's my feeble attempt at a whirlwind summary of what I've been doing.
I've been working full time at the bar. It's been a good experience and I've learned a lot of things and gained a whole lot of exposure to a totally new industry. But it has its downsides as well. For example, it's understood that on the job, I'll have to deal with rude and arrogant drunks. But Queenstown is a small place, and everybody thinks they're "somebody" or that they know "somebody" and that it's ok to treat workers in the hospitality industry like dirt. etc etc etc... But that's all the complaining I'm going to do...I'm leaving town in a month and moving onto better things.
I took a bit of time off from work to tour the south island, and hit a fair amount of cities and got to do a bunch of cool things. My trip began with an 8 hour bus ride to Christchurch, where I met up with Andy, who was working at a real fancy restaurant there. Christchurch is a nice city, with a nice river, lots of parks, and cool public art. I was only there for a night, but there was a street performers festival with some of the best street performers in the world. I had no idea that people were actually that into street performing...but apparently it's kind of a big deal.
From Christchurch I continued onto Kaikoura, a small township on the East coast of the island. Kaikoura is famous for its dolphin and whale populations - the most popular activity is taking a boat out to find a pod of dolphins to swim with. But I was more interested in the "fly a plane" option... a sign that I saw along a airstrip as we drove into town. After checking into the hostel, I made my way out to the runway to investigate. A five minute lesson later, I was strapping myself into the cockpit of a two seater Cessna. The pilot/teacher handled the takeoff, and once we had climbed to about 1000 feet, handed the controls over to me. (!). I started out just trying to keep the plane level...much more of a challenge than it sounds because the high winds that day pushed the tiny plane around without any problem. Tried a few complicated maneuvers, like...turning right...and turning left. Turns out that flying a plane is hard! But it was fun...something I'd like to do again.
After Kaikoura we continued up the coast and around the top of the island to Abel Tasman national park. Abel Tasman was a Dutch explorer - the first European to set sight on New Zealand. As the story goes, he came up to the islands and sent a boat ashore to investigate. His boat was attacked by Maori (New Zealand natives), and four of his men were killed and eaten. So Mr. Tasman turned around and hightailed it out of there. I guess that if he had landed and somehow managed to peacefully interact with the Maori, New Zealand might today be a Dutch speaking country. Anyways, Abel Tasman is a huge national park with amazing coastline named for this explorer guy who pansied out when his men got eaten. I spent two nights there and spent the day sailing along the coast seeing lots of small and secluded beaches. The water was clear and pretty...but plenty cold
After getting devoured by the abundant numbers of sandflies (like mosquitoes but smaller and with an itchier bite) in Abel Tasman, the bus took us down the west coast to Barrytown. Nicknamed "Barry-no-town," this town with a population of 40 people doesn't have a lot going on. But it is near these really cool rock formations called the pancake rocks...the pictures do a pretty good job of explaining why.
Next up was Franz Josef. Franz Josef is a tiny town that exists primarily to bring people to the Franz Josef glacier. The Franz Josef glacier is special because it's one of only 3 glaciers in the world that descends down through a temperate rainforest. The other two are Fox glacier - about 5 miles away - and some random glacier in Argentina. So unless you happen to be Argentinian (like my two roommates), hiking on the glacier is a pretty unique experience (they were unimpressed). The glacier is amazing...unlike anything I'd ever been on before. The pictures don't do justice to the enormity of the thing. It's HUGE. And beautiful. Once you get up past the first area (where it just looks like dirty snow) and into the crevasses, it's a gorgeous deep blue color. (NOTE If you don't care about science skip the rest of this paragraph). When I asked about why the ice was this color, I got some answer about "diffraction" but realized the guide was actually talking about "refraction." But then that answer didn't make any sense because any refraction of the light that occurs when it enters the ice should be exactly negated when it leaves the ice. Back at the visitor center, I was told that it's due to Rayleigh scattering (where light is scattered by particles much smaller than its wavelength), the same reason for why the sky is blue. But apparently that's also incorrect, as demonstrated by a couple of chemists at Dartmouth, and that it's due to an overtone of a -OH stretch in water in the red part of the visible spectrum. So now you know.
After Franz Josef I had a short stay in Makarora, a nature preserve. Not much to comment on here since I didn't really do anything other than hang out and read, but I did go swimming in the blue pools near Haast Pass. Kiwis are all about naming things as they see them, and these pools were indeed quite blue. And quite freezing. Generated by glacial melt, I stayed in for about 2 minutes before it became hard to breathe.
That about wrapped up my trip on the South island, so I'm back in Queenstown now, and I promise that I'll try to be better about putting things up with a little bit more regularity. That's all for now, folks!
