Wow. Bye New Zealand!

My bags are packed. My bank account is closed. My bike's been sold off to a happy new Kiwi home. And I saw my last takahe.

This evening I'm flying from Wellington to Auckland. Then I have a quick 6500 miles to California, a teeny 9-hour layover in LA (where hopefully my Los Angeleno friend Alyssa will take me to the beach and feed me ice cream), and then another cool six hour flight across the country back to Pittsburgh, land of french fry salads.

I've already started my pre-travel routine: stress-eating, crying, drinking bad wine, and not sleeping. It's a very centering process for multi-day airport expeditions.

Exams are finally over (how many people forgot I was in school? I know I did. And then I had to take two exams over the weekend). All the exchange students are running out of time on their visas, and people are trickling away. We all tried to make our last week in New Zealand a good one, savoring our last cups of coffee and visiting zoos. But mostly it's been a week full of loaded goodbyes and repetitive conversations about flight schedules and airline food.

Like everyone else, I'm struggling to create significance with my last day (hence the goofy bird in the header photo instead of a dramatic Wellington sunset). Don't get me wrong - I've absolutely loved my time here. I've learned a lot, met heaps of amazing people, and seen some spectacular landscapes. It's been a wonderful break from reality. But my real life is still hanging suspended in the USA. Now I'm ready to start it again - to reconnect with my friends and family, do some real schoolwork, finish off my degree, and get serious about running again. I won't be cutting ties with New Zealand. I know I'm going to miss it as soon as I get home, so I'm definitely coming back here in the future. But right now I've got some unfinished business in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

So that's all I've got for now.

Peace out friends!




PS - Happy America Day! You should probably all go see the new Spiderman, because what's more patriotic than a cute guy in a red, white, and blue bodysuit? But really, it's awesome.

far north

New Zealand's North Island is easily the most underrated place I've ever been. Tour books, DOC advertisements, and locals all tell you that everything worth seeing is in the south. They say the North Island is full of sheep, farmers, and Auckland. Down south, the hills are bigger, the roads are emptier, and there are more people shouting at you to go Bungy jumping. Thanks to all the hype, lots of southern towns have a hyper-developed tourist infrastructure. Buildings and street signs are Aspen-style rustic-plastic. 

The towns up north (besides the cities) are tiny and dingy; the only people there during the off-season are locals and the occasional German traveler. But the scenery is on par with anything in the south. 

On my first day, I took a bus tour from Paihia up to Cape Reinga, NZ's northernmost point - where the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea collide. It was cold and rainy, the drive took 11 hours, and I hate bus tours. Still, our driver tried his best to make it bearable, and I got some nice moody lighthouse photos.

Getting to Raglan the next day was a relief. 

I went surfing, drank some coffee, and hung out on the beach with a puppy. At night I slept at the Raglan Backpackers, one of the nicest hostels I've seen yet in NZ (free surf lessons, a hot tub, pizza night, and weekly massage classes? It doesn't get better than that). I could've easily stayed in Ragland for a week, but my bus ticket called me over to the Coromandel. 

In Coromandel Town, I met some Germans who'd used their working-holiday visas to pack Kiwi fruit in Tauranga. They were a little cracked from staring at fruit for two months, but they were great company. I invited myself to drive around the Coromandel Peninsula with them. The hairpin turns on the one-lane gravel roads were terrifying, but the scenery was breathtaking. 

I spent my last day on the bus back to Wellington, flipping through the hundreds of pictures I'd taken over the week and wondering why I didn't take this trip earlier. 

Now I've got just two and a half more weeks left in New Zealand... sigh.

5 more weeks.

The past couple weeks haven't been terribly eventful. 

I've been taking walks by the waterfront, watching sunsets and hanging out at hipster cafés. I met some sweet new Kiwi friends who told me I stick out like an American flag in my running shoes and purple fleece jacket. I bought a pair of cute boots so people will stop staring at me.

I finally got around to taking pictures of these sweet city sculptures.

And I've put all my shorts back into my suitcase for storage. They say it's getting on to be winter here. There's a nip in the air and my flat doesn't have central heating. But check out that sunshine. This is the most pleasant transition into winter I've ever seen.

I just realized a couple days ago that my semester is almost over. We only have two more weeks of class until exams start. I'm having a hard time coming to terms with that. After a couple months, we're just settling in, making friends, finding our favorite restaurants. And then we're yanked away back to the States. It's such a conflicting experience. First Wellington felt foreign, all the way across the world from my home. I was homesick, thrilled, and lost. Then I got used to it and life got dull. I scampered down to the South Island and found myself missing the city's bays and cafés. When I came back Wellington felt like home.

Soon it won't be home anymore. In just five weeks I'll be on a plane back to Pennsylvania. I'll be displaced again, to a new semester and a new house in Ohio. After that I'll be transient again, looking for a place to live after college to start a real life with bills to pay and no essays to write.

Thank goodness for study abroad. None of that seems scary anymore. I could live anywhere and do whatever I want, as long as I have some money for food.

But I am going to miss Wellington quite a lot.

(This weekend I'm headed to a yoga retreat in Otaki! We'll be cooking vegan food and chanting a whole bunch. I hope there's lots of incense.)

part 4: Kepler Track

After Queenstown Lauren and I caught a bus further south to Te Anau, a little town at the edge of Fiordland National Park. We heaved our food-laden packs onto our backs. Then we set off into the wild. Sort of.

The Kepler is one of NZ's Great Walks - a manicured 40-mile trail up a mountain, along the ridge, and down through the bush. The trail is perfectly clear, and the alpine section even has stairs and handrails. The Department of Conservation offers 3 huts along the way with running water, mattresses, and gas stoves. It's not exactly roughing it.

We'd booked all the huts a few months in advance. But soon we realized that we probably could have done the whole track in three days instead of four. Each day we started at 9:00 and reached the next hut at around 2:00 with plenty of time to sit around and scratch our sandfly bites.

Still. That's not to say that the experience wasn't astoundingly beautiful.

We had amazing weather at the first hut, which sits up above the town of Te Anau.

We did some casual caving that night.

At this point, we realized we should've packed matches and hiking-friendly food. The fresh carrots and canned tuna seemed like such a good idea at the beginning. But they turned out to be really heavy and smelly. Thankfully our packs got lighter as we got down to eating. And there were lots of friendly Germans on the trail who were willing to share their matches.

We had a fantastic sunrise view the next morning. I took at least twenty thousand pictures of it.

Then we headed off to walk the alpine section in mystical fog.

I wore those compression tights for four days. Not a good idea.

The next two days were an easy downhill walk through the bush back to town.

The last hut was on the side of another ridiculously lovely NZ lake, where we attempted to wash some grime off ourselves.

And the next day we stumbled back into the civilized world (aka: where you can buy cake).

It was a pretty good time. 

Part 3: Queenstown

When you talk to other tourists in NZ, Queenstown is like a point on a pilgrimage road - some kind of Holy Land of outdoor activity that might hold Sir Edmund Hilary's ashes inside a quad helmet. Everyone's going to Queenstown. Or they're on their way home, and they're broke. 

Considering the hype, I was pleasantly surprised at how small it was. Downtown Queenstown is a half-mile grid of a few busy streets packed with cafés and outdoor shops snuggled up against sapphire-blue Lake Wakitipu. Sailboats and jetboats cavort around the harbor. There's a brick walkway full of street performers along the lakeside where tourists in hiking packs wander around with ice cream cones. At the edge of town there's a botanical garden on the peninsula with a limestone walking path that extends out to the airport. People are relaxed and smiling - even the tourist-harassed café workers and bike shop guys. It felt like a Colorado ski resort town without as many pretentious Americans. 

Gold and green mountains jut up around the city. Five minutes from downtown there's a network of pristine hiking trails so fantastic it's stupid (you can even get to the famous Routeburn track). Most of the hiking trails are mountain-bike-friendly, there's a freeride park hidden in the woods east of town, and a gondola that takes a bunch of smelly downhillers to the top of a big hill so they can show off their baggy shorts to tourists. Paragliders jump off the top of the gondola hill and float into town.

A couple hours' drive away are historic Arrowtown, Lake Wanaka, Mount Aspiring, and Fiordland National Park - home to some of New Zealand's most stunning scenery and awesome, accessible hiking.

I was smitten.

Lauren and I spent four days hanging there out to recover from the bus trip. We did a lot of eating. On the first day, we met up with our program advisor Jane - a Queenstown native - at a fantastic ice cream place on the water. We bought groceries at the supermarket and luxuriated in being able to use the hostel fridge. We sampled a more few cafés, went on a bar tour, and ate at the famous Fergburger.

Trevor and Lauren had something called the "Mr. Big Stuff" - a half pound of beef with bacon and cheese. My single-patty brie cheeseburger and its gluten free bun looked a little malnourished in comparison. 

I hadn't had a good burger in New Zealand. Their beef tends to taste a bit different, maybe because NZ cows eat cleaner grass. But I can attest that those burgers were pretty damn awesome. I also realize now that getting a diet Coke with a burger the size of my head was a pretty dumb idea. 

To offset all the eating and alcohol consumption, we walked up the hill by the gondola and watched grown men giggle to themselves on the luge track. 

I also ran around town every day. One of my favorite runs was the Queenstown Hill Time Track. 

It starts outside of town close to the hostel where we stayed. The track switches back and forth through the pines and opens up on a high point where the trees and hills cancel out the noises of the town.   A couple vagrant Merinos had been grazing in the grass when I ran up, but they'd moved on when Lauren and I hiked up later to take pictures. 

Criminy. This place is awesome. 

In retrospect we didn't take advantage of Queenstown. We didn't go Bungy jumping, skydiving, canyoning, fish-feeding, zoo visiting, jetboating, golfing, horseback riding, whitewater rafting, or kayaking (I can do those for free at home). I never got around to doing any bike riding since nobody else was keen on going with me. 

But that's okay with me. I didn't end up broke, and Lauren and I were well-rested and well-fed on the fifth day when we got up at 5:30 to start our long walk on the Kepler Track. 

I do plan to go back to Queenstown sometime, provided it's not too snowy in June. In that case, maybe I'll rent some skis. 

Part 2: not the most efficient mode of travel

At 8:04 the next morning, Lauren and I were sitting on our backpacks in front of the Nelson Youth Hostel and sweating. It was hot, I was wearing cotton, and the bus was late. Did we miss it? Surely we would've seen a huge blue bus go roaring past. We'd never get to Queenstown at this rate.

With a mechanical roar, the bus rounded the corner and ground to a stop in front of us. We shoved our bags into the boot underneath and the driver (a wry, silver-haired guy named Alan who lives on a house boat when he's not driving tourists around the country) ticked off our names on a chart. The bus was half-full of sleepy-looking people. There were two of our friends from Arcadia were there, a few Germans, some British guys and a girl, and one lady from Brazil. We flopped into a pair of seats next to some Swedish girls. I was still exhausted. A four-hour bus ride sounded nice. The bus lurched forward and we were on the road.

I shut my eyes and leaned against the window.

"So today we're on our way to Greymouth," said Alan. "If you want to book your hostels you can do it now. Lovely city, Greymouth. We'll be doing a tour at Monteith's Brewery if you'd like to sign up."

The bus got quiet. I shut my eyes again.

"Greymouth also offeres quad biking and ATV rides, if you're into that kind of thing. I'll send around a clipboard and you can tick your names off for whichever activity you'd like to do."

Silence. Naptime.

"And on the way there, we'll be going over this little hill called the Hope Saddle. Let's hope the bus makes it. After that we'll stop for some photos at the Punakaiki Pancake Rocks."

In half an hour we stopped for coffee at a café next to a farm. I got a cup of tea and watched a chicken scratch around by the bus tires. It was 8:30. I figured we'd get to Greymouth by 1:30 or 2 at the latest. We packed back onto the bus.

In a few minutes my stomach started to churn and cramp. Oh hell. I'd eaten something wrong. Was there wheat in that Chinese food I'd eaten the night before? Probably. I prayed we'd get to Graymouth fast. I tried not to think about killing myself while gluten knives were stabbing my stomach. I was on vacation in New Zealand. I should be loving it.

As we wound our way South down the coast and into the hills, we stopped more and more. We stopped for pictures at Cape Foulwind. We stopped for a walk through the bush. We stopped at the Pancake Rocks. We walked through the bush again. We looked at beaches. Between each stop, Alan would interrupt my nap with a fun fact about opossum traps or New Zealand weather. After a couple hours, I gave up on sleep and talked to the Swedish girls about skydiving.

We got to Greymouth at 4:00. I staggered off the bus and we checked into a hostel called Noah's Ark. I got the monkey room. Good lord, you've got to be kidding me.

I had to get out of there. I attempted a run around the town, which consisted of a few houses and a supermarket scattered around a train station. I limped back into the hostel half an hour later, defeated and clutching my stomach. I flopped onto my bed. A stuffed gorilla was staring at me from the mantel. It was getting really hard to keep up my love affair with New Zealand.

The brewery tour was cancelled that night, so we had a beer tasting and a nice dinner at a sports bar full of senior citizens. It wasn't a bad deal, even though I couldn't eat the bread or drink the beer.

The trip picked up steam after that night. My cramps faded each day as the gluten crawled through my system. As we headed further South, the roads got thinner and windier. The landscape turned rugged, wild, and colorful. I started loving the photo stops. I forced myself out of bed each morning to go for a run at sunrise before the bus pulled away for the day at 8:00.

We stopped in a few old mining towns along the way. Some of us tried to relax, but we had to get back on the bus after ten minutes or so.

We spent one night in Franz Josef and walked around on a sea-level glacier.

There wasn't much to do in Franz Josef. There were a couple bars, a few hiking trails, and a supermarket. It was like Ohiopyle if the Yough River were replaced with a big hunk of ice. But they did have a pretty sweet sunrise.

Then we made our way to Wanaka with ample photo stops and lots of New Zealand trivia in between. We said a final farewell to the coast line, saw some impossibly blue rivers, and got shouldered out of the way by excitable Asian tourists.

We got to Wanaka around 4:00. I went for a run on the lakeside hung out while some German hippies played the guitar on the sand.

Just like in Nelson, I wished we'd had more time to chill in Wanaka. There were lots of cute cafés and shops in town, and I heard that there was some great hiking and mountain biking just outside of town. But we were getting antsy and sick of being in transit, so we decided to truck on to Queenstown as fast as possible.

The next day's drive was astounding. Our first morning stop was at a bridge over a river.

Lauren wanted to throw herself off. I tried to take a video but failed at using the camera and got this sweet shot instead.

Jesus, what good form.

We stopped over in Arrowtown, another 1900's mining town with lots of pretty trees and cafés.

Then it was a quick shot down to Queenstown.

We said farewell to Alan, hefted our backpacks, and set off to check into a hostel for four blisfully bus-free days.

Thank goodness. The bus was nice, but being tied to a bus schedule is kind of stressful. And we had to be around a whole lot of people all the time. I'd much rather travel by car with one or two other people and a loose itinerary.