Taupo: Lake Tour

Hey everyone,
More on Lake Taupo! For the second day of our trip, we decided to see the Māori carvings located nearby. They were done in the 1970's using traditional tools and techniques, and are only viewable by boat (or maybe some kind of jetpack device).
They are quite impressive, and the trip over was pleasant and sunny. We all had fun chatting and drinking copious amounts of complimentary tea in the pseudo-galley/bar downstairs. There was also a pigeon launcher on the back of the boat? I think we might have signed up for the wrong scenic cruise... shotguns and boats with bars ALWAYS mix well (that would also be about as close as I'll ever be to becoming a pirate, which would be sweet).
I was, of course, being my usual annoying self and taking lots of photos of people while they were trying in vain to have an unfettered conversation for a few moments. And true to form, I also decided to muck with said photos by tone-mapping them... HDR post-editing is turning out to be quite addictive for me...

Our cameras and bladders sufficiently filled with photos and tea, respectively, we headed back to shore and made our way to the Champagne Baths a short drive away. I'm going to leave that one for the next post.

Take care until then faithful reader(s?),

--David

Taupo: Skydiving & Huka Falls

Ciao all,

So this is the first installment of our Taupo trip we happened to do on my birthday. We got our rental car the morning of my 21st (which let us get cheaper insurance!) and hit the road for Taupo. On the way I had a second opportunity to stop in Tirau, and got a picture with Alyse with the giant dog. It seemed to really like Alyse.
Onward and Southward, we got to downtown Taupo after 5 hours of driving (it was to be trial by fire for me with the whole driving on the left thing) and checked in to the skydiving office.
It wasn't long before we were suiting up, watching a surprisingly brief safety video while the instructor was talking to us about something else, and hopping into the plane. The plane ride was pretty short, as plane rides go, and best of all we didn't have to sit through the landing! (Landings make me nervous)
I watched as the instructors sitting behind each of us passed around oxygen tubes to each other and started 'sipping' on them. We had opted for the 15,000ft drop, and the air is a little thin up there. I was a little biffed though when we didn't get any... Oxygen, really in any business except maybe coffin making, seems like the type of thing you want the client to have enough of.
Nevertheless, we were all lucid enough to jump out of a plane, so I guess it worked out okay.
Skydiving is, in a word, incredible. Those of you who have done it know you don't really see the ground rushing up at you; it's just really windy for about a minute and then the chute opens. I think I like the chute ride the best, because the instructors let us control it for a bit, tugging hard left or right to go into tight helices. To my surprise, we landed on our feet, and ever since that point I've been wanting to go again.
After we landed we got to see our photos, most of which I posted above. The thing I like most about them is seeing my shoes... looking at their irrelevance there reminds me of how disconnected you are from the earth at that point, and how rare that is.

I know it's a little anticlimactic, but I also want to throw in the rest of the day in this post, and I like the photos.
After skydiving, still beset with adrenaline and awe, we drove to Huka Falls outside town.



They were quite impressive, and it was a fun way to cool down a bit after the craziness of the morning. Alyse, Kelly, and I hung out in the parking lot while the rest of the group did a short hike. Since I had been doing all the driving Alyse and Kelly took turns driving around in circles while I took pictures set to a slow shutter speed to make our amazingly bad ass minivan look faster.

Altogether, a pretty wacky day, not soon to be forgotten.

Okay, that should do it for today.

See y'all later!

--David

Horses!

Kia Ora all!

Phew! Alyse and I just got back from the South Island (now officially recognized by its Māori name, Te Wai Pounamu, as well), and I have to study for a final I have tomorrow after this.
Ergo, short post this time.
While we were on the Coromandel, we found a ranch that did horse riding tours. We were picked up at our hostel, drove over to the ranch, and saddled up. It was an interesting challenge to take pictures with my SLR while trying to steer the horse.... some of the photos are a little shaky as a result and didn't make it to the internet. The process of taking pictures was made even more difficult by my horse's propensity to bite the butt of the horse in front of it – I had very little time to see it coming each time, and Alyse's horse was a little irked by the end of the ride.
The scenery was, of course, spectacular. I tried to get a few shots that would do justice to the views we had and of all the various farm animals we passed (you'll note the Volkswagon-sized hogs in the background of a couple).
It looked very near rain all day, but except for a couple drops the weather was kind enough to hold off its downpour (there was definitely a downpour) until we got back inside the hostel.
Horses are always fun, so it made for a pretty awesome day. Coromandel remains one of the prettier places I've been.

Okay, that's it for now.

Cheers!

--David

Hotwater Beach & Cathedral Cove

Hey Everyone!

So for this trip Alyse, some friends, and I took a coach out to Coromandel Peninsula, about 3 hours East of Auckland. The next few posts will highlight our time there; I took a bunch of pics so I figured I should separate them.
We stopped off at Hotwater beach on the way, aptly named for the springs that gurgle up hot water on the beach (at low tide). As the pictures show, it was a bit crowded, this beach being an increasingly popular tourist destination. With only a few minutes before the bus headed out again, I just snapped a few pictures.
Our next stop was a beach nearby, where we hopped on a dinghy that took us all around the various coves and caves. It's not readily evident from the photos, but we were flying around the rocks, making photography a somewhat haphazard affair (also true on account of the large body of water surrounding my treasured, not waterproof, camera).
Composing a nice shot was less a matter of actually thinking about composition / subject / timing and more about pointing the camera in the general direction of something moderately interesting, taking lots of wide-angle pictures (the better to crop / tilt later), and praying at least one of them wouldn't have the side of the boat covering everything except sky.
Most pictures did not survive the iPhoto chopping block.
After that we hopped back on the coach, and got to stop by a winery for a free tasting since the coach driver knew the owner. New Zealand wines, by and large, leave something to be desired (it's very moist here). They did have a mean feijoa liquer, but it was a bit out of my price range, and I haven't really figured out what sort of food one has with a liquer (if any)... they seem like such strange spirits.

Anywho, more to continue next time!

--David

PS: I just thought I should throw in this link to a wikipedia article about moas. They are so intense! Since the Māori got rid of them, the islands have been pretty much completely devoid of any animals threatening to humans (except the "West Island", which is chock full of scary critters).

Party Like it's 1812

Tēnā Koutou!
(Hello, everyone!)

For my next installment of memories and adventures I thought I'd share Alyse and my visit to the Auckland Domain Park (where, incidentally, Alyse is hanging out today with some friends). We heard about this event a few days after arriving here, and knew right away it was something we would enjoy: a classical music concert / picnic featuring a full symphonic rendition of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture set to fireworks. Upon arrival an hour or so before the show was to start, we found a huge crowd gathered, setting up blankets and baskets of food.

We had prepared some sandwiches and a fruit salad, which went nicely with a bottle of terrible Australian chardonnay we picked up on the way out there. That, along with a bag of chips and some ice cream we bought from some UNICEF volunteers, made for a feast of kings as we sat and watched the show.

I had fun futzing with my camera in the retreating light (most of the photos I took were too smeary to post). We didn't know what other songs were to be performed there, so we had fun being surprised at each successive change of performers. We stood and hummed as the Kiwis sang (and swayed to beat) to Pomp and Circumstance, belted out with the best of them to a soloist singing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, danced to a waltz (I forget the name), and finally prepared ourselves for the feature event.

Not only were there fireworks during the finale, but as the pictures show there was a LASER SHOW, and HOWITZERS from the New Zealand Army! This being the first time I heard the 1812 live, the artillery reports going off in time made for quite a spectacle. Without getting too political, I must say I think the Kiwis have it right in using their siege engines for concerts at public parks rather than their intended purpose.

Altogether an awesome evening, which led to some fun pictures for teh interwebs [sic], too. Hope all of you are doing alright back home! If anyone's actually reading this, comments are totally appreciated!

Until next time,

David

Around Auckland

Hey Everyone,
Here's a few pictures of my flat and some that I took when I first got to Auckland, and some that I took at night just a few days ago. Again, I decided to have some fun trying to spiff them up in HDR... I put the before & afters adjacent to each other.
I'm really enjoying this city. When I first got here I still haden't gotten my bag back -- the airline told me that it was now lost. But thanks to the numerous "Op-shops" (2nd hand stores) I was able to get a bunch of clothes for relatively cheap. Most of these are around the harbor (harbour), which is at the end of the main street, called Queen St.
My apartment is just across the street from AUT (where I'm going), which is just across the street from University of Auckland (where Alyse is going); the three line up parallel to and about a block away from Queen St. It's all terribly convenient -- I walk everywhere I need to go, but I probably walk more in LA between parking spaces and destinations.
Kiwis like to rag on Auckland for being overdeveloped, but by my standards it has quite a bit of parkland, clean streets, and for a city of 1.4 million is pretty quiet. Oh yeah-- Auckland has 1.4 million people. there are 4.2 million people in New Zealand. That's 1/3 of the population!
Hmmm... not too much of a cohesive story here... I think I'll put in a better one next time.

Cheers!

David

Luging & Abseiling

Monday, 2/16

After our Agrodome experience, still smelling a bit like sheep, our orientation group split up to either go zorbing or luging (can't really loose with those options). Zorbing, which involves rolling down a hill in a double-hulled plastic bubble filled with soapy water, involves swimming attire, which I soon found I was lacking at the time.
I realized around lunchtime that the only blue and green Kelty internal frame backpack, the one with the straps tucked in exactly the way I like to when checking it on a plane, currently sitting in the luggage compartment of our tour bus, was in fact not my blue and green Kelty internal frame backpack with its straps tucked in exactly the way I like to. I had grabbed someone else's bag at the airport.
This discovery hit me in waves.
"How Odd," I thought to myself, "My sandals aren't in the outer mesh pockets. I hope they didn't fall out!" A slight sinking feeling enveloped my stomach.
"Did I remember to put a luggage tag on this? I could have sworn I did." A slightly stronger sinking feeling, this time creeping its way up my esophagus.
"Oh bloody hell," Upon opening the pocket where I knew my trunks should reside, I found socks and a long sleeved t-shirt.
I thought about doing a quick inventory of the bag, running some quick arithmetic in my head, and deciding if it would be monetarily advantageous to not call the airline. But my conscience got the better of me, plus I was afraid of finding weird / illegal contents in there, so I didn't open it up any more. I got some help from the Australearn coordinators and we got the bag back to the Rotorua airport within the hour.
Happily I had happened to pack some clothes in my carry-on bag, and there were laundry facilities at the hostel, so I could wait it out till I got my bag back from the airline.
So, back to luging. After arriving, we rode up a gondola with a great view of Lake Rotorua, and hopped into our luges that would take us around halfway back down. The luges were not like luges in the olympics. They looked something like motor-less go-karts, with handle bars one could pull back to apply brake pads against the road. I tried each of three concrete tracks available, the last and hardest of which actually had a point where you could catch air!
At one point I decided to try jury rigging my camera to get some action shots. I had it point out from my chest by wrapping my strap around my shoulder and holding an IR shutter remote in my hand as I held on to the handlebars. Sadly, I sort of got the worst of two worlds -- I was unable to get any pictures from it, and holding the remote lead to some close calls with the sides of the downhill track.
Before we left, a few in the group decided to try a giant bungee swing as well, so I snapped a few pictures of them and posted them just for good measure. Afterward we headed back to Kiwipaka to relax and swap stories with the zorbers.

Tuesday, 2/17

The next morning, we all (groggily) climbed onto the tour buses and headed off to Waitomo for some spelunking. Spelunking, which I observed on the drive over sounds more like an onomatopoeia for sneezing underwater, is just a fancy word for exploring caves, and also remains one of my favorite nature-related things to do.
On went the wetsuits, gumboots (rain boots), and flashlight helmets. We had a quick demo on how to clip on / off the ropes, then tramped down into the abyss. The cave, called Haggas Honking Holes (at least by the company we went with), offered quite a bit of climbing and crawling. The whole thing was (happily) much more rigorous than I thought it would be, and involved a few different abseils. On one such abseil we went down a waterfall (nothing like a couple liters/second of icy mineral water splashing your face to wake you up!). In the photo of me I've still got somewhere around 10 meters of nothing below me. The cave took us in a long loop, and was a total blast. After we got out we were served copious amounts of pizza that we quickly finished off.
We got back to the hostel, relaxed, and started getting ready for our drive up to Auckland.

Okay, that's it for this entry.
Happy Easter / Passover / Spring equinox everyone!

--David

A visit to Agrodome

Sorry for taking so long on this post! It's so easy to get caught up with things here.... I'll try to post more often in the future.
When we got to Auckland International, there were a few clumps of us that had established we were in Australearn together. We wandered, bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived, through an absurdly long customs line, an extensive slew of "bio-security" apparatuses, into the general entrance of the airport. I cannot tell you what a relief it was to find Australearn people, who ushered us over to a couple of stagecoach buses that would take us down to Rotorua.
After a relaxing night at Kiwipaka, our hostel in Rotorua (first two pictures in this album), we were ready for a trip to Agrodome. We had a buffet breakfast at the hostel, then hopped on the buses.
Agrodome is a sort of zoo-esque place meant to showcase rural kiwiana. They apparently have tours of the grounds (tractors & wagons), but we didn't have a lot of time to explore there. Shortly after arriving we gathered into a large auditorium for a show dedicated almost entirely to -- you guessed it -- sheep!
Before it started we had a chance to mingle with the ewes and rams chilling along the sides of the room (yes, that is a live ram smiling for the picture behind me).
The MC for the show was VERY energetic, introducing each type of sheep by having it run up the stage to its appropriate spot. Each place had a little dish of sheep food ready for them, but sometimes the sheep would get distracted on the way up the ramp and start munching on a dish only halfway up; a little tug on their collar got them the rest of the way up.
We got to see a sheep sheared, which is best told in the pictures... the sheep in question didn't seem to mind very much... she just sort of went along with it, but did seem fairly happy to be finished.
I think my favorite part of the show was when they brought out the sheep dogs (my dog Gully would LOVE it there). At first they were just barking at the sheep, but then started jumping up and running along the tops of them. At one point the Merino ram (whose name I recognized because REI socks are made from New Zealand Merino wool) stared down the dog, and it took him a while to hop past... though pretty docile creatures, I think even sheep can get annoyed at a certain point.
They brought out cows to be milked and lambs to be fed by audience members, and finished the show outside with a sheep herding demonstration. This was impressive -- the only things the guy would yell was "left" and "right"; the dogs / sheep figured out the rest.
Later that afternoon we went luging and zorbing... more explanation on that next post.

Cheers,

David

Beginnings...

Kia Ora and Hello all!

First, I must apologize for the lateness of this post. I realize that three weeks is a long time to go without an update. So despite the lag in time, I will begin at the beginning and go “step by step by step.”
My flight here was actually quite pleasant. They had a wide variety of entertainment on individual tv consoles and I was actually able to sleep on the plane (being aided by my very comfy travel blanket). After arrival, I was able to quickly gather up my bags and head through customs. Once through, I was met by the IFSA-Butler staff and the whole IFSA group was loaded on to a bus and taken to the Shakespear (yes, that is the spelling) National Park in Whangaraparaoa (wh is pronounced as an f in Maori).
At the park, we stayed in a dormitory-style lodge that was quite beautiful, and had a great view of the surrounding countryside. On the first day, even though we had arrived at 6am, the councilors did not let us rest. They took us on a long hike through the pouring rain and fields of cows, pigs, and (of course) sheep. The entire four-day orientation was exhausting but fun. The councilors alternated activities such as rugby, cricket, kayaking, park-wide scavenger hunts and mountain boarding with information sessions, quizzes on New Zealand, and group projects.
After three days at Whangaraparaoa we traveled southward, through Auckland, to a sacred Maori marae, or meeting grounds/temple. On the way we stopped at Mt. Cook, one of Auckland’s tallest inactive volcanoes (apparently there is a volcanic eruption in Auckland every 300 years… and the last one was 300 years ago… eee!). Staying at the marae was an amazing experience. To be accepted on to the marae you must go through a formal greeting process. You are called on to the marae (which specifically refers to the courtyard) by a specially designated woman. Your entire group must enter together and proceed slowly, with the women in front. Once seated outside the temple, two men from each group, the tangata whenua or hosts and the manuhiri or guests, give long speeches of welcome. This is followed by a hongi, the traditional Maori greeting where two people press together the nose and the forehead. Our dinner of meat and potatoes was prepared in the traditional Polynesian method of cooking it underground, which the Maori call a hauni. After dinner, a regional Maori dance group came to perform for us. They danced stick dances, weapon dances, the poi (performed by woman who swing and tap a white ball on a string), and the haka (the Maori war dance performed by men). They even had some the men from IFSA-Butler join in the haka! (though I must say that they were much less intimidating than the Maori dancers). That night we slept in the tupuna, or sacred temple. The red carvings on the outside of the temple represent the ancestors of that particular tribe, or iwi, of Maori.
The next morning we thanked our gracious hosts drove to a nearby beach to relax and cool off our feet, before finally heading into Auckland.

...to be continued...

Much love,

Alyse

Made it to Auckland!

Hello World!
I'll start off this little blog by saying I'm rather fond of the Southern Hemisphere. I have yet to observe water vortexing clockwise rather than counter-clockwise (or "anti-clockwise"); my experiences in Auckland have made other differences in orbit more relevant.
For example, when crossing a traffic circle, cars are moving clockwise, so they are therefore coming from the right. As for normal roads, I tell myself drivers are going to be on the left side, so I look to the right first, but I cannot for the life of me shake my intrensic desire to look left as well. Whenever I cross the street I look like I'm watching a freakishly fast tennis match.
Getting here was fairly uneventful. I crossed the international date line, which was exciting because I hadn't done it before, but at the end of the day it just brought about the end of the day faster than usual. I'm pleased that I was able to shorten my February by about 21 hours this year, which is already an appropriately abridged month, given its deppresing weather and semi-silent 'r'.
Nothing much to say about the photos for this post... I was just getting back my "shutter legs" and trying out some panning shots. I snapped a few while we were losing our minds of boredom at the airport, a few on the bus, and then a few in Tirau (where they apparently have a fascination of making large animals out of corrugated steel). We (Autralearn students) went straight to Rotorua for orientation the day we arrived, but I'm going to post those seperately since I'm working out the logistics of blogging and don't want to deal with lots of files at once.

That's it for now,
Cheers!


--David