Eating the best ice cream I've ever had while I write this...

Well, we continue.

The ferry dropped us off in Picton and a) it felt like a carribbean island airport; and b) a man from rent-a-dent (from now on RaD) was standing with a sign that read 'genevieve joy'. O RaD! How pleasently surprised we were!! Except for then the man gave us the car and walked away forgetting to leave us with the keys. O RaD! You were so close but then such an epic failure. The good news was, firstly that we were able to run after the man, locate him as he was driving away in another car, and get the keys. And secondly, our new car is SO much classier than the first one. Our North island car was a 1994 Nissan Bluebird who was a girl and light blue and we named her Belle (thanks to Wayne the RaD man in Auckland who suggested that name. Random? Yes.). Our South island car is also a Nissan. But it's from 1996 (!) and is a Sunny and is white. Sunny is his name, obviously and he has fancy things like: automatic windows, automatic locking abilities, a trunk lock, a stereo that works, oh and he doesn't feel like he's gonna literally fall apart at the slightest bump, and also he doesn't make racketty noises from the accelerator (!?? I just met 'er!!). So basically all in all: Sunny doesn't suck-- tho we do need to give him lots of encouragement when going up hills of any size because he doesn't like the incline since he can't seem to switch gears very quickly. But comparatively...he's great!

Well. We drove straight southeast to Blenheim to do a bit of recon on where i'll be working at the end of the month. The town feels cute and managable; saw the house I'll be living in, etc. Felt a bit stalkery of me but hey, i wanted to know.

The next few days saw us driving the whole eastern coast of the south island. From Blenheim we went to Kaikoura, a tiny strip of a town on the water with awesome mountains, epic scenery, some funky live music, a hostel playing a late night movie, and a stand selling mean fish and chips for cheap!

Next we drove up and around and all the way zigzagging past Christchurch, through the rain over the mountain pass and into the tiny town of Akoroa--which is the first French settlement in NZ and has street names like Rue Bulgerie. There we really went all out: staying in a hostel with sheets, out to an italian movie with a bottle of wine, dinner out! All would have been perfect except for when we got mixed up and didn't pay for the movie and almost had the NZ cops after us! But we are safe now. The next day we drove further south-- after a mad hunt for the Cookie Time factory (a cookie here in nz) with no luck, we ended up camping in a small town where we watched penguines waddle on shore after dark, cooked a dinner on our car hood using the camping stove, and found an abandoned little trampoline that all made for a great evening.

These days of constant travel were great, if not tiring as well. There's a lot of car hood cooking, tent sleeping, and makeshift plans. And that's all part of traveling, especially since we have a car and not too much of a plan so we end up planning a lot the day before we do things. Again, this is liberating and tiring at the same time. Sometimes it's awesome to be meeting new people every day, and other times it's just nice to curl up with a bottle of wine and friends, and have sheets and a shower!

But I digress perfectly. We left that next morning for Dunedin where we couchsurfed for 2 nights, explored the town and tried to make a night out on the town out of a dead Monday evening. This failed and ended in ice cream and NZ TV shows. Turns out NYC really is one of the only places you can go out any night of the week.

After all these towns and driving it felt really dire that we get some serious nature-- and nature is what we got! We happily packed our backpacks to the gills and headed out on a 3 day hike along the Milford track.

Milford is the most popular track in the country and actually you have to book your hike with the DOC and space fills up nearly a year in advance. How then did we do it?? Turns out, while they say you must hike the track and stay in these huts along the way, turns out you're allowed to camp aslong as your site is 500 meters off the track. The issue is this: most of the track is lined with this forest or, more challenging, it's in the valley of mountains, which means that there are only a few places along the hike where it's possible to get 500 meters away. We'd met some dude on our travels who'd told us a bit about how to find the spots to walk off the track and camp-- tho, he made it seem really easy to do and, well it proved to be somewhat of a challenge. It's probably good that I didn't tell people back home that we were sort of winging the hike because now we are out and safe and can look back on it and laugh since it's in the past; but at the time it was a bit scary and unknown.

We decided to look at the hike as our first solo-of-sorts camping experience in the extreme. We embraced the challenge of finding places to camp, cooking all on our own, and carrying everything on our backs. And hete's how it went down: We packed tent, stove, food, waterproof everything, sleeping bags, etc. Into our packs Sadly I learned early on that my rain coat is not a rain coat at all; rather it's only a windbreaker, posing.

So day one: starts with a ferry to the beginning of the track. We were late (duh) and nearly got left behind. Started hiking It starts to rain-- oh! You're only a windbreaker!-- by evening we've made it to the first hut where other hikers were staying (dry) and the hut warden offers us his floor to sleep on if we pay $90 each. Ha! So we head back out onto the torrential rain and turn off the path 40 pacess after the boulder on the left, etc etc and..... Well you must picture this right because it's so good: gen and me covered in waterproof gear ( in my case I'm now wearing a large trash bag over my 'raincoat') carrying 50lbs packs, dirty and cold, shoving our bodies through a forest so dense that the ground cover comes up to our necks. It's like ploughing thru a wall. Trying to find a spot a) 500 meters off the track and b) large enough to pitch the tent. After nearly an hour of searching and as the day light begins to fade, we decide we need to be a bit more invasive--branches are broken, ferns smushed, the tent is erected, and we're now huddled over our pot of ramen noodles wearing soaked clothes hoping we don't get esten by some unknown animal. Luckily NZ has absolutely no animals besides sheep and orcs, so in the wild beast department we were quite safe.

Actually. That's all I have time to write at the moment. The rest will have to come later.

Xoxo
SB