One shire to the next..

I don't really know why I've waited so long to blog. This week has been awfully academic, but we've had a couple days to unwind, explore, and pack our lives up in a bag again for our journey to the South Island. This is a rough schedule of what I'll be doing down there:

- Sept 26th - Drive down to Wellington

- Sept 27th - Ferry across channel, drive down to Kaikoura and stay at the Takahanga Marae for 4 days and 4 nights

- Oct 1st - Hanmer Springs, day and a half off to play in the hot springs and go hiking

- Oct 2nd - Greymouth on the West Coast

- Oct 3rd - Reefton to look at the mines during the day, travel to Nelson Lakes National Park at Lake Rotoiti for 4 nights

- Oct 7th - Drop off in Nelson for spring break. I'll be hiking the Abel Tasman National Park "Great Walk" for 4 days and 3 nights and then exploring the largest caves south of the equator in Takaka for a day before meeting the rest of the group in Nelson on the 13th.

- Oct 14th - Going back to the North Island to East Cape to stay at another marae, Te Araroa, until Oct 18th

After 6 days of non-stop gale force winds (I'm not even kidding), the weather finally has cleared up. Yesterday I went to Waharau Regional Park, which are the trails going into the mountain ranges just down the road, and hiked to the highest point in the ranges. It was a lot of fun, very muddy, and the rain held out for more of the time. We got a great view of the Firth of Thames and the Coromandel Range. All in all it about 7 hours of hiking.

In the 4 weeks that I have been in New Zealand, I have already witnessed more rainbows than I have seen in my entire life. A few days ago in one of those brief moments when it stopped raining I saw a complete rainbow that framed the Hunua Ranes. I ran to my room to grab my camera and snapped a few photos, but when I went to upload them to my computer the memory card got corrupted somehow and I lost the pictures! On top of that, I took out my iPod (for the first time since the plane ride) to charge it for the long car trip ahead, and it died on me! All my efforts to bring it back to life with instructions from the internet failed, so it looks like my plane and car rides will be music-less. Just bad bad luck with electronics.

So I guess it's a good thing I will be internet free for the next several weeks! If I get the internet any time in between I'll probably pop in the blog for a bit to let you know things are all right. I'm looking forward to this trip a lot, and will hopefully have something interesting to write about when I get back.

Love you all... hopefully you'll hear from me too.