We get it almost every night..

What a day. The morning started out with a consistent sprinkling but by midafternoon the sun was out and the day turned around. We drove up that dam road! and after a few official gate crossings we pulled onto the side of the road and Wendy said, “ok, we’re here,” although here did not appear to be anywhere in particular. She let us lead and told us that we had to keep the main river to our right and that we would eventually hit an intersection with our main stream. So we literally went bushwhacking for half an hour. It was so intense! Probably one of the coolest things I’ve done so far in New Zealand. We finally made it to the stream (with some sliding on our butts down the steep slopes at the end) and walked up for a few minutes until we hit the split between Blarney and George stream. Beck and I went one way and the other teams went the other. Most of the time we were below our knees in water but occasionally it would get quite deep. At one point I sank into a random hole and fell in to my waist haha, brrr. It never did really get quite that cold, it was just an initial shock. Then on the way to our furthest transect, a recent landslide occurred that caused quite a detour in our route and slowed us down a lot, but it was really exciting. I’ve never had to maneuver through such tight spaces with a big pack on, so it was new but fun. We finally made it and were able to do the transect without many issues, but we did not find any frogs at my site or Beck’s sadly. We think it was because of all the rain, which did raise the water level of the stream considerably, even though it wasn’t raining very hard or very long. We did see two huge eels, lots of creepy spiders, fish, and freshwater crayfish. Also, a little bit of a walk past our furthest transect, we saw a pretty large waterfall. I wish I had a camera for that.

We had a delicious dinner of fish, veggies (carrots, broccoli, zuccini), and rice with sweet thai chili sauce. Afterwards Wendy drove us to Whatapu to watch the sunset. It was probably one of the coolest beaches I’ve ever been to. The sand was all black and there were a lot of random stone structures. One of them was sort of a sand dune, which we hiked up, and Beck was brave enough to climb to the rocky point with his huge walking stick. We ran down like children and continued running along the bay to another rocky point with a little lighthouse on it. Around that bend was super squishy sand that we jumped into and sand halfway down our shins. We watched the sunset and did hand stands and crazy yoga poses and walked back. Great conversations. I was worried at first, but I’m really liking our group now.