Spring break and microscopes

Howdy to all! I just got back today from the beautiful town of Kiakoura where I battled seals, captured starfish, collected snails, stuck my finger in a sea anenome (on accident) watched the sun rise...twice and a whole plethora of other exciting and not so exciting things. So why was I in such a magical place you ask? a fieldtrip of course!

My marine ecology class had a 5 day field trip where we learned all about rocky reef systems. I did lots of boring things while I was there like spend 22 hours in front of a microscope between the hours of 7 am on Monday and 3 pm on Tuesday. There were also painful things like getting up at 4 am to beat low tide out on the reef....that is when I battled seals...they just happened to be hanging around our field site where we had to set up our experiment so we had to scare them off...let me tell you it's not easy to scare off a family of seals in the dark when all you have with your is a head lamp and a clip board. I suppose we should have expected as much since we were at a place called "seal reef" because it is home to one of the largest mating colonies of these seals. They are an endangered species.

Despite how much it sucked getting up so early and how cold the ocean is at that time (I had to spend about an hour and a half catching sea snails for our experiment...my hands almost fell off), I did get to see two very pretty Kiakoura sunrises.

This hazy mountain view is what I looked at during breakfast and lunch each day. The landscape in the area is amazing plus it was kind of fun to watch the baby seals playing...from a distance.

The Road That Doesn't Want Travelers

Today we went to Sumner which is a small town just outside the city that has been badly damaged by the quakes because it is built into the side of a mountain. On our first day here, a man from Sumner described the road that leads into town as being "The road that doesn't want travelers" because after the quakes one side of the road started to get covered by rocks that are falling from the cliffs and the other side was being licked by the ocean most hours of the day. On a windy day the high tide will cover the edge of the road for a few minutes. We went down that road to enter the town and the whole time you are on it you can feel how much you shouldn't be. on the side with the falling rocks they have packing trailers (almost the size of semi trailers) Stacked 2 high to stop the rocks from killing the road. it is hardly more than one lane wide. It is the only pass for the people of Sumner to get into Christchurch where most of them work unless they drive around the mountains on the inland side which is several tens of miles extra. It was quite weird being on the road.







Pretty flower huh?



We had planned to hike at a place called Taylors Mistake which has lots of sheer cliffs and amazing views...but as usual our plans did not work out. Since the quakes they have had to close the pass because there are falling rocks that may or may not kill you if you aren't careful. We did however see some really nice views.





I really like that there is just a huge hole in the mountain.

I have noticed that I only really take pictures of rocks and plants...I really like trees and decided that I will live in a NZ tree later in life because they are just very cool.

Planning and Preparing for quite the adventure!

Sorry I haven't posted recently, most of my days have been filled with a lot of planning and preparing and purchasing the required goods for the best road trip(s) in the world. Carina Sophie (two girls from the same study abroad group) and I have two amazing road trips planned out. The first is a 9 night 10 day trip that tours the entire coast of the SSouth Island...well almost. We plan to drive inland for the last 2 days to avoid retracing the area that we visited on our last adventure. instead we will go through the mountains. So what sort of attractions will we see and what will we do you ask? The first day should be complete with a dip in a natural hot pool followed by a nice camp site in our new tent! then we will visit the Tasman Bay where we will camp at a free camping area. Next is a visit to the "Pancake Rocks" of NZ and a night in the Jade carving capital of the country. Thendown we will journey to a Glacier, a beach, and an old mining town all in one where we will get to hike the glacier caves and sleep on the beach. Fom there we will go to Milford Sound which is rumoured to be the prettiest place in the country and from the pictures I believe it. The next day Sophie and Carina will be bungy jumping in Queenstown and I think it would be nice to do a bungy swing but we will have to see how expensive it is.  At this point we are over half way through our trip and most of the fun exciting things will be finished... We will visit Fiordland and a couple other areas but no big exciting things. Then back in CHCH we will be!

I have planned out the trip so that we get to camp a lot which is really cool because we bought a 2 man tent for really cheap at a fancy outdoors store because it has broken tent poles. Luckily the sales woman said that for $25 we can just order new ones so in the end we got a $249.99 tent for only $64. Pretty darn good deal if you ask me. We set it up yesterday and the thing is HUGE! we could easily sleep all 3 of us and out bags without being cramped at all. If we really wanted we could always make friends with someone else and let them come along so we cam split gas prices. I also invested in a fancy pair of hiking boots. They were also on the sale rack because they were damaged but it was the easiest fix ever. I got a $120 discount on them. :)

Enough about my shopping and planning, I'm sure it's quite boring for all of you to read.

Something that may be more interesting is what I did today. I went to help with this service project called Project Piko, which is working to clean up one of the highly damaged areas in CHCH. We spruced up a community herb garden and cleaned up a bunch of rubble alongside a few Christchurchers. They said they wanted to invite us back out in a month or so to help them actually rebuild the area and to help them install a stage and more gardens. It should be kind of exciting to really work with Kiwis to rebuild their city. After the service work, Sophie and I walked home (mostly to save the $2.30 it costs to ride the bus home) and we got to see where a lot of the earthquake damage that we saw only a month ago has been cleaned up. It was hard to recognize several areas because when we first toured them they had rubble and broken buildings and now some of that is totally cleared and turned into a makeshift carpark for now. It took 2 and a half hours to get home...

I'll update again soon.