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.
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