Making a Break from the City and Doing a New Form of Climbing

August 8-12

This one won’t be so short, but I think you may enjoy it.

Ok, so at this point I was getting pretty antsy, as you may be as well reading this. It had been about a month since I got out of the Dunedin area and I felt like my time in New Zealand was slipping by far too quickly. I was determined to get out. And I have to say, I was far more successful this week than I expected.

On Tuesday I met with James (guy I went climbing with at long beach) for $3 lunch (best idea ever, I wish more places offered lunches as cheap and delicious) to discuss plans for the weekend. The weather was looking good for at least Saturday and we were both keen to get back into the mountains and do some mountaineering. Sadly though, I hadn’t had the chance to find a good book on climbing in New Zealand, so he’s talking about different mountains and I’m pretty clueless. So we made a vague plan A and plan B based on what the weather for the weekend.
Late that night I found out that a space opened up for me on Jaz’s midweek trip to Big Hut- I snatched the opportunity.
Wednesday at 4:55 PM, right when my English professor was finishing his lecture, I made my way with a full pack and mountaineering gear to the Tramping club gear room. Within the hour, I was on the road in Jaz’s car with four others and two full cars following us, for a short but decent night hike up to Big Hut-a lovely rustic cabin above tree level (in an area renowned for feeling like your in the Antarctic). It was a mere one-hour drive from campus. Soon 15 of us were all geared up and starting the 2.5-hour hike straight up hill. Despite the nip in the air, the hike was having me shed some serious layers. The sky was clear and beautiful, with a near full moon and the people were great company-including some Canadians and kiwi women I met on the Awakino trip.
Upon arrival at the cabin, Jaz started to make the mulled wine and everyone threw on his or her warm layers because there was no insulation or heat. In no time at all we were playing ping-pong, table bouldering, and body bouldering (that’s right, that isn’t a spelling error, I got the pictures to prove it). The later two have to be some of the best games ever invented. One you’re trying to get under and over a table without touch the ends or ground, the other you’re trying to over and under a (tall and strong) person. Sounds weird, but I have to say there’s nothing like body bouldering to break the ice. Though I suppose it may only work for tramping club types.
We were all up early the next morning, ready to enjoy that beautiful sunrise over the hills. Jaz was in search of some ice for ice bouldering, but sadly there was none to be found. This was actually the most mild winter weather he’s had up to big hut-just about every time he’s come it’s been in a blizzard and there’s a ton of snow. We lucked out on the weather, but unfortunately not on the ice. As you can see from the picture, Jaz got a little desperate about it.
After a leisure morning we hiked down and drove back to campus in time for lunch and for me to miss my second class of the day. I was on a roll with missing classes so I decided to skip the third one to play catch up on the homework.
So that was my first escape for the week. Friday evening I was leaving with James and Tom on a whole new adventure six hours from Dunedin and in the heart of NZ Southern Alps. Oh and I should mention: this is a whole new Tom, this one is the Tramping club’s gear room manager. To make life simple for the both of us, we’ll just call him Tommy. Anyways, Tommy, James, and I headed for Queenstown where we picked up Max and headed straight for the trailhead, arriving at about 11:00 PM; and so began our weekend adventure that got extended a little longer than planned.

Hikes and 'Climbing Adventures' to the Local Peninsula

August 1-7

Overall, the week was a complete wash out thanks to the four homework assignments due (it doesn’t help that I’m just not grasping some of the Maori concepts-it’s kind of hard to write an essay on noa or tapu when even the professor isn’t sure she completely understands them and you could probably do a PhD on each one).
I did have a break midweek and went to the New Zealand Alpine Club meeting with Jaz, where I meet a few people and got to watch a presentation on this woman’s travels in Northern India. The meeting itself was a bit entertaining, for apparently the elections are coming up and the president of the club was trying to convince others to run for his position so he’s not stuck with it next year (he mentioned that if you know how to heard cats, you’d be excellent for the position). I do love the social side of the climbing community.
Saturday I made it to Dunedin farmer’s market (supposedly the best in New Zealand) in the morning before heading off with Hannah in the afternoon to do a short hike up a hill that’s within walking distance of my house. Did I mention that I love Dunedin because there’s so many trails within walking distance? There’s the pineapple trek (which is the hike I just mentioned), the reservoir, Cargill (well that’s decently close I should say), Signall Hill, and the Botonical gardens (100 meters down the road from my flat)? After our hike, Hannah made Dave and I a delicious curry dinner (we gave Dave the hard work of peeling the pumpkin, so props to him for that).
Oh, Sunday was interesting. Tom (a climber from Maine that I met at the bouldering wall in Dunedin) and I went on a little ‘climbing adventure.’ We caught the bus at 9 AM to the peninsula. At the last stop we hopped off and with glances to the sky and fingers crossed for the weather to improve, we started our long (about 8km) walk to Lover’s Leap (a famed cliff ledge right on the ocean that’s suppose to have beautiful burly sport and trad climbs). Sadly, the fingers didn’t work and about 3 km from town on the dirt road we started to get rain and hail. We were about to turn back when a truck came our way and we were able to hitch a ride from this nice woman and her young son (coincidentally, also named Tom). She happened to be on her way towards Lover’s Leap-she and her husband own the farmland all around it.
Upon arriving to the trailhead of Lover’s Leap, we thought that the weather was finally turning in our favour. Oh how we were deceived. By the time we hiked to the top of the cliff ledge, the wind had a harsh, cold bite to it. By the time we climbed around to the bottom to have a closer look, we were trying to stick our heads around the hill to look at the wall, only to be pushed back by the hale pelting us in the face. My pictures are definitely not the greatest-that would be the hail you see on the lens. The red backpack in the other picture is Tom crouching down for shelter from the brutal wind. I’ve only experienced wind like this on top of mountains; it was odd to have them on the shore with no hurricane. We soon gave up and made our back up the slope and started a long walk back to the nearest town to catch the bus. About 2 hours into it, we were finally able to hitch a couple of rides that brought us basically right to our door steps-which was pretty awesome. At the end of the day, I just got my climbing done indoors at the bouldering wall.

July 25-31st

This will be a short one, I promise.

This week was basically a mix of classes, homework, exercise, and one of my new obsessions: the anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender (supposedly way better than the movie, I wouldn’t know since I never saw it, but I highly recommend the series).
Saturday I went to Jaz’s (new friend, president of the Tramping Club) belated birthday party, where I got to enjoy 21 year old, top-notch wine his grandparents had put away for him when he was born (pretty neat having grandparents that own a vineyard). Sunday I got out climbing once again! Back to long beach, but this time with tramping club people: James and Max (Jaz brought some others when he joined us in the afternoon). It was a full day of climbing at a different area on long beach. Got to practice my sport and trad leading, and work a hard route on top rope. Overall, it was a pretty fantastic day.

Oh and I learned a new method of belaying, invented by Jaz as seen in the picture. He calls it "The coaching belay"

Closings to Birthday, Climbing to Chocolate

Dunedin Week 3
July 18-24

Lucky for you there are only a couple of things worth sharing about this week, seeing as classes were starting to kick in. Maybe I can finally have a short entry; I do hope my readers aren’t suffering too much from my long-winded writing.

Tuesday, one of the last remnants of my childhood came to an end: I saw the final Harry Potter movie in theaters with Dave and friends from a neighboring flat. Crazy that it has been thirteen years since my mom gave me the first book of the series and I kept her up until three in the morning reading it to me (you have to admit, that’s pretty late for a nine year old).
When Thursday rolled around, so did my birthday. It felt so odd to have six hours of classes; it was definitely the first time I’ve done that on my birthday. Of course, last year I spent my birthday in a chicken coup, so maybe I’m just on a roll for first time experiences; I hope they start getting better. That night we had a big dinner with my flatties, Isabel, her flatties (same people I went to Harry Potter with), and of course, Steph. While the others played a vicious game of spoons, Steph and I cooked dinner (she took over the meat dish since Liz and I were the only veggies); Isabel’s flat brought dessert. Isabel actually didn’t know when she suggested the date for the dinner that it was my birthday. However, my flatties remembered: Liz and Dave surprised me after dinner with a delicious homemade chocolate cake (brilliant idea to put this cookie, nutella crumble on the bottom-I may have given away the fact that I love nutella by eating about 2 containers of it in a month), and Quentin was careful to remind everyone in the complex (all day) that it was my birthday.
That Saturday was a very important and fantastic day: it was my first day of rock climbing in New Zeleand (hopefully the first of many). I went with Dave and Isabel’s flat out to Long Beach-a local climbing area that has these really fascinating caves and rock formations. It was pretty much everyone else’s first time climbing outdoors, so I was more like a guide for the day, but it was a blast! And it was fun exploring around the beach and enjoying the tang-top weather in the middle of winter. I also met a couple of other climbers: Hannah and Nijal, whom I plan on doing a lot more climbing with. Hannah is a student/ice climber from England studying abroad at Otago, and Nijal, who is originally from Canada, has lived in New Zealand for the past 4 years.
Sunday was suppose to be this big 10 Km race for the Chocolate festival in Dunedin (yes, Dunedin has a Cadbury chocolate festival that lasts a week long-don’t get too excited, there wasn’t nearly as much chocolate as you would have thought there would be and a lot of it cost $$). Sadly, Dunedin is a bit like New England- maybe even worse-when it comes to weather. It turned into a sunny, rainy, hailing, and snowy day (all in a span of 2 hours). The race was canceled, but since we showed up before we knew, we still got the free chocolate bar which was all that mattered. Peter (one of Isabel’s flatties) and I proceeded on an interesting trail run where we had fun working our way up and down muddy/icy trails.

Well…It was a little shorter. I’m slowly getting better.

Time to Play Catch Up!

Ok, time to catch you up on the last 5 weeks of my life. Good thing the first two weren’t too eventful: filled with lots of walking around Dunedin, shopping, spending an alarming amount of money to settle in, and sore feet (from all the walking-asphalt bloody hurts you know). I’m going to (try to) fast forward through them so you don’t feel like you walked every step with me (trust me, you don’t want to; I walked about 15 miles in just one day, but that is a story you must hear)

Dunedin Week 1: Pre-Uni & Settling into the NZ way of life.
July 4-10

So the first couple of days consisted of shopping for food and supplies, and figuring out the layout of the city/Uni . Unfortunately, this was all on foot because I was unable to get a cheap bike. I think I hiked more miles this week than I did with Eagle Rock’s 24-day trip.
Anyways, we had a couple of orientation meetings at Uni within the first three days of arriving. Thursday night I attended a party organized by the international office (to my utmost surprise) at Bar 10 in the Octagon . It was here Dave and I worked on our socializing skills. Seriously, this would never happen at UNH; of course I quickly came to realize that UNH may be the ‘number 7 drinking school’ (lies) in the US, but I really think Otago easily has it beat.
Dave and I also began our exercise routines together and I’m finally working out regularly again. I’m definitely emphasizing stretching more (21 was the age I discovered long term injuries, 22 I hope to be the age I learn to completely prevent them). Something about New Zealand has instigated me into doing a lot of things I’ve talked about doing the last few years, but never actually got around to. So working on getting in physical shape with a balance of running, climbing, and weight routines, while still staying on top of stretching (lets see how this goes this classes). I’ve also started taking capoeira classes to help me work on reflexes (physical and mental: rock doesn’t move, so needless to say it hasn’t helped me with solving problems faster or reacting quickly), flexibility, and balance. I’ve started cooking food from scratch and eating a lot more veggies (my flatties and I rotate dinner weekday nights, which has led me to be more creative, especially since apparently there is this ‘unspoken’ competition between us of who can make the best dinner for each week).
Thursday morning was class registration, which involved wandering around to different buildings, waiting forever in lines, and collecting signatures from professors to get classes approved. It was a bit tedious and I grew to appreciate UNH’s online system. That afternoon was an epic 3-4 mile walk to get groceries at the cheapest supermarket in town (that will not be repeated, I can promise you; I now wait to hitch rides from Liz).
Friday morning we got to go on Dunedin’s train ride for ‘free’ (you know it’s budgeted into that tuition somewhere). It was a pretty beautiful and neat 2-hour train ride. Though it was a little disappointing because we’re too far from the real mountains.
Sunday was our last day of Freedom before classes started; Steph, Dave, Quentin and I went on an afternoon hike up a local hill. We were supposed to do Flagstaff, but then Dave mentioned that we should do Cargill, ‘it’s closer.’ I was surprised, because Liz hadn’t mentioned it and she said that Flagstaff was a short walk from the house. He pointed Cargill out on the map (one of those colourful maps that looks like it was drawn by someone on a computer-not to scale). I warned him that I think it’s a lot further than he thinks and if he wants to do it, we should probably take a bus. He insisted though that by the map it showed Cargill to not be that far. I said I was looking at the real mountain way ahead of us and it looked quite far (I even pointed it out, since it was very obvious with the tower on top and he still insisted that it wasn’t that far). I suppose I could have been a little more assertive, but I caved and after 45-60 minutes of walking along the road we finally reached the trail head of a hike that was suppose to be 3.5 hours in length (one way). Luckily we booked it up to the summit in 2.5, just in time to watch the start of the sunset before heading down a dirt road that brought us back close to home (eventually, but I guess dirt road beats asphalt). This would be the 15-miler day (I didn’t even mention the walking we did in the morning around downtown for errands). My legs were very tired and sore that night.

Dunedin Week 2: Vacation ends, Classes Begin and Adventure Time Begins to Dwindle
July 11-17

So, not too much to report from this week. If you’re interested in what courses I’m taking they are: Creative Non-fiction English class , Writing for Professions (sadly, instead of travel narratives), Human Geography, and Maori Society.

What you need to know about is my weekend adventure (15th-17th) with the tramping club to Awakine Ski ‘Resort’-the tramping clubs homey little ski place.
The adventure starts with the drive in, with the last five miles on a dirt road up to the hut. You can make the first four in a regular car loaded with people (we only bottomed out a little, but we did have the car overloaded). In the last mile you need to have a truck/jeep with four-wheel drive and tire chains, or you have to ride in this old van on steroids. Now when I say steroids, I mean it’s a large van with good clearance, four wheel drive, and tires that you’d see on an old land rover or all terrain military car. When I say old, I mean it’s probably at from the 80’s, seats in back are missing, and parts of it are held together by duck tape. Do we have a good enough picture?
Well, sadly, we were unable to ride the old timer, because the chains could not be found. So someone with a jeep had to drive back down to shuttle us up. It was probably one of the scariest drives of my life (and that’s saying something). So imagine driving (more like flying) up a mountain valley on a narrow, windy, snow covered dirt road, with steep drop offs along most of the corners. It got even better when we reached the deeper snow and someone told the driver they could get through it if they do little quick jerks left and right with the steering wheel. We went about 100 m with the driver doing this and me wandering why I hadn’t volunteered to walk. I was relieved when we finally did get stuck; I took the opportunity to volunteer myself to take weight out of the car so they could un-stick themselves. I walked the rest (a grand total of 400ish meters). The rest of the night was not so eventful (luckily), just relaxing and meeting new people, playing cards, etc.
The next day, we spent most of the morning getting the ski tow set up (that’s right, it was a rope tow from just after WW2, but the biggest I’ve ever seen, and no, they don’t have a ski lift), by digging the rope out from under a couple feet of snow, getting it up and over to the right side of a supporting pole, and watching them set up the counter weight to tighten the rope again. In the afternoon we got to make a couple of runs with the new rope tow running (oh, and an old tractor was what ran the rope tow). You can basically see this whole process via my pictures.
Sunday was a fantastic day. The sky was clear and it was sunny and around noon, Jaz (the tramping club president) and I headed to Foster’s peak for some mountaineering-a mere 45-minute walk from the upper hut to the base. It has tons of routes on it-from easy slope climbing to technical mix climbing (climbing on ice and rock). We were hoping to get on a more challenging route, but sadly the snow conditions were not in our favour and we had to stick to just a steep snow slope. Though the climb didn’t quite live up to my expectations, the views did. Finally I got a glimpse of the southern alps of New Zealand-from Mount Aspiring (beautiful pointy peak I must climb before I go) in the Southwest, to Mount Cook (tallest peak in NZ, a mountain I would like to at least climb on, if not summit) in the North and so much in between. Highlight of the trip by far and the wind died down while we were up there so we stopped for a quick lunch to sit and admire the views. We made a quick trek back to the hut to sneak ski runs in before heading back to Dunedin (I wont lie, I only did one run-I’ll use the excuse that the boots I borrowed were too big and the skis pretty beaten, so skiing on an icy steep slope with no warm up wasn’t my cup of tea-I can ski back diamonds, but not right off the bat). The trip ended nicely with a stop at a delicious Mediterranean restaurant.

Oh, I do have sad news: my warm red hat blew away. Tragic, I know; I lose hats like no other.