Mid-semester break Pt 1

just relaxing at beachcomber island....

as the two weeks of mid-semester break are over I start to realize that we did "heaps of stuff" in a very short time. At first we visited Mount Taranaki, one group of four people nearly climbed up to the top whereas the other group of six, including me, preferred to take the short trip and walk around in the forest. It was a beautiful day and so we were happy enough to see the mountain as we walked around - normally it hides itself behind some clouds, and at least the top is not visible. At the end of the day the short trip was not that short, and we arrived exactly 15 minutes earlier than the others.

Two days later we did a full day (not four day, alex ;)) walk - the world famous tongariro crossing which included some steep nearly rock-climbing parts but also some "we all walk together" parts on motorway-like walkways. The nature and landscape at Tongariro Nationalpark are just amazing. Inside the big crater everything looked like the surface of the moon, and some minutes later we were overwhelmed again by the new zealand typical landscape with hills of grass and green forests.

The plan for the next day was to drive south, to get nearer to wellington, and maybe see some stuff by looking out of the car or even do some short stops. (Beware of walking to much around ;)). But sometimes it just happens the other way round and in this case some member of the group (no idea who ;)) found a leaflet of a "flying fox" not too far away. After a short discussion everybody was convinced and we could make our way to the extreme sport part of this day.

What is a flying fox? Hmmm, to be exact, it is just a long, long steel cable. In this case nearly one kilometer long. This cable is fixed to one point at the top of a canyon and to a second point which is a little bit lower than the first point. You have to walk up to the top of the flying fox and to get on a fancy harness, which is later fixed to a tiny car which can go down the steel cable very fast.


Wooooooosh, thirty seconds of superman-style flying trough a canyon until you slow down again - sweet as ;)


The next couple of days we spent on a very slow way down to wellington, including one rainy day which we used to go to a go-kart track and a spa-like public pool, an d a nice "tomorrow is your birthday"-party dinner for stumppi at a really nice backpacker near wellington. In fact, we wanted to spend that night in wellington and not near by, but the rolling stones where in town and we had no chance to get five beds in a backpacker ("Hello there is Hanna speaking. Do you have any accomodation for tomorrow night? For five people? No? Okay, thanks, bye")

We also made some walks up and down some local beaches, sometimes even in the rain, and used our 4WD drive subaru to speed around at the beach - big playground for big kids. Several Lord of the rings locations (I don`t like the movie, I have seen the first part and fell asleep) were also a very important reason to stop, even if nobody could exactly see where the scene was shot...

Wellington - capital city of New Zealand. Okay, as Auckland is not a real city in my opinion (do they have a subway? any kind of public transportation except of buses? a CBD which is bigger than Stuttgart? - no ;), Wellington is even smaller. But nice. And very important for New Zealand.

Finding a backpacker was the first task - somebody told us that it could be easier to drive to the backpackers instand of calling them - so we strolled around in Wellington, visited several backpackers which were all full (maybe the rolling stones fans from the south island stayed more than one night), until we decided to use again the advantages of the age of mobile communication...

Our next sightseeing stop was at the parliament buildings, which we found pretty fast after we walked nearly through the whole inner city of Wellington. Maybe it was just too barefaced just to walk towards the main entrance of one of the buildings as one of the security men suddenly shouted at us: "are you looking for the touuurrs?" - "hmmm?" - "parliament tours are over there!" We basically just wanted to take a short look into the building, but even security men in New Zealand have their rules and we had neither any motivation nor the time to do a parliament tour...

"Te papa" is the name of the national museum of New Zealand which hosts exhibitions about New Zealand, the country, the history and the people who live here. Fortunatelly, especially for Lord of the Rings fans, a special exhibition about
the making of these movies just started at Te Papa some days before, so we could spend the rest of the afternoon in the museum. It was interesting. In fact, it was awesome. Even for me (i don`t like these movies...) it was cool to see how the made these films, how they got the special effects and how many people spend that much time to put it together. To cite my lecturer Paul: "the purpose of making-of videos is the anti-democratisation of the film-business [...] everybody can buy a computer to produce special effects, but nobody has that much time and money". For me it was a very relaxed way to learn a little bit more about the Lord of the rings, more about the process of producing such a piece, without beeing constrained to watch a fantasy story whose author intended "to write a long story".

Later on this day we managed to meet Johannes, another guy from Fuwa who is currently studying at Dunedin (South Island), and who was in Wellington because of the rolling stones concert the night before. Johannes even took the chance to sleep in the same hotel as the rolling stones (intercontinental), which is just the perfect hotel for a busy MI-student from fuwa ;). (and it was the only hotel where they had free beds if you had not booked in advance). We had a nice dinner (eating pizza) at a restaurant, drunk some beers at a irish pub and another bar, and talked a lot about beeing abroad, studying in New Zealand and even about our small, little mountaintown Fuwa.

The next day we drove up to Mt. Victoria (the kiwis tend to build roads up to every summit), and ate our breakfast while having an awesome outlook on the city of Wellington. We had the plan to drive to the other side of the bay by car, rent some bikes and do a nice "bike along the beach"-tour. But sometimes opening hours in New Zealand are even more strict than in Germany - as it was a normal weekday nobody was there to give us our bikes, which led us to another walk at the beach.

Seal Colony and Lighthouse: two words on a map, and a very long way to go (and a very long way back), but: "we can drive down there, and then drive along the coast"....that was just the idea at the beginning. In real, it took us several hours of driving, including a beautiful but very winding mountain pass just to get to the lighthouse (which was in fact very beautiful, especially at sunset). Maybe we should have taken the map more serious as it said "4WD Track". We tried to drive along the coast after we had visited the lighthouse, but maybe after one kilometer and thirthy minutes our 4WD family car had no chance to get further - too many rocks and too many mudholes made it too risky to drive on. Therefore we took the long but safe way back to the state highway, drove for some hours and finally found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, at a backpacker located at a very remote sheep farm.

"You don't need any keys out here", our 'backpacker-mom' told us when she showed us the rooms, and it was just the biggest possible contrast to the night before which we spent at the crowdy YHA Backpacker in Wellington. Just sheep, cattle, stars and a very bright full-moon night, and the feeling deep inside to be just at the right place, just at the right time.

to be continued...