We had a University orientation that was pretty short and not that helpful, but fun nonetheless. There are around 200 or so international students at Vic. Probably three fourths of them are American but there are also many from Asia, Germany, a few from France and some other places. Turns out one of my flat mates goes to CU boulder! His name is Ryan, then Gerard is from Ohio and goes to Wooster and Jessica is from Alabama and goes to Alabama State. They’re all really nice and we’ve been living together well so far! After the university orientation we had four days before school started so Dani, Tess, Molly and I decided to take a road trip!
We rented a car and I drove (!) and we drove North to the city of Hamilton. Hamilton is kind of a city that is the butt of a lot of jokes here. Dani’s kiwi mate Fin referred to it as Hamiltron and when Dani asked him why he said they call it Hamiltron, City of the Future. It’s kind of like the armpit of New Zealand. It’s not really that bad even, but of most of the places I’ve been in NZ so far, it wasn’t as beautiful or as great. Anyway, it’s about 6 hours from Wellington. So we drove up to Hamilton and checked into our hostel. The next day we drove to the Wiatomo caves and did a cave tour and got to see thousands of glowworms, which was really cool. After we did the glowworm tour (which we were unfortunately not allowed to take pictures of) we headed down the road to a HUGE and beautiful waterfall and then to a natural bridge. They were both amazing and looked like they were from a movie. It was crazy. Anytime we got in the car there was an amazing show of beauty outside. Nothing is ugly. Nothing is the same. And it’s all mind blowing. We spent the entire trip being amazed by the views.
We came out of the cave walking on our hands!
Waterfall
The walk to the natural bridge!
Kind of reminds me of mist and all of those other games
The bridge
From under the bridge
Dani and me
The next day we drove for about 2 hours even further north to visit Cathedral Cove, which is a beach featured in the second Narnia movie. It was beyond amazing. The water is the most beautiful color of turquoise blue and its just phenomenal. It honestly felt like we were in Narnia because as we were driving to the cove it was POURING rain and the moment we parked the car the storm rolled out over the sea and it was beautiful and sunny! We spent a few hours on the beach and in the water before heading back to the car for some food and then the drive home.
Dani’s smile chasing the storm away!
Excited Tess!
Last semester my friend Marge brought a little gnome with her, which she takes on almost all of her trips. His name is Sir Gnome Chompsky and at the end of our trip in the Caribbean, Marge accidentally left him. I found him and told her I’d send it to her, but when it got closer to my NZ trip I thought, maybe he should come with me! So he did! And he’s loving it too!! Strangely enough, I pulled out Chompsky and Molly said she had a friend who used to have a gnome too and she was pretty sure his name was chompsky as well… we didn’t really think much of it but when I put up pictures of the gnome of facebook, I tagged the picture with Marge’s name and turns out, the gnome and friend Molly was talking about was MARGE! We knew the same person and Molly had gone on a trip with this very gnome before! What a small world.
Sir Gnome Chompsky
That night we got some dinner and then relaxed in our hostel for the night watching some quality television (Sarcasm implied). The television her is a very strange mixture of some NZ shows and really awful or really old American shows. If it’s a current show, like glee, they are almost an entire season behind. Its very interesting to see what shows they get. Tess, Molly and Dani and I have been getting into a show called Shortland Street, which is the equivalent of a daytime soap in the states, but its at 7pm every week night and it’s NZ longest running show other than the news!
We drove home on Sunday and used the rental car to go grocery shopping and to run some errands. When we finally turned in the rental car and made it back to our houses I was exhausted and not ready for class to start the next day… but alas I had to deal with it!
I love the Kiwi hat!
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