Back in oregon

So I'm home and am now able to post pictures for those of you following the blog.

Pictures are here!

Feel free to comment or email me

Likely my last post from overseas

So tomorrow I fly out of Auckland to LAX. I will arrive in LAX 7 hours before I took off so that is always fun.
Today I did a free tour of the city went to the sky tower, the tallest volcano in the area, the harbor bridge (under it to the bungee platform to see some jumpers, frankly didn't seem like such a big deal, especially after skydiving but I didn't feel like spending any more money to attempt to get my adrenaline flowing as skydiving didn't, zorbing did a little but it certainly wasn't scary.) and some other stuff. Yesterday I went to the zoo and saw kiwi's. They are a lot bigger than I expected. I was thinking they were small little flightless birds but they have a body about the size of a regulation volleyball. Saw other stuff at the zoo. They periodically parade animals through the zoo for exercise so I got to see the elephants coming down the walkways and boars and stuff like that which was neat.

As per zorbing, I don't think I posted about it yet. I have pictures, but if you didn't click on the link in the previous post, then its basically rolling down a hill in a human sized hamster ball. I did three rolls down the hill. I opted for the ones filled with nice warm water (not all the way but enough to get you completely soaked). I did two zig zag courses and one straight.

I must say I'm going to miss the food... I only have two candy bars left that I want to try: malteasers and milky bar. They are the equivalent of whoppers and white chocolate respectively. Candy here (and everywhere else is so much better than back home).

Anyways, little low on battery and I got some other stuff to be taking care of. Will talk later and start posting pictures when I get back. I'll likely find a site where I can post high quality pictures and provide a link here. If anyone has any questions about anything I might have left out feel free to ask...

In any event, I land in LAX in 13 hours and take off from Auckland in 20, sweet as.

(Sweet as is a kiwi expression)

Home Stretch

So I'm in Auckland today. It's raining so I don't quite feel up to my normal walking tour of the city plus I decided to sleep in today which was the first time in a month which was nice. Tomorrow I'm off to Rotorua to go zorbing. I will have some free time there so will be able to walk around there for a bit, maybe go to the mud baths. The hostel operates a free tour of the city which I signed up to do on Tuesday. The tour goes up the sky tower (the tallest structure in the southern hemisphere at 394 meters or so, just under a quarter mile), goes to Mt. Eden (an active volcano), over the Harbor Bridge, and other places.The hostel also has free dinner and since I booked it with a certain backpackers travel place I get a free super-size which is good.

Last night I caved and bought a hamburger as I'd been craving one for sometime. The only reason I did it is because I saw the place as I was walking from the bus station and you could just tell that it was an iconic place. Great food, great prices, great portions. It was called the White Lady and has only closed once since it's opening in the 40's due to Auckland losing power. It was open again by the next morning after the museum brought a generator over to help them out.

Wellington was a fun city. I wish I had more time to spend here but I guess I'll just have to come back. Saw lots of cool Lord of the Ring filming sites and on the train ride up to Auckland I saw Mt. Doom. Not sure which one it was as they were all snow covered making it a lot less Doom-y. ("...represented by Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Ruapehu, both active volcanoes in New Zealand." courtesy of Wiki) In any event, the train ride was a little interesting as the train was late and then had electrical problems. The solution, put everyone on a bus and then send a train south from Auckland to intercept us. We got on the train right around Mount Doom and took it the rest of the way and had a short power outage just outside of Auckland. I missed my free dinner last night which wasn't so bad as I went to the White Lady.

I might go to the Auckland zoo and get my picture taken with a Cheetah as I've always wanted to do that. They are very big on animal encounters here, and I would be remiss if I came all the way out here and didn't see a kiwi (bird). I bought a kilogram of kiwis (fruit) which cost $1 NZ so that equates to 2.2 lbs of fruit for $0.63 which is pretty tough to beat. The third type of kiwi is a person from New Zealand. Apparently the kiwi farms got hit by a hail storm which ruined lots of crops so kiwi's might be more expensive soon.

almost forgot

The beach is called Manly beach, there is also Bondi Beach, Manly beach is more a town I don't know about bondi beach, but there wasn't much to do in Manly in the way of tourism in the winter so I didn't stay long.

Additionally, the computers here are pretty nice...

Not on my computer

So I'm not on my computer right now, but hey the internet is fast here at the Nomad's Hostel in Wellington. Tomorrow I have a full day tour of Middle Earth. I spent the last two days bussing and training and ferrying my way here from Queenstown, with a 1 night stopover in Christchurch. I had fish and chips for $5 NZ in Christchurch with is approximately $3 US. I almost couldn't finish it it was so much food. Additionally, the chips were the best fries I've ever had in my life. Perfectly salted, piping hot and huge. They were like regular fast food fries tripled in cross sectional area.

Anyways, New Zealand is amazing. The entire country is a picture. I still like Queenstown the best so far, but I took teh train up the pacific coast and saw black sand beaches. I don't have much time left on my charge for this (thanks Susie by the way if you're reading this as I'm using your card) Wellington is a nice city, clean industrious. I had to walk a few miles with my bags to get to the hostel. In any event, most of the towns we past through had populations of around 2 or 3 thousand. NZ itself only has 4.1 million and significantly more sheep. They also have deer farms. I had a really good Vennison meat pie in Tikapo (a bus stop layover). In any event, will post more when I get a chance... Laters

Milford Sound

No pictures for now as I can't afford to wait for the upload anymore, but if you Google Milford Sound, that pretty much sums up my day. That and some amazing food.

In Just 3 Days

Here, I will attempt to list everything I did in the past 3 days in Sydney

I went to:
-Kings Cross
-Observatory
-Tour of the Opera house. The opera house is really cool, learned a lot of things about it. Initially it was supposed to be 3 years and 7 million dollars and ended up being 15 years and 130 million dollars. The architect who died last year, never returned to Australia to see it finished. His design was chosen by the designer of the St. Louis Arch who, in doing so, broke the competition rules as it was a world wide competition for the design. There's lots of other cool stuff but nothing really worth noting in the blog.
-Show at the Opera House (Carmina Burrana, also included Pines of Rome by Respighi and a song by Shostakovich which I didn't know initially but was very delighted to find out as I really like the Pines of Rome. The Shostakovich piece was very much in his style with trills on the violins and flutes.)
-Blue Mountains where I climbed two waterfalls
-Olympic Park
-Harbor Bridge
-Top of a pylon of the bridge (290 ft above water for $9.50 AUD vs. $180 AUD to go to the 400 ft top of the bridge)
-Darling Harbor
-Sydney Aquarium
-Cockle Bay Wharf
-Manly Beach
-Botanical Gardens
-Wooloomooloo (spelling?)
-Went out to lots of shops and stuff
-Hyde Park
-St Mary's Cathedral
-St Andrews Cathedral (Organ Playing as added bonus)
-Darrel Lea Chocolates (Australia's oldest Chocolate makers) I got something called Rocklea road along with a sampler box. The rocklea road came in several varieties, I chose the espresso one. Essentially, it was coffee infused marshmallows covered in milk chocolate with coarse pieces of nuts and coffee beans. Was pretty good to say the least.
-Worlds Largest (IMAX) theater. Saw Transformers 2 which was pretty decently entertaining though some parts I could have done without. But seeing it on that screen was downright amazing. It felt like everything was real size. The actors took up about 2 meters and the robots took up about 8 stories so it all worked out pretty well.
-Harry's famous meat pies cafe on wheels (The actual name is some combination of those words) I can now join the ranks with thousands of others including Blink 182, Jason Biggs of American Pie, and Colonel Sanders to name a few. Pretty good meat pies.

That's all I can think that I did right now but there may have been more. With the exception of taking the ferry to and from Manly Beach, I walked everywhere a distance of probably about 40 or 50 miles in the end.


Right now:
I'm sitting in a place called Patagonia in Queenstown, New Zealand. It's a really good chocolate shop with free wireless and not too far from the hostel. Queenstown itself is absolutely beautiful. I'm staying at a hostel right on the edge of a lake surrounded by mountains on all sides. Could definitely live here if it weren't for the lack of a need of aerospace engineers in the area. I've been sliding down the thermometer as in Cairns, Australia it was in the 30's and in Sydney it was in the low 20's/ teens. In Christchurch (where I had my layover) it was 8 degrees and here it's 4 degrees. I'm supposed to see Milford Sound tomorrow but I might have to do some serious rescheduling due to weather. This would involve me pushing the rest of my trip around and probably a dozen phone calls. Anyways, the flight into Queenstown was amazing. It was a pretty short flight, I fell asleep for a good part of it but it was shorter than 2 hours. In any event, we descended through the clouds and were immediately surrounded by snowy mountains and beautiful mirror lakes and flew around and winded down and around and like that we were in Queenstown. It was the smallest commercial plane I've ever been on, an ATR-72 which seets 68 people and is powered by two turbo propellers. I switched to the small plane in Christchurch where I was flown into from Sydney on a Boeing 777 operated by the United Arab Emirates airline. I have to say, that was by far the nicest airline I've ever been on. Extremely comfortable seats and on a two and a half hour flight all amentities provided. Amenities like, steamed cloth at the beginning of the flight, breakast which included: scrambled eggs with chives, steamed mushrooms, tomato ragout, some really nice vanilla mousse cake, bread, orange juice, tea/coffee, crackers and cheese (from Cracker Barrel in the states oddly enough...). The seats all had touch screen tv's with about 50 arcade style games, 100 movies or so and about 60,000 songs from all over the world along with several episodes each of about 30 tv shows. US airlines suck. Even the really short New Zealand flight on the tiny plane had tea and cookies and candies right before landing. I hardly ever get anything other than maybe a free glass of water on the planes these days. Another thing I thought was weird was that there was no security for the domestic Air New Zealand flights. I got my bags from the international gate and went through customs, checked in and simply walked to my gate no questions asked. This was good as I would have been a little pressed for time if I had to go through security.

In anyevent, my battery is getting low so I'm going to head back soon.