The update

So, I was a little surprised to see that it has been around 3 weeks since I last did a post, surely time hasn't gone that fast?! Anyway, I shall give you a summary of what has happened since I last wrote...

A typical day:

7.30 Wake Up
8.20 Make sandwiches/get ready
8.29 Rush to bus
8.30 Get on bus
9.00 Go for warm up run
9.30 Meet trainer for day (normally Colin)
9.35 After a bit of banter with Gav start training
10.55 Get told I'm doing something wrong
11.00 Correct initial mistake but get told i'm doing something else wrong
12.00 Go for lunch and eat my home-made turkey and cheese ciabatta roll sandwiches
1.00 Meet up after lunch, give Gav some abuse.
1.05 Watch someone try to undo their pole straps after Gav has tied them together (he still finds it funny...)
1.06 Learn to do a silly trick on skis like a running two-footed jump into bindings or how to balance on the tips of your skiis.
1.10 Start training again
2.00 Get told by Colin that i'm still doing it wrong
2.15 Get stroppy with Colin for being too negative
2.45 Finally do something good and get told it's "nice" (about as much as you will get out of Colin in the way of a compliment!)
3.00 Hit the beginners' slopes for demo/teaching practice
3.30 End of training with de-brief from Colin. More abuse in Gav's direction, moan about Colin.
3.35 Go fo a final run, use the beginners' slopes to practice my backwards skiing, carving through the snow-ploughers using them as racing gates.
4.00 Bus home
4.30 Arrive home, eat/drink/shower
5.00 Rest/do lessonplan/go to town/have supper ect.
11.00 Bed

Last night was a bit different though, we decided to stay up on the mountain for night skiing which was good fun, although exceptionally cold. You get some amazing views though as the sun sets (see photos!) and it stays pretty light till about 6pm, although it keeps going untill 9pm as they have big floodlights over the mountain. Normally night skiing is quite a party but last night wasn't too busy as it was so windy and the snow wasn't really all that good. We did a few runs whilst it was bearable and then just went and sat inside but still had a good time.

Some of the photos are also from Heli-skiing which was a really good day out. We drove for a couple of hours to Wanaka which is another, somewhat smaller and quieter, town on a lake up north a bit. Here we got in the helicopters in our groups on 5 with our guide up to the snow (there is no snow at ground level here) and got to do 4 runs of powder skiing including a really good buffet lunch up the mountain. The snow here isn't fantastic and they don't get a huge amount of snowfall each season but there was enough to really enjoy ther experience and it was my first time in a helicopter (they are very cool... I think I want one!)

Oh Jesus, crocheting and teaching

Apologies to all my adoring fans who I have abandoned somewhat with the blog recently. It's partly my laziness and also that I have been quite busy and trying not to spend too much money on the internet recently.

I probably do have a lot to say, but will no doubt forget most of it so I shall try to fill you in as well as I can with what I can remember.

I have discovered a new hobby since I got here to kill a bit of time in the evenings. I've taken up crocheting beanie hats! it takes me about 3 hours to do a hat and then I give it/sell it to whoever wants it. The wool for each hat only costs around $10 ($3.50) so they're cheap and look quite resonable by the end. I quite like making them becuase in the evenings I can sit around the TV with the boys who are normally watching a film that I have little interest in and at least be partially sociable.

Skiing has improved a lot the last few days as it has snowed most evenings. It's rained a bit down in Queenstown, but the weather here is fine now, just a bit chilly. Got to do some good off-piste as well because of the conditions. Friday was really great weather so we spent a lot of the day just exploring bits of the mountain that we couldn't get to before. It was good to have Nat, our instructor, with us because she knows Coronet better than most! Managed to go over a jump that had briefly been pointed out to us on our first day too. Its name is 'oh jesus', which comes from a few years back when one of the instructors when over it and screamed 'oh shit' at the top. However, Coronet Peak didn't like having a jump with this name so forced the instrcutors to re-name it oh Jesus. Anyway, when you go over it you realise why it has that name. Everyone else in the group decided to just roll over the top slowly, but for some reason I thought I'd give it a go, and without much speed at all got projected about 4m in the air and about 15m from where I took off. It gave me a huge suprise, as i wasn't expecting to fly that far given my timid attempt at it, but I guess that is why it has its name. I managed to land it okay, but was then in so much shock that I decided to fall over, which was quite amusing. (End of boring ski talk for those not interested) Here are some photos from the off-piste I was doing, you can see the impressive scenery from the top of Coronet.



We've also been practicing our teaching for the exam on Tuesday which has been interesting. There is quite a lot to learn because there is a very specific progression we have to follow for introducing beginners to skiing. I did my practice teach on developing the gliding wedge which went pretty well, except for minor mistakes like making my students do straight runs down terrain that was too steep and had no run-out so they had no way of stopping. Nat just found it very funny that I had told everyone to stop infront of my poles that were on the ground and everyone just skied over them! Everyone in the group was actually very good, although most people made little mistakes like mine, which turned out to be pretty hysterical at the time, including one girl who told us to "look at the building behind your head' instead of 'look at the building behind my head.'

Getting technical...

We’ve had 3 days of free-skiing to practice what we were doing in the two days of training we had last week. The first day of training went fine, we were mainly doing balance exercises that I didn’t find too hard and managed to get the hang of. On Friday though we were doing lateral movement that I found somewhat more difficult, probably because I apparently had a completely stationary stance throughout the whole turn before. Anyway, I’ve spent the last few days trying very hard to get the hang of this flexing over the outside ski as you come into the turn (but the flex must be from the waste not from the knees). The point of this is so that you can get onto your edges earlier to make nice carving turns and so you transfer your weight early in the turn. I found this difficult to master even with loads of exercises aimed at you getting to tilt you body slightly. Part of the difficulty is that it is a very subtle movement so it's hard to know if you are doing it right or not. We've got training tomorrow so no doubt I will find out then.

If you think the above is dull you should try reading out ski instructors' manual.

The perks of the job (or in my case, being a trainee)

1) Being the best skiers on the slopes.

2) Being able to criticize the people with 'all the gear but no idea'.

3) Get to jump queues at the lifts because they have a special queue for us.

4) 30% off all your ski hardware.

5) 15% off everything else at ski shops.

6) When they tune your skis they do it well because they know you will know if they haven't.

Not all of these apply yet, seeing as I am only 2 days in, but I'm starting to realize there are a number of advantages to spending a lot of time in the resort. I'm going skiing in a few minutes, no training till Wednesday but need to get some good practice in and I want to try the new equipment!

Watched the rugby last night at a pub in town. I'm not the biggest fan of Rugby, but there are lots of Aussies here so it was a good atmosphere.

My nice new equipment:

The Long Awaited Post (by my reading audience of 3 anyway)

Apologies for the lack of updates. I guess there is an element of the novalty wearing off, but i've also been rather busy recently and had lots of stuff to sort out/do.

I'll fill you in briefly on Wellington; it's much nicer than Auckland, kinda like a mini-London I think I would say. Lot's of shops and good nightlife. Hostel was fine, although only really got to spend one day there because of how the transport in and out worked out.

Got a short flight down to Queenstown on a little 90 seater plane. They have no security whatsoever on internal flights so you arrive around 30 minutes before you take-off to check-in and pretty much walk straight onto the plane. They didn't check my passport once. The flight over the southern alps is very impressive and at one point you actually fly right through the mountains.

Queenstown is a very nice town, much more upmarket than anywhere I went in North Island, but that also makes it very expensive. I went out for a curry with Amy the Irish girl last night and it cost us $60 (around £25) for two, but when you consider that we had the most basic meal possible, that's quite expensive. I've normally been paying around $15 for a meal when travelling around.

The ski training is pretty tough. We have 3 days of lessons a week, and so far we've had two days. Even in that short space of time though I can feel that my skiing has improved lots, which is good. Haven't got any more lessons for 4 more days so will probably have a days rest before we go off skiing on our own without the instructors. The accommodation is good too. Fairly basic, as was expected, but certainly adequate for the 11 of us that are there. In my chalet there are 10 guys and me (although I do have my own room!) They're all very pleasant people and we tend to cook as a group and eat together which is good, and cheaper.

I'll leave you with some photos of the architecture in Naper (which I should have uploaded a long time ago!) To remind you... the city was destroyed in an earthquake in 1931 and so was rebuilt in an art-deco style which the council maintain very well today. There are quite a few art-deco stores too and the dress is one I found in a shop that I thought was quite good fun! I bought myself a cool purse from the same shop that is in the shape of a bunch of grapes but the pattern is from beads (quite appropriate because napier is wine country).

Back to civilisation

Well, i'm here in Wellington and it feels good to be back to a settlement with a population greater than 30,000. I had forgotton just how (comparatively) dead the rest of north island is until we drove into Wellington, and through surrounding towns. To give you an idea, the main highway that goes from Auckland to Wellington is single lane until about 30 minutes outside of Wellington, and this is a major road!
Wellington itself is not all that huge, I think i managed to walk across the main shopping area in about 30 minutes earlier, but it is certainly more bustling than anywhere else I have been so far, and much nicer than Auckland which is a bit of a dump.
Not sure what my plans are for tomorrow, hopefully will upload some pictures of Napier that I took this morning for you.

She survives the prison

Yesterday I got a coach down from Taupo to Napier. The weather has deteriorated somewhat although it's not as cold, just rather cloudy. Napier is a very interesting town, rather like something out of a disney movie. They town was distroyed in an earthquake in the 1940s and so was rebuilt in an art-deco style which it retains today. It certainly makes the town a very unique place. It's also on the coast so there are some great views out to see and it is the wine country of New Zealand so as you drive in their are numerous vineyards.

I spent last night in a converted prison up on a hill about a 5 minute walk from the centre of napier. It only ceased being a prison in 1992 so a fair amount of it is authentic; all the buildings are still how they used to be.





"The yard"
Although it wasn't the most modern backpackers i have stayed in, it actually turned out to be one of the best ones. Becuase it's only 50 beds (and only 12 were occupied last night) it's very friendly and easy to sit in 'the yard' in the evening and all talk together. Even the showers were quite good, outside so cold, but the water was very hot and came out pretty powerfully! I didn't actually stay in one of the cells, instead I was in one of the administration buildings just outside the cells which was a big dorm.

They used to do executions at the prison and the 'hanging yard' has now been converted into the place where you dry your laundry!

I've got a couple of hours to wander round napier before my 5 hour bus down to Wellington where i'm spending the next couple of days before my flight down to Queenstown on Wednesday. Hopefully i'll upload some pictures of Napier later as there certainly is some very interesting architecture!

Post Hike

I finished it, all 18km of it and they don't call it a hard walk for nothing! We got the bus at 6.20 this morning and headed for the hour journey over to the national park, and on the bus we got all kitted out with our boots and crampons.

The walk start off fairly tame, a slightly ascending path into the mountains, but quickly becomes more rocky and requires a fair bit of actual climbing to keep moving along the path. After about 2 hours we stopped for our first break.



After the break we were warned the next part was called Hell's staircase (or something similar), a rather apt name given that it was to be like this below for the next 45 minutes, and this photo is only the beginning, it got a lot more steep.




This is me at the top of the first climb. In total it is a 400m vertical ascent, but more practically it is 45 minutes of very difficul and physical walking on very rocky ground.




You can see the snow starting to appear at this height, quickly after the path became complete snow and so the crampons come out. Crampons are these funky things you stick to the bottom of your shoes to give yourself better grip.

More to come later!

Unlucky for some...

Oh, and for all you superstitious people out there it is Friday the 13th and i'm still okay. I even took a coach this morning. Didn't want to risk a skydive though.

Tales from Taupo

So here I am in Taupo, a rather up-market town (for NZ standards) on Lake Taupo. It was only an hour on the coach this morning so i'm not too far from Rotorua. All checked into the Hostel which is nice enough, but the atmosphere is kind of ruined by angry signs everywhere saying things like "NOBODY ELSE WILL DO YOUR WASHING UP FOR YOU" and "IF YOU DO NOT DATE YOUR FOOD WE WILL THROW IT AWAY". I can't help but think all these warnings (there are many) could be phrased in a somewhat more welcoming way. Taupo is pretty beautiful though, as you can see from the photos below.


Huka falls. The coach stopped on the way into Taupo so we could have a look. It's very impressive, not so much because it is a steep decline but because of the huge volume of water that passes through it.


Before I forget, one of the chaps who i went rafting with bought all the photos they took (they wanted $40 for them which I though was a rip-off) and becuase they were on a disk, gave them to me. Here are some for you, on some you can play "spot the Lou". I'll give you a clue-i'm near the back of the boat!


The 7m waterfall!! It wasn't actually as scary as it sounds but I did get very wet and cold.



I haven't really done much today other than walk around Taupo and buy a nice warm hat. i'm made a fairly major plan for tomorrow though, I'm going to do the Tongariro Crossing, a 17km (just over 10 mile) trek across the national park. Apparently it is the best one-day Trek in New Zealand so i've got the camera all prepared. It's a difficult walk in Winter, and you need to take a guide with you as well as hire crampons and an ice pick (how cool!) and it should take about 8 hours of walking. I've bought my lunch (lots of biscuits) and hopefully will have enough warm clothes. They lend you any extra exquipment you need. I think it's about an hour drive to the national park, but the pick-up is at 6.20 so i'm going to have to be up at around half five! Hopefully the day after tomorrow will be my first propper lie-in since I got here.

No plans for this evening, probably just an early night to prepare for the trek tomorrow! I'll let you all know how it goes when I get back (hopefully around 6pm).

Tongariro Crossing: http://www.tongarirocrossing.org.nz/

A day of two halves

survived the white-water rafting! Including a plunge over a 7m waterfall (the largest you can do in the world!), I have come out of the experience unscathed! It was absolutely freezing, and even the physical exercise didn't warm me up all that much. It was good fun though, we drove to a river about 30 minutes out of Rotorua for the rafting and we were on the river for about an hour. It was good to get back in the bus to the wamth at the end of it though!

I had lunch at an Italian cafe which was good and much appreciated after my early morning rafting trip!

Anyway, this afternoon was a great contrast to the adrenaline of this morning. We went down to the Polynesian Spa which is a spa with lots of pools from the geothermal springs. It smells of the sulphur (everything here does!) but the water is lovely and warm and it was a wonderful relaxing contrast to the beginning of the day. The pools are all outside and it is very cold here (but sunny!) so it is so nice to sit in the hot water and feel the breeze from the lake. You get an amazing view from the pools too. I'm sure they have lots of supposed health benefits too, although from what I can tell all they do is make your swimsuit smell very bad. We spent about an hour here before heading off for a walk around town.

I’m feeling a little bit lost at the moment as they girl I have spent most of my time with over the last 3 days has headed off back to Auckland for her flight down to Queenstown. Amy's from Dublin (there has been a noted improvement in my Irish accent) and has been making her way around the world for the last 4 months. She should be in Queenstown for the next week so I hopefully will see her when I make it down there and I’ve offered her a ski lesson!

There are quite a few amusing things that I’ve seen/done over the last few days, which I’ll try to relay but I suspect there will be a large element of 'you had to be there.' I've managed to leave the dorm key in the door on two occasions in the last two days and on both time I’ve got into a paddy over thinking I’ve lost it (and with it my $10 deposit.) They also have these really funky pedestrian crossings here where not only does the green man actually walk, but they also count down the seconds you have till the cars come charging towards you! One of the funniest things I have seen though was the video they show you on the plane about all the bio security controls you have to go through. Firstly they make you sign all these forms saying you haven't touched a cow for years and haven't inadvertently hidden a grape inside your hiking boots as these would both be a great threat to the national security of the fauna over here. Anyway, on the video they have a girl who goes through all the stages saying she has nothing until she gets to the X-ray machine and it flashed wildly and they decide to search her bag, and, what do they pull out? A huge great pineapple! As if someone could accidentally bring in a pineapple that took up her whole backpack and must have weighed a few kilos... Maybe it would have been more believable if someone had inadvertently brought in an apple from their bag! (i think maybe you need to watch the video to fully appreciate the hilarity of it!)

Tomorrow I leave at 8.15 for Taupo that is only about an hour away. Not sure what I’m going to do here, no doubt it will involve spending lots of money though! I've gotta go now as Starbucks in closing!

The photos...

Louise Meets the Maoris

Yesterday was a rather eventful day. I'll start with the main reason Rotorua is famous, which is the geothermal activity. The town does smell of sulphur pretty strongly, although it's okay where our hostel is because we're a bit away from the lake which is the main place where it absolutely stinks (and it really does). We had a walk around the lake which is white and looks like its full of chalk.


We spent most of the morning walking around the lake and trying not to choke on the smell and then at half six we headed off for our trip to a Maori village just outside of Rotorua. It is set up entirely for the tourists, but I get the impression it's the closest I could get to a real village. They take you there on coaches and then you get to watch a few shows and listen to them talk about various aspects of Maori life. It is quite tourist-y, but I've heard from people who have seen similar things about the Aborigines in Australia and they say this was a much better performance. After the show and the walk around the village you get an meal cooked in the ground. It's basically like our roast, but you get to eat as much as you like and the food it very good (and warm, which is appreciated after 2 hours outside in the cold) and then after the meal we got a coach back at around 10.30.

The coach journey down from Auckland goes through the Waikato region, which is basically farmland. We drove through a couple of towns, but most of the journey is just green fields with lots of cows and sheep. It's looks remarkably like England though, which is a little bit odd. We did drive through one town which had a big sign welcoming people to "hobbiton" with Matamata written underneath. I just assumed that Matamata was the original Maori name and that Hobbiton was just the settlers' name for it. Seeing as the journey was fairly dull, I was looking up each of the towns in the guide book to see what their claim to fame was, although i couldn't find Hobbiton, despite it clearly being of a reasonable size. So, I looked up Matamata to see if that was there, and of course it was and I discovered that it is the town where Lord of the Rings was filmed and the set was for the village of Hobbiton in the film. (which explains why Hobbiton was not in the guide book) My Lord of the Rings ignorance is very clear! The town still keeps quite a lot of the Lord of the Rings influence because it is the only place where the film set still stands and there are lots of tours around the sets for the fans.

I leave for White water rafting in a minute and it's still pretty cold outside so I'm glad they give you wet suits!
(photos won't upload, I'm tired of waiting, hopefully will load them up later!)

On the road to Rotorua

So, it's very early in the morning (still jetlagged) and i'm just taking a break from getting ready to head to Rotorua, a very geothermal town about a 4 hour drive away. I've booked a package where i've got 2 nights' accommodation, a trip to a geothermal spa, a morning white-water rafting and then an evening in Maori Village when you see a performance and get to eat lots of food. That's this evening, so if I can get to a computer later hopefully I will update you on that. The rafting is tomorrow, when the weather is forcast to get better. I'm quite looking forward to my first white-water rafting experience!

My post yesterday was rather succinct, mainly because I was so tired and having trouble typing! Hope you liked the photos, as you can see the weather wasn't great, although it was okay for a bus tour. Still quite cold, but it's stopped raining which is better. I'll head out for breakfast in a bit, i've found a place next door where for $6 (around $2.50)I can get hash browns and a good bacon buttie!

Auckland is much like any other city, it has a few buildings of note and plenty of shops, but not much else to do. The bus tour was good though as I wouldn't have been able to see my first ever volcano without it, or some of the other interesting places just outside the city. If you see the picture you may agree with me in feeling that the volcano itself was a little anti-climatic, but I guess that's just what a volcano that has been dormant for thousands of years looks like! There's quite an interesting story about the volcano though; you are not allowed to walk inside it because in a Maori battle many years ago a great chief was stabbed in the back, a huge insult, and his body was left on the site of the battle, so to the Maoris it is a very sacred site. I have been told that at the end of this year they are closing access to the site (and the views that go with it!) becuase they are fed up of people walking in the volcano which is such an insult to them. [culture lesson over]

We also saw the sky tower on the tour, which is the highest construction in the southern hemisphere (as I said yesterday!). Quite a lot of things here seem to be described by a superlative followed by 'in the southern hemisphere.' It seems to give the impression that the only country they compete with is Australia, and that everything else is more impressive in the northern hemisphere!

The flight was as enjoyable as a 26 hour flight can be. The stop-over in LA turned out to be okay though as we got unlimited drinks and food for 2 hours!

I can't immediately think of anything else to write right now, but hopefully this evening I will have some more photos to show you. I might also be feeling quite ill-apparently Rotorua absolutely stinks from all the sulphur!

Greetings from Auckland

So, I'm in Auckland. It's raining, and a bit cold but all is well. I went on a free bus tour this morning and saw a few of the sights of the city so here are some photos for you.

First we stopped off to see the bridge. I had though about climbing it but given that it was raining and rather grey I thought it best to view it from the warmth of the coach, just popping outside for the obligatory photo!

We saw one of the three volcanos in the city this morning, which is 20 metres higher than the sky tower (which is the highest structure in the southern hemisphere!) which is where the picture of me was taken. It was the most windy place I have ever been to, I was almost too scared to take my camera out (even more windy than the place we used to get the Mr. Whippys in Cornwall, mum!) but it gives you an amazing view of all around the city.


We also went to the harbour where the America's Cup was held. The photo ahead is of two of the boats from the race a few years back, I think it is the french boat and the japanese one (not sure). That bit of Auckland is one of the nicer parts because the Americas Cup brings with it a slightly higher class of tourist than the ones staying in the hostels!

The hostel is very nice and everyone i've met has been very friendly. I'm rather jetlagged but i shall keep going until tonight.

I'll probably write a longer post soon, but at the moment i'm a bit too tired to write, hopefully I will write about everything else that has happened later.

Cindarella must go to the ball

It's T minus 14, the eagle is flying at dawn and it's code blue in Gosmore. I depart for fine Heathrow tomorrow, and the packing is fully underway!
It was the leavers' ball last night, a fairly momentus event for us Rugbians and all went well. I don't have any particularly good photos of us; out of nine it is inevitable that one would be looking the wrong way! I do however have one reasonable one from before we all got in the pumpkin.

Departure Day minus 11

So, the day of my departure from the fine land looms ominously just over a week away, and in between I shall pass a week in Zante braving temperatures in excess of 35 celcius. Bring on the snow!
The packing is still far from being complete, and infact has barely started. At least I shall have the morning before I leave to sort all that stuff out. Anyway, it's 11 weeks, packing will be easy; i'll just take everything...
For those who are pondering over the slightly unusual name of the blog, there is, of course, an explanation behind it. As a quick bit of research led me to find out, the European first man to sight New Zealand went by the name of Abel Tasman, which leads nicely onto the name the abel taswoman.