Finally another update!!

So I have been doing a terrible job keeping up with this blog!!  This is my second post & I've been here for just about 11 weeks.  I think it's a good thing tho because it means I've been busy :)  Lots has happened since I last posted in January!  I'll try to briefly sum up what I've been up to since then.

After a day or so in Dunedin, Nate & I drove up to Christchurch for his last few days in NZ.  We had a hard time finding a place to stay at first in the city, as it is still recovering from the devastating earthquake last February.  So we ended up heading to a town on the coast nearby.  Drove out to Castle Hill, a pretty sweet bouldering spot west of Christchurch.  Very different climbing from Pawtuckaway!  It looks like another planet.  We met up with a couple friends of a friend out there, and they showed us around and gave us a place to crash in Christchurch!

Nate left the next day for the states, and the following day I met up with a friend from UNH, Eian.  We each had about 2 weeks left to travel.  We headed to Arthur's Pass up in the mountains, it was pretty chilly at night even in January!  Saw a couple kea there - New Zealand's alpine parrot.  Stopped in Wanaka and Queenstown again on our way south - two of my favorite places here - and did a few day hikes.  Went to the Queenstown gardens where they have a sweet frisbee golf course and a Monkey Puzzle tree, super funky tree.  Eian bungy jumped and we visited the Gibbston winery.

Continuing south, we drove down to Invercargill, which is the site of the story of "The World's Fastest Indian" movie.  It's also in the 'roaring forties' latitude range, so the weather there was a bit rainier and windier.  It also stayed light out until after 9pm.  We were WWOOFing (working on a farm in exchange for room & board) for about 5 days at a small scale dairy farm, run by Sherry and Jeff.  They sell raw milk and make cheese, yogurt, butter, etc.  Sherry is also a nutritionist, and she had some interesting perspectives.  They do a lot of fermented food, like sauerkraut and kombucha, and occasionally they do raw milk diets for a few days at a time.  We had a lot of interesting conversations.  They also play ukulele and Jeff is learning guitar, so we had some great jams!  Lots of Bob Dylan.  We had to work for about 4 hours a day, which entailed removing ragwort from the pastures.  Felt good to be doing some work after 4 weeks of basically vacationing!  We spent the afternoons exploring Invercargill and one day we drove out to the southernmost point of the South Island - closer to the South Pole than to the equator!  It was gorgeous but incredibly windy!   Also went to a petrified forest.  Invercargill is a more industrial city but has a cute downtown, a nice museum, and more rose gardens.  On our way north when we finished the week WWOOFing, we stopped at the factory for Deep South, one of NZ's ice cream companies.  Apparently they don't get visitors often because they were so excited we had stopped there that they gave us a bunch of free ice cream!!  Invercargill is also the home of the Backcountry camping food company.  Also stopped at a moonshine museum, NZ had a pretty long history of prohibition.  Drove back up to Christchurch for Eian's flight home, and I had a few days before I had to fly up to Auckland to meet the EcoQuest group!  Stayed with the climbers from Castle Hill again and they took me surfing, started to get the hang of it eventually!  

EcoQuest is the study abroad program I am doing here, a combination of classes and fieldwork, and for the last month of it we do a Directed Research Project.  I flew from Christchurch to Auckland on Feb. 1 and found the other 25 people in the group in the international terminal.  Got settled in at campus, which is near a small town (= one gas station, a fish and chips place, and a pub/hotel) named Kaiaua.  It's right on the Firth of Thames, and you can see the mountains on the Coromandel Peninsula across the bay, it's so pretty.  We can go kayaking right in the backyard basically.  Very peaceful place to be living!  The program is very focused on group living and learning, and we're in these dorm room 'cabins' I guess is the best way to put it.  I have been playing a lot of guitar here!  A few other musicians in the group which is awesome :)

So we spent about a week here then went to a place called Opoutere for a week to learn about estuary ecology/issues and take part in an ongoing shellfish survey.  It was a pretty rainy week but we did get out and do some kayaking on a nice afternoon.  That weekend a bunch of the girls in the group and I drove up the Coromandel Peninsula, stopping at a couple of small towns and then Cathedral Cove, one of the most amazing beaches I've ever been to.  Had perfect weather that weekend.  We each have to do a 10 minute presentation throughout the course of the semester, and it was my turn for that during the Opoutere week, so I got that out of the way!  Had to talk about the impacts of excessive sedimentation on estuaries.

We had another week in Kaiaua with lectures and assignments and whatnot, then left for a week studying marine ecology at the Leigh Marine Reserve, the first marine reserve in the world.  Auckland University has a campus up there, and we did some fish and kina (sea urchin) surveys both inside and outside of the reserve.  We had a lecture from Roger Grace, who has done a lot of long-term studies of the effects of the reserve, and then a discussion with a couple of local recreational fishers.  Fisheries & marine protection is a super complex, overwhelming issue to try to tackle, lots of conflicting interests.  The reserve has been really effective though and has the potential to benefit fish stocks outside of the reserve as well.  Roger said that a lot of fishers will sit on the boundary of the reserve because there tend to be more, larger fisher coming out of it.  Friday of that week we were fortunate enough to go up to the Poor Knights Island, which Jacques Cousteau put in his top 10 list of dive sites in the world....really hard to describe it here, but it was incredible.  The clearest, bluest water I've ever seen!  Those islands get a warmer current from off of Australia, so some more tropical species are able to survive here.  Lots of corals, seaweeds, anemones, ah it was so awesome!  I can't wait to develop my one-time underwater camera.  Here is a photo one of our instructors took.  Poor Knights is a no-take marine reserve as well, and being able to visit it even just for a day made me really glad that some people took the initiative to ensure its protection.  Really great experience.

Had a super fun weekend in the Northland following the week in Leigh with my friends Molly, Carla, Ian, and Andrew.  We picked up a car Friday and drove to a campground in Whangarei Falls.  The next day we went to the Abbey Caves right down the road and walked through one of the caves there, which has glowworms in it!  Right next to the cave is an area of forest with a ton of cool rocks, reminded me of a small scale Castle Hill.  Then Molly and I went to a kiwi house at a nearby museum and watched one of the kiwis for a while.  They are really hard to see in the wild, both because they aren't super widespread anymore, and because they're nocturnal.  Very evolutionarily goofy creatures.  We drove up to the Waipoua Forest, an area with lots of old Kauri trees!  We got to see 'Tane Mahuta,' the oldest (1200-2000 years old, somewhere in there) Kauri tree in New Zealand!  Very impressive and amazing to think about how many people have seen it, and what it used to be like a thousand years ago.

Camped out that night right next to a kiwi reserve, so that night we walked around trying to spot kiwis!  We definitely smelled a few, and heard one really close but couldn't see it! (They have a really pungent smell, so it's easier to smell than see them).  The next day we got up early and drove up to a sand dune and went sand surfing.  Like sledding on a boogieboard, on sand.  It was high tide so we skimmed right over the ocean for a bit!  Really fun.  Got back to EcoQuest and had to study for our midterm.  Since we have the month-long project, the semester is only about 10 weeks long, so the midterm seemed really early.  Just working on assignments the rest of the week, and Sunday we are leaving for the South Island!  Internet here on campus is fairly limited so I can't post tons of photos, but I will try to add some more periodically.