A Visit from the Aussies and Running the Routeburn!

I'm now almost two months behind schedule, and I have no excuses. I think I left off about mid April, right after G & G Lerner visited me.

The weekend after they left, Josh and Pierre's friends, who were studying abroad in Australia, came to visit. Brian and Sam came on Friday, and Tyler came on Saturday. It was crummy weather all weekend, and they all had plans to explore the South Island the following week, so we decided to hang around Dunedin and show them the sights. We went to the farmer's market and ate some crepes and went to the Cadbury factory with the intentions of doing the tour, but it looked lame, so we just bought some chocolate from the gift shop instead. Then we went to the Otago Museum for a while, which was awesome. The highlight was a butterfly exhibit where we entered a greenhouse-like room filled with plants and thousands of butterflies!

The next day, Pierre took his friends to the Otago peninsula to see some sights for the afternoon while I did some studying (yep). That night, Pierre, Brian, Sam, and I (I forget what Josh and Tyler were doing) went to an Indian restaurant for dinner before heading to the Speights Brewery for a brewery tour. It was a lot of fun - especially the end, when they gave us free reign on the taps of all their different beers. Special thanks to Sherry for chauffeuring!

On Sunday, Brian and Sam left for Queenstown to bungee jump and mountain bike and whatnot, while Tyler decided to tag along with us (fortunately, he's an experienced Settler). Unfortunately, I didn't take many/any pictures this weekend...

Anways, on Thursday, Pierre, Josh, Tyler, and I left for Queenstown. It was ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) day - like our Memorial Day- on Thursday, so classes were cancelled (count it). We got Fergburger, obviously, met up with Brian and Sam again, and enjoyed Scrumpy on the beach. Then we bid farewell to Brian and Sam that night as they were leaving us the next morning. The next morning, Pierre, Josh, Tyler, and I hung out in Queenstown a bit more and enjoyed the nice weather. We rented some frisbee golf clubs (they're just small frisbees) and ended up playing 36 holes! For those of you less familiar with frisbee golf, it's just like regular golf, but you throw a frisbee instead, and the hole is like... I can't describe it actually. It looks like this. The course was on a beautiful peninsula, too, so it was a blast. I'm not going to say who won, but the fact that I'm even writing "I'm not going to say who won" should probably give you an idea. And you call yourself a frisbee player, Josh.

That afternoon, we drove near Te Anu, not far from Milford Sound, and a found a beautiful campsite on a lake. We got there after dark, but we enjoyed a full moon rise over the mountains.

Note: Tyler is big into photography, so he documented this weekend... hopefully he puts his pictures on facebook soon so I can steal them. Otherwise, I apologize for the lack of pictures this post... there are a ton more to come in future posts, I promise.

Anyways, the next morning, Josh and Tyler dropped off Pierre and I at the Divide, the trailhead to the Routeburn Track. We decided it would be fun to turn the 32 km (20 mile) Great Walk into a Great Run! We started the run with our backpacks, running shoes, smoked chicken salad, and an awful weather forecast. I didn't bring my camera because the weather looked so crummy, so these were the only pictures of us this weekend:

Hour and a half? Ha! Took us 45 minutes to get to the Howden Hut.

Our goals for the day: Pierre: finishing in under six hours; Me: finishing with four healthy ankles. Just after 9 am, we were off! We kept a decent pace, and were happy to find that we could cut down the estimated times by over 50%. It started raining pretty early on and didn't stop. When we got to Howden Hut, we checked the forecast again: snow and 100+ km/hr winds at the Saddle at 1 pm. It was 9:45 am, and the sign said four hours to the Saddle: challenge accepted. The next two hours we ran mostly along a ridge line with craaaazy winds (not 100 km/hr, but we estimated around 80) and freezing rain. We got a lot of strange looks as we jogged by people wearing shorts, but we kept warm just by running. We got to the Saddle (just past the halfway point) before noon, fortunately, and not long after, we passed our friends Jay and Joe running the opposite direction as us. We had originally planned to run with these guys, but they had some car trouble on the way to Queenstown which messed up the plans. It was great to see them, though; it definitely lifted the spirits and whatnot. After the Saddle, the rain and wind let up a bit, and we cruised to the Routeburn Falls Hut, under 10k from the end. The last 8k or so was the easiest part - a flat, extremely well-maintained 'sidewalk'- and we were on pace to break five and a quarter hours, complete with four healthy ankles.

Then after the 25k of wet, rocky, mountainous, elevation-packed terrain, I rolled my ankle pretty badly on the flat ground and had to walk the last 7k, thus putting our finishing time just over six hours. So that kind of sucked.

Regardless, the shelter at the Queenstown end of the Routeburn was a very welcomed site, and besides my ankle, we were feeling great. I guess our feet had seen better days, too. We hitched a ride to Queenstown on a coach bus with a school group from China and their American teacher, a nice fellow about our age. We found a hostel, and after day dreaming about a hot tub throughout the run, we discovered that our hostel had one. No words can describe how awesome that hot tub was.

We treated ourselves to deep-dish pizza and a beer in Queenstown before we passed out for the night. On a side note, we recently read in the news that Fat Badgers, the pizza place, started the largest fire in Queenstown in the last six years and burned almost completely to the ground. The next morning, we walked to Frankton, which ended up being further than we thought (~5 miles) and began hitchhiking. After about an hour, we got picked up by a nice middle-aged woman we drove us for about an hour to Alexandra. She worked as an apricot and cherry farmer. We actually picked up three more hitchhikers before she dropped us off ("I have an empty mini van, why shouldn't I fill it?"). Our next driver was a really nice man in his 60's or 70's, an ex-apricot and cherry farmer (apparently this area is full of them), who was now a big biker. He took us on a detour to show us some sights around Roxburgh, including part of his 50km bike trail that his volunteer group had made. It was a long wait until our next ride picked us up, a young guy who cut hedges as a living. He drove us for another hour or so. Our last ride was with a forty or so year old guy who worked as a consultant or something. He used to be an agent for one of the New Zealand All Blacks! He seemed very wealthy, and he told us that he now only does accepts job offers that he would normally do even if they didn't pay. He has a lot of time off of work. He also plays a lot of golf. He had some very interesting philosophies, and he drove us to Mosgiel, just outside of Dunedin, where Josh and Tyler picked us up. They had done a cruise on the Milford Sound.

The next weekend was Pierre's 21st birthday, so we had a barbecue, and hung out in Dunedin for the weekend. We also went to a bar to watch the Highlanders game with Josh, Stu, and Sherry, and the Highlanders won for the first time all year! Too little, too late, unfortunately. As of now their record is 2-11.

Okay, the next four weekends are packed full of photos and promise to come in a timely fashion.
Thanks for reading, and get ready for another post soon (maybe even later today...)!