Ok. So, it's been about a month since I last wrote and so much has happened! My papers have really begun to get underway and tests/essays are flooding in. We're coming to the end of the sixth week of classes and we have a two week teaching recess coming up. Some friends are going down to the Southern Alps to get some skiing in, while others are trying to head to Fiji for a few days in the sun (totally opposite ideas, really).

I plan to stay in the North Island for further exploration of this awesome place. Beginning tomorrow, I'll first be going to my friend, Hannah's house on the East Coast for a few days of beach, horses, what-I-would-call mountains and relaxing. When I come back to good ol' Uni, Ashleigh, who's from the Chicago area, and I are going to be heading to the Coromandel Peninsula, also on the East Coast. We might try to go way up north to the 90 Mile Beach before heading to Amanda's parent's house for the last weekend of the break. I'm pretty excited about taking a break from school and getting out of Hamilton.

During the last four weekends, I've been blessed in being able to travel to four different parts of the North Island. Two of the adventures were field trips for my Geochemistry class and two were simply for the pure enjoyment of going.

The first was a weekend-long field trip to the geothermal fields in the Rotorua and Lake Taupo area. We spent two days in the rain taking water samples from mud pools, hot springs, steaming lakes and the Waikato river (a volcanic basin lake that runs from Taupo to the sea via Hamilton) and smelling of rotten eggs.

It was amazing! Definitely one of the best trips that I've had to date. When we finally arrived at our cabin, Annie, the lab technician for the class, had a three course (hot) meal waiting for us. We got to swim in the resort's hot pools and have a tutorial of the day's work. Also, because we were no longer technicially on our field trip for the day, they also provided us with wine and beer, because the chemistry department and all of its student's have a healthy appreciation for alcohol.

Next weekend, my friends and I traveled down to Lake Taupo again and spent the weekend relaxing on the beach. I wanted to go Bungi jumping, because Lake Taupo has a famous jump and the sport was invented here in New Zealand after all. However, no one would go with me and well, its one of those things that I would definitely want to experience with someone else. They seemed to be of the opinion that Sky Diving would be less frightening... I don't get it, but alright.

It's a beautiful town and we seemed to have a propensity that weekend for climbing things...

The first weekend of August, my Geochem class went out for it's final field trip. This time we went to Miranda, a tiny bird-watching town on the East Coast. We first tramped through some soaked peat bogs and of course, one of my gum boots has a crack in it's lining. :O) One foot was nice and cozy while the other was quickly flooded with 12 degree C water. The wet foot aside, I'm continously amazed at New Zealand's landscape. There are hills and mountains anywhere that you look and they're mostly covered with sheep and dairy cows. My camera has been filled on more than one occasion with simply what's outside the car window when driving through the countryside.

Anyways, when we arrived in Miranda, we went to a bird watching/information building where a guy talked to us for over an hour about the birds that come to this region of New Zealand and of their migratory patterns all the way up to Alaska and northern Asia (some fly to Alaska in one go!). He also showed us birds that make Miranda unique, like this one bird who's beak is curved to the left! Such a weird thing to see, but apparanently they use the beak to dig under rocks to catch their food. After eating lunch there and air-drying my feet, we went through a bog that came up to the top of our gum boots and often threatened to remove them for us due to the amazing sticking power of the mud. Our destination was the shoreline on the other side of the bogs and bushland. The tramping was all worth it when we finally got to the beach area because, from the waterline and back to the bushland, the entire ground was covered in thousands of shells that spanned the shoreline for as far as one could see and was a few feet deep.

After taking some water samples from the sea, my teacher suggested that we walk to beach awhile. So off we went and while the guys were stomping along, hoping to crush the biggest shells under their feet, the girls were walking along slowly trying to find the most beautiful shells to take home with us. By the end of the walk, my jean pockets and all the pockets in my two coats were filled with shells that I just had to have. I think I may have gone a bit over board now, but I'm beginning to have quite a collection of sea glass and shells from all my travels to the coastal beaches on the North Island.

Last weekend, Amanda (Canadian), Susi (German), Aishah (American) and myself rented a car in Hamilton and headed down to New Plymouth and Mt. Taranaki on the southern West Coast of the North Island. Though the rest are all older than myself, I seemed to be the one with the most cofidence behind the wheel and was thus asked to drive the whole trip. Man oh man, was I a happy camper! It was such a cool experience to drive on the wrong side of the road and only the first twenty minutes of so (when we were still in downtown Hamilton) were truly terrifying. I'm proud to say that I only drove on the right side (their wrong side) of the road once and quickly mended my mistake. I had Amanda, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, yell "Far lane Laura, far lane!" whenever I was making a right turn, so we made a pretty good team.

We spent the first morning on New Plymouth's gorgeous Fityroy beach before heading to Chaddy Charters for a boat trip out to the Sugar Loaf Marine Reserve. When we arrived, we were met by a very chatty skipper who calls everyone sweetheart and talks endlessly. The sky was pretty cloudy, but we all thought that we had dressed appropriately in jeans and rainjackets. Boy, were we wrong. The skipper and captain gave us huge life jackets that were then covered in oversized yellow raincoats and rainpants, saying that it can get a bit wet out on the water.

We then walked into the next room where I then realized that we had just boarded the boat and we were in a boat garage of sorts. The skipper told us the boat was an English lifeboat and if we flipped during the ride, just hold onto the boat and it'll flip back over in under 15 seconds. We all stared at each other wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. One of the men opened the garage door and another released the cable holding the boat in place and we zipped 30+ feet down a ramp to the water... a bit of a roller coaster ride, one could say, which should have prepared us for the ride ahead. Inside the harbor, the water wasn't too choppy, but it was getting progressively worse. By the time we were on the open the sea, the waves had escalated to 20-30 foot swells, so it felt more like a roller coaster ride than a pleasant, relaxing boat ride. It was awesome. We were all hanging on for dear life to whatever we could grab, getting face fulls of sea water and loving every minute of it. The boat would rock so violently or crest a wave and slam down to the trough that we were, more often than not, unseated and slidding around a bit. Amanda and Aishah probably had the right idea in trying to stay in one place and shielding their faces with their hoods, but Susi and I on the other side simply knelt on the benches, leaning over the edge, and watched every wave coming at us. The whole point of the trip was to go to the Sugar Loaf Islands and see a ful seal colony there. We saw them for about 2 minutes out of the whole hour long ride, but I would definitely say that the trip in getting to the islands and coming back was the best part of the whole weekend.

We then went back to the hostel to change. I was definitely the wettest out of the bunch, because so much water had gone down my jacket that my shirts and pants were totally soaked. After lunch we traveled back to the beach and went to the area's rain forest gardens. Then, being the romantic girls that we unabashedly are, we bought some pizza and drove to Oakura, another beach town that was got its name from the Maori words for "red sky" or "beautiful sunsets", to watch the sunset. Though the sunset wasn't spectacular (it was mostly behind clouds), it was quite gorgeous and we had a great time huddling together and trying to stay warm. The next morning we got up early and headed to Mt. Taranaki to do a 3 hour hike. When we got there, the information lady looked at our small packs, light raincoats and tennis shoes, and kindly suggested that a less involved 2 hour hike might be a better plan. We took her advice and were soon tramping up and down stairs in the heart of a green forest and headed for the lookout of Mt Taranaki's summit, which is covered in the only snow that I've seen since coming to New Zealand-in-the-winter. We definitely got a workout that day and were pretty wet by the time we reached the lookouts because the slopes/stairs were covered in water/mud puddles and it rained quite bit. It felt quite rewarding to finally reach the lookout and see the summit and see where we had begun and the surrounding country. We also ended up driving to the other side of the mountain (about 45 minutes away) and climbed to see the beautiful Dawson Falls before coming back to Hamilton.

Though New Plymouth was only 220 km from Hamilton, which should have taken about 2.5 hours to drive, the roads were SO windy and hilly (we were driving through and over mountains) that it took over 3.5 hours to get there and I felt as though I was driving one of those racing games where you're continously turning the wheel back and forth to stay on the road. It was such a great trip and I was extremely reluctant to give back the carkeys when we finally got back to Hamilton on Sunday.

It may sound like school is a small priority, I am actually getting some work done and am learning heaps about the environment and culture of New Zealand. The New Zealanders have an incredible appreciatation for their land and the ocean, because that is where they derive their resources from. They rely heavily on sheep and daily farming, along with mining, for their income and through my Geochemistry paper and my Anthropology paper, I've been able to see what that's doing to their local communities and how these exploitations are changing the environment of the land.