going out on top

so the day after tackling tongariro crossing and mt. doom we decided to head to rotorua, where we could treat ourselves to some hot springs and get off the beaten path to learn about maori culture. so we found our "bus stop" and our first drivers were this really cute set of newlyweds who took us to taupo. we then took the shortest bus ride of our bussing career, a group of kiwis were looking for some waterfalls and they found said waterfalls approximately two city blocks after we boarded the bus. we off-boarded the bus and waited for another one to show.

enter luke. luke is a kiwi with blonde dreads down to his bum, quite possibly the most cruisy man on the entire planet. he offered to take us to rotorua and show us some hot springs along the way. he pulled over and took us to this swimming hole where a hot spring meets up with a mountain river. the resulting mixture was a delight, you could swim around to one side and be boiling up and then move a few feet over and into the cool stream. after a few hours we left the swimming hole for rotorua. after discovering that rotorua was a complete and utter tourist trap we decided to go camping. we set up camp at a beautiful remote lake and spent the night looking up at the ginormous sky and admiring all of the stars we could see.

the following day the adventure continued. we visited some caves and then hit a breathtaking waterfall on the way to the west coast. as fate would have it, the beach that luke took us to was the one that we had heard about several weeks before. there is heaps of geothermal activity at this particular beach and you can dig your own hot spring in the sand!! as the sun started to set we got on the road to auckland. it was a lovely drive home, lots of beautiful scenery. it was a pretty joyful drive home, but there was a bit of sadness in the air as well as it was our final day in new zealand and we had fallen in love with the country.


below are some pictures of our time with luke:


here we are at the lake where we camped, pretty heinous landscape, aey?

this is the backside of luke. see, i wasn't fibbing about the dreads.

and finally, here we are chillaxin' in the dig your own hole springs on the beach. good times.

and now we are getting ready to shove off to india. i am bracing myself for the inevitable assault on the senses. wahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

unbelieva-bull adventure!

so yesterday we awoke, thinking of planning: taking a bus, reserving a hostel. nothing like waking up at 830 to find that your bus left at 7 - yes, we are a bit retarded (literally) in the planning aspect.

but we set a positive intention, and off we went! took a train up to the northern environs of wellington (the cities on the north island have actual suburbs - wild).

we caught a 'bus' in less than five minutes - two young blokes took us on our merry way, and we ended up in this town called Bulls. funny, because i'd met a friendly chap named andy on the ferry who lived in Bulls, who'd given me his card and invited us to stay at his place if we should need to. (he'd also offered to set us up with family if we were more comfortable - just a genuinely nice guy).

so here we are in bulls, for once we're off the lonely planet. oh so nice not to rely on a map or a guidebook. not that we needed one. there is one intersection, and you can walk in any direction for 20 meters to the edge of town! so no big surprise that we went to the bathroom (with a sign that says 'relieve-a-bull" - and andy's shop is directly across the street.

we walked around for a bit and just put our bags down on a cul-de-sac to rest, and decided that it was time i should call andy. so i walked up to the gas station - no pay phone. waiting in line to ask the cashier where i might find a pay phone in such a small town, when the customer in front of me turns around: it's andy.

he immediately scooped us up in his car, brought us back to his home. i'd sent him an e-mail in the morning saying that there was a wee chance of us popping in, but he hadn't gotten it. he was delighted to see us nonetheless, and took us to his friend's beautiful 120-year-old house for a bbq.

turns out that andy's also a beekeeper, so we had f r e s h h o n ey...mmm, insert oozing fresh sweetness here in the most delightful way. and he took us to meet the bees and eat fresh honeycomb! we got to wear bee suits, too! he gave us some propolis, which is a honey by-product that i pay through the nose for at the co-op in san diego...and then to the beach, back to his friend's house for tea - sO hospitable on a moment's notice (or less, as the case had been:)

we are super grateful to these wonderful small-town people, and we're striking up conversations with every shopkeeper - it'll be a bit sad to leave bulls but there's a national park that awaits.

we'll keep the magic rolling for sure. or, for those of you who are also fluent in my native gangster tongue: 'fo' shizzle'.

movin' on up

for your viewing pleasure we have posted a whopping four more pictures of our adventuring.
this first one is of o.g. (original gangsta) heather. much like the other north american variety of gangstas, she is completely thugged out in her crocs, yoga pajama pants, and braids. and of course, no gangsta gear would be complete without a double scoop of ice cream. she is flashing the "west side"gang hand sign and is quite in her element in front of a field with a horse grazing. it doesn't get any harder than this folks.

here we have a shot of us with our new buddies, craig and chris. we are enjoying the fudge we had recently purchased in a phone booth in nelson. why a phone booth you may ask, to which i would reply why not in a phone booth? it is also noteworthy that chris is wearing a woman's flowered tank top that he managed to get for free from a store simply by asking if he could have it (it had been marked down to $1 so the store didn't lose much on it).

next we have a shot of heather crossing a bridge at abel tasman park. there were heaps of bridges there, but this one was particularly long.

finally we have me posing as a road sign. this was on the way to picton and was taken during a break from practicing the dance routine we are working on.

we are now leaving wellington to head off to parts uknown. we will eventually find ourselves at tongariro national park, which is where a large chunk of lord of the rings was filmed. i believe it was where the orks lived and where they filmed sam and frodo uhhh, you know, doing whatever sam and frodo did, i think it was climbing big mountains to get to the part where they destroy the ring (i am lucky to have remembered the characters names, but i reckon the middle earth geeks will be able to figure out what i am referring to).

the dolphin swimming in picton, sadly did not come to pass. we did see a number of hector dolphins, which are the smallest dolphins alive (only 1 meter long) and are endangered (hence the no swimming with them). we barely made it onto the ferry to the north island after making several mistakes . . . not knowing that check in time meant that you needed to be there at that time, not that you could check in starting at that time, as well as going to the wrong ferry terminal. the ferry staff gave us stern looks and shook their heads at us, but ultimately helped us make it on to the boat.

we passed our time in the capital celebrating the inauguration of obama! we even wore our falsies and tied on a buzz in the early afternoon. the rest of the day was spent tooling around the city center. we took our ever so gracious hosts out to dinner and a drink in order to repay them for their kindness.

and now we are off again, in a northerly direction. lots of love to everyone!

more photos!

and here we have three mas photos - the first two are of amy and me on the abel tasman trail, which, as you can see, is breathtakingly beautiful. the whole trek was about 15 miles, so it was a lotta walking for sure, but with vistas like this it went by pretty quickly! add to that the rain that hurried us along and encouraged us to jog parts to stay warm, and you have a delightfully exhausting day! met some good folks along the way, including an inspiring older couple who had been traveling for 14 months!!! what rockstars!




in this particular one we were trying to make faces at one another. someone ended up snotting a booger on someone else's lap in the process, and this is what ensued.




and below we have the rock wall that we built at our last wwoofing place. we had gathered rocks from the riverbed and brought them to the house - some nice good manual labor! reg, our host, was quite a character. he's about 70 with blond dennis-the-menace-type hair, a bit portly. we had made the infamous texas sheet cake to soften him up a bit, and after dinner one night, he literally pounded both fists on the table and exclaimed, 'when are we gonna have chocolate cake?!! when are we gonna have chocolate cake?!!' hilarious man.



and here we are in nelson on our way to picton. not much doing there except for the manifestation of a lifelong dream to swim with DOLPHINS!!! AHAHAHA!!! hm, i just realized how excited i am for that one!

other little tid bits - towns in new zealand are super cute with hanging pots of begonias and petunias, cobblestones, and charm oozing out of every person and building.

the hole in the ozone layer is apparently right over us - hmm, maybe that's how we got so tan!

lots of love and namaste!
miss mamie and miss mev

here's where we did yoga at our last wwoofing place

it's a helipad!

if you can buy it, we can buy it!

this is a direct quote from heather. we were picking up rocks (more on that later) when our host, reg, commented on how the two of us have everything, and that was heather's response. it made sense, but when taken out of context the statement sounds a tid bit asinine, no?

our stay at the song of the tui is coming to a close tomorrow. life here has been pretty kind to us and we are still in awe of the amazing beauty of everything around us. we did our first (and possibly our last) hard physical labor as wwoofers here, though again, this isn't a farm it is a b&b so we have changed our status from wwahs to wwabbs. our assignment was to collect long flat rocks from a riverbed and then build a wall using them. this involved a lot of bending over, picking things up and finally putting them back down. it felt good to actually do some physical work, but we definitely felt it afterwards. thank goodness we had yoga to revitalize!

we spent or afternoons hanging out at the aorere (aw-reh-reh) river, climbing around on rocks, successfully attempting to cross the river with minimal wetness, and collecting rocks for jan's (a norweigan dude who is also staying here) art project. today we headed to a different river and were able to go for a swim b/c the weather finally warmed up enough. the water was crystal clear and a wee bit icy, but lots of fun.

we have also been able to muck about in the kitchen and even got our host to sample some vegetarian cuisine, which he really liked!

last night as heather and i were walking back to our cabin we looked up and saw that the sky was full of stars . . . something we hadn't seen since we got here since the sky is often overcast at night. it was truly awe-inspiring. we set up some chairs and spent about an hour just star gazing. we could see so MANY!!! we even managed to see two falling stars each. it was wonderful.

there are these "bus" stops with red signs (with a thumbs up on them) here that have a very sporadic schedule. tomorrow we are getting dropped off at one of said bus stops and will attempt to board one of these "buses". apparently the only cost for the "bus" is a donation for gas. hopefully the "bus" will drop us off at a point close to abel tasman park (our next destination) and then we will try to find another "bus" to uhhhhh, well, we haven't quite sorted that out yet.

over and out.

amazing i say!

yo yo yo! comin' atchya from...where are we anyway? oh yeah! we are at this beautiful, byooootiful place called song of the tui (www.songofthetui.com), which is an upscale b & b type place high up on an amazing hill surrounded by many other amazing hills, so the scale of amazing-ness, is high!

amy and i will be wwoofing here for a week or so, building some rock walls and weeding. the nearest neighbor (of the three) is about 1 kilometer away, so it's right peaceful. there's a river down the hill for swimming. we have our own standalone accomodation separate from the house. tonight we're sharing space with an argentinian couple, who leave tomorrow so we'll have our own bungalow!

last days in oamaru were fantastic fun! just a good solid family of wwoofers, including our buddy connie who dropped us off at the bus station after some ice cream and a prolonged good bye! then we met up with our friends ari and sam, a brit couple who took us to their next wwoofing place, which is kind of like a petting farm. we got to play with louie the llama, marmalade the pig, some chinchillas, and baby bunnies the size of grapefruit. they had a baby dear (bambi), a dog (barney), a lamb, and a goat who all played together - i don't think they realized they were not of the same species!

the bus ride here was long and windy but the price was right and the bus driver was a friendly chap. we're quite happy to be settling into this paradiso for the next few days! hopefully we'll get some more photos up of the sunset we saw tonight, which was, as you may have guessed, amazing!

some eye candy and the final post from oamaru

just in case you were wondering, we do read your comments on the blog. so, per matt's request, here is a sampling of some of the pictures we have taken thus far. as you can plainly see from the pictures, the sky down here in new zealand is a stunning mustard yellow color, unlike the sky in any other part of the world.



this first shot is of me having a go on the swing in front of the hostel . . . big smiles all around, big hair all around as well.

this second picture is of the elephant rocks, pretty beautiful stuff. there are five people in this picture and i will personally pay for a game of ms. pac man to the person who can accurately locate all five of the people.

this last picture is an action shot of ari spanking heather with a piece of dried seaweed. the seaweed was actually quite heavy, but ari gave it her best and heather gleefully accepted her walloping. this was taken at the rocky beach about 400 meters from our hostel.

these last two days have been pretty sleepy and quiet. we paid a visit to the whitestone cheese factory with ari. we ordered a single cheese sampler and found the portions to be incredibly generous. there were six different wedges of cheese, some french bread, crackers and fruit. the three of us were quite satisfied with the food, quite satisfied. we then road into "downtown" (if a town with a population of 13,000 can have a downtown) where we checked out an art gallery, a place called the whiskey (i will leave it to your imagination to determine what can be purchased there) and a retro shop. The retro shop had tiger beat magazines from the 1970's, when tony danza and erik estrada were considered to be studly.

we had dinner in town and then went to watch the blue eyed penguins cross the road. these guys were so cute!! they are about a foot tall and would look about them and then waddle a few paces and then look around again. they crossed the road in groups of six or seven. the ones who were bringing up the rear had to haul to keep up, when this happened they would flail their little wings all over the place and teetered from side to side. so cute! i wish i could post pictures of them, but you aren't allowed to take pictures of them b/c the flash hurts their eyes.

today has been a pretty lazy day outside of our wwah responsibilities. we spent a good chunk of the day determining the logistics for the remainder of our trip. the amount of planning in advance required here has thrown us a bit, but things still seem to keep falling into place. we head out of oamaru tomorrow and will gradually make our way up to the northern part of the island where we have secured another wwoofing position.

our stay in oamaru has been pretty wonderful, but we are excited about what the future holds for us.

cracking bird

we've settled in nicely to chillawhile, feeling very much like part of the family these days. we've been hanging out with a brit couple, a german chica, and two japanese boys who crack us up constantly with phrases such as, 'oh rearry?'

we're also learning proper british slang. an attractive woman is a 'cracking bird', or buuhhd, if you're into phonetics!

yesterday we had a nice little excursion to elephant rocks, these big boulders situated in the middle of a grassy meadow with nice views of mountains and sheep. i taught a spontaneous mini-yoga class there, which was a fun time for all!

last night we had a bbq here at the house followed by a, um, drum circle. it may have been the worst drum circle (of the six) i've ever attended, but there was lots of heart so it all works out in the end. :)

today's outing was a bike ride to the cheese factory - new zealand, man - these people know what's up with cheese. nummers!

we're trying to plan our next stop and still waiting for things to fall into place for our next wwoofing station, but in any case we're excited to get there!

let the wwoofing begin!

we have officially been inducted into the world of wwoof. for those of you not savvy to this word, it is an acronym for willing workers on organic farms. technically we are not on an organic farm, as we are working at the hostel we are staying at, but we do meet the willing workers requirement. so i suppose you could call us "wwahs" (willing workers at hostels).

our duties here generally consist of changing bedsheets, doing laundry, and watering the garden plants. We work for two to three hours a day in exchange for breakfast and a bed. after finishing up our work yesterday we went on a bike ride into town with ari and conny, two girls from the hostel. the bike ride was a bit tricky for us as we are not used to traveling the left side of the street, but we managed to get around without any major mishaps. we did have a minor mishap when i couldn't figure out where my brakes were and crashed into heather. the old town part of oamaru is so quaint and adorable . . . lots of old charming buildings and little independent businesses. after the bike ride we decided to take the playground in front of the hostel for a wee test drive. the seesaw and swings were in excellent condition and brought us a lot of joy. it is impossible to be swinging and be unhappy, impossible.

today there was a buzz in there because we had a big field trip planned with kelly (the woman who runs the hostel), ari, conny, and long (a japaneser). our destination was . . . (insert drumroll here) . . . the town dump! now, some of you may think i am kidding, but i assure you it is true. we had been hearing about the various treasures to be found at the dump and it did not disappoint. there is a little "store" there where you can rummage through various items, you bring whatever you want to the register, the person working there looks at whatever you have and makes up a price for it. i got a pencil case, which will be used to carry toiletries and a little head scarf for 50 cents nz, roughly 30 cents us. heather picked up some jars, a purse and a super cute scarf for $5 nz.

we later visited a park down the street and indulged in what ari called chip butties, buttered bread with chips/fries. yes, it sounds disgusting, but it was actually really yummy, though it should not be eaten regularly for obvious reasons. the park we ate at was fantastic, it had very climbable trees, big seesaws and a plethora of other things to play on.

we are now prepping for the rest of our time here and though one month seems like a very long time, it just won't be enough to do all that we want to do. we won't even be able to cover as much of the south island as we would have liked. i guess that means that we will have to return at some point and do it right. most of the other backpackers we have met here are in new zealand for about six months. in spite of the time crunch, we are feeling very blessed and making the most of the time we have here.

as we were saying...

...we got up bright and early this morning and got the bus schedule to our next stop: chillawhile hostel in oamaru. we were both excited to boogie and see more of the country, as christchurch was a bit sleepy. perhaps because the whole country seems to take off at least 4 days for new years, with some cafes not opening for a couple more weeks. it's not the most convenient way of life for customers, but i'm happy that employees get to take solid time off. our german friend nanett, for example, gets something like 7 weeks off - she works for the german embassy in pakistan, is fluent in 7 languages, and she's 23. amy and i were stumbling around quite tipsy in pacific beach when we were 23, but to each their own. euhhh...

i digress. we went to a cute little farmer's market this morning in the town square, and treated each other to xmas presents (clearly a valid excuse for purchasing these really beautiful rings:). had a wee yoga in the park, and we were off!

the bus ride was uneventful save for the beautiful scenery - lots of sheep (10 to 1 ratio in nz - crazy!), and fleet foxes on the ipod did the job of putting us to nap right nice. we got to our present hostel, chillawhile, just in time for a potluck with the other chillers - good fun! lots of krauts here. doichers as we're calling them. the beach is rocky and beautiful and about 400 meters away. we're here for a week - will feel nice to settle a bit before hitting the road again. oh, and there are penguins here! cute little blue-eyed ones! hee hee!

new zealand is quaint and adorable. it's sparsely populated and feels a little 50s-esque, but they're conscious about recycling, organic food, and such. the sun is STronG here! it's like being in canada in the middle of the summer, b/c there's about 18 hours of daylight. add to that the hole in the ozone layer, and you have a nice little sunburn. oh well!

we're doing a good job of not planning and staying present, and so far it's been falling into place to perfection.

the eagles have landed

we arrived in new zealand safe and sound on january 2nd. the flight here was made much more pleasant by the in flight entertainment and the friendliness of the flight crew. we managed to sleep our way through most of the flight and were probably unconscious when we crossed the international dateline into 2009.

we got into christchurch at 8:00 am and made a b-line for our hostel, which is absolutely adorable. there is a garden with fresh herbs and berries for the picking. we got our own little cottage to ourselves at a dorm rate. the hostel also has free bikes for guests. we took advantage of the free bikes and tooled around town for a bit. the town is prett sleepy and is even moreso b/c of the holiday. most of the shops and restaurants were closed. after eating lunch we hopped on a random bus and got off at a random stop. we played at a school playground and had some good chats. we came back to the hostel and made some dinner and went to bed.

yesterday we went to some nearby hot springs with a couple of girls we met at our hostel. the hot springs were exactly the way that we wanted to spend the day. the scenery here is gorgeous. i just kept staring out the car widow in wonder the whole trip. we pulled over a few times to take pictures (which you will see at some point in the future). the four of us ate dinner in a cute little restaurant in a seaside town called lyttleton. the food was delicioso, but our friends found it a bit too spicy for their liking. we finished the day off with heather giving the girls neck massages.

on a side note, heather has offered to start teaching me some massage techniques . . . her motivation is completely unselfish. good times!

heather has volunteered to brief you on today's events so i am off. hope everyone is well.