OKAY, so yet again I am very very sorry about how long it has taken me to update! I hope that all of you are doing well and I would like to hear about your lives!
I am now living and working on a dairy farm that is in Riversdale, a small town about 1 ½ hours from Te Anau, so I am still at the very bottom of the south island. I just started work today on the farm, so I got to milk my first cow today…very exciting! They milk the cows about every 12 hours so its 4 am and 4pm, a very long day! It is hard work, but fun and just nice to do something different and challenging that I have never done before. This area is ALLLLL locals so they all look at me like I am a crazy person when they hear my accent. It is entertaining. Yesterday I went shooting clay pigeons with rifles with some of the guys…it was quite the experience…it’s a lot harder than it looks…It was a competition and there were 50 to shoot at and I only got 15…I guess its not too bad for my first time. So basically I am getting the real country experience down here….
Before coming to the farm, I stayed in Te Anau for a little over two months, working at the hotel. I absolutely love it there. I made some really amazing friends who have become my little New Zealand family. We all have plans to meet in New Zealand and elsewhere in the next few months/ years. There is a girl I met in Te Anau named Macarena, from Chile, who I have become the closest with. It is a little freaky how much we have in common…she is just like me! At the hotel, I usually worked nights so during the day I would just hang with friends or do one of the million day hikes in the area. The area down there is incredibly beautiful…it is like a fairy tale world! Now it is coming into autumn here so all the colors are amazing and the mountains are snow capped…so beautiful! I got snowed on one of my last hikes when I was on top of the mountain! My time in Te Anau was most definitely the best in New Zealand. I could stay there forever but unfortunately it was time to move on because the season was ending and it was going to start getting miserable and cold! After leaving Te Anau, I went on a 10 day hike with Macarena and another guy I met from work. Unfortunately, it rained almost the whole 10 days, but it was still beautiful. We started in the mountains and then hiked out some basically untouched beaches. Because it is a national park, there are no roads or anything to get there so the only way to see the area is to take a helicopter in or to walk! If you look on a map of NZ, you can see just how huge Fiordland National Park is. All in all, it was a very long, wet and challenging hike but it was a lot of fun as well. We had a bottle of wine and some chocolate cookies waiting for us in the car, which tasted sooooooo good after 10 days of hiking in the bush! After the hike, I spent a few days just traveling and enjoying some time off before heading to the farm.
After a few weeks on the farm, all I have planned is to meet my Te Anau family in Mt. Cook, the tallest mountain in NZ. We will do some hiking and catching up there and after that I am not exactly sure. I am thinking of trying to find work on the ski fields for the winter but haven’t decided if I can stand the cold!
I am still trying to work out exactly what I would like to do after New Zealand, I know that I want to travel around Asia but I have to make it home by November for my friend Ali’s wedding…so we will see how I end up! I am planning on being home for the holidays at least this year before heading off to travel again J
Anyway, love and miss you all…let me know how you are!
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