So lets be honest, I am lazy; and this writing every day thing, is just not working with my style of living. So instead of writing everyday, I think it would be more productive to just write summaries of the highlights throughout the week. Sound okay? Perfect.
Time is a funny thing here. The days pass in rapid succession but also seem to stretch on forever. I am not sure whether or not to attribute this to the late sun rises and the early sunsets, or the fact that every day I spend here is pack to the brim, overflowing with new information, new experiences and new communities. I can’t quite decide who or what the cause is, but whatever the reason, I have quite a difficult time recalling all the intimate details of Kaikoura. The senses are constantly bombarded with new smells, sounds and sights, and it can get a bit overwhelming, but not in a bad way…it’s almost like Christmas…so much excitement and only so much attention span to capture it all. In way of new smells, we went to Hanmer Springs, a hot springs bath nestled in an adorable little town in the mountains about 2.5 hours SE of Kaikoura. The water ranges from body temperature, to a steamy 41 degrees Celcius, and OOO!! The smell of sulfur wafts through the air without paying any mind to your sense of smell. You get to the point where you don’t thing you notice it any more, but then a little breeze will pick up, and WOO! You’re right back where you started. At Hanmer Springs, we lazed around for about 3 hours, trying out all the different spring temperatures and making friends with visiting college kids from Christchurch. Even got invited to their church! So great! However, the dressing rooms at these places are ALWAYS a little interesting. All I am going to say is that some people should ALWAYS wear clothes in public. I DON”T WANT TO SEE THAT!
As for sights, we recently went on a nature hike with a local alpine bontanist and her husband. They took all of us up a little trail on Mt. Fyffe to look at the various plant life that live around this area. As we pulled out of the Old Convent’s driveway it started to rain…and then it got harder…and then it poured. Thank goodness for robust rain gear!! We started the hike in this cow pasture where you find yourself surrounded by very curious little calves. I almost got one to suck on my finger, but at the last second he got a little spooked and jostled himself all the way back to this bush the calves were using to stay dry in the pouring rain. As we hiked up and out of the pasture, we entered this lush, green world that looked exactly like pictures of the rain forest in my Ecology book. It was stunning, and the rain did not even dapper my spirits. Rather, it only added to the whole “rainforest” experience. We got to see silver ferns, these cool trees whose red back peels off periodically, and huge Matu (??) trees whose bark looks as if it had been hammered down onto the surface of the tree. We hiked for about 2.5 hours, trying to listen to the botanist and her husband over the swishing of rain pants and the pouring rain. I tried to take a couple of pictures, but my little Nikon doesn’t stand a chance in the low light conditions of the rainy forest. Overall, it was a great time…wet…but so great! I will say though, that it did my heart good to come home and have soup waiting for dinner. Yeah for Sam and Emma!!
The rest of this past week has been spent doing orientation meetings, making little trips to town, gardening, and attempting to do laundry at the Convent. In an effort to be a sustainable community, the Convent does not have a washer or public dryer. Instead, we get to make the journey back to the 50s and get introduced to hand washers. So on one sunny day, I filled up the washtub and with the help of Erika and Jada attempted to get my clothes a little cleaner with the little washboard. All I have to say is that I have so much more respect for those housewives. I had no idea where to start to try and get those clothes clean. Do I rub the entire piece of clothing on the washboard? Or do I just rub the grubby parts on it? What do I rise with? Are my clothes clean enough? AH! The only thing I did get was the ringer, with which I got some weird sense of satisfaction watching all the water squish out of my clothes. Weird. It will definitely take some getting used to.
This past weekend, I found myself in a little bit of a predicament. What was I to do with the long weekend? Should I go to Picton and do a little sightseeing? Or should I go to Christchurch and do a little shopping…maybe take in a rugby game? What’s a girl to do with so many options? Answer? Climb a mountain.
So this weekend, nine of us set out to conquer Mt. Fyffe, the local mountain that sits basically in our backyard. My favorite time to watch Mt. Fyffe is during breakfast where you can just sit in the dining room and watch it light up in the brilliant sunlight of the Pacific morning. The sun reflects off the snow and creates this golden glow that seems to hover around the top of the mountain. It is just so very pretty and a great way to start off the day. Anyways, the nine of us set off at 2:00 Thursday afternoon for the little mountain hut that sits below the summit, fittingly titled. Mt. Fyffe Hut. While five of them set off at a rather quick pace, my little group of four girls went a little slower…largely because of me…and my being out of shape. What can you honestly expect though, when you spent the entire summer riding around on a golf cart taking pictures for camp? So I huffed and puffed my way up the very steep trail ( % grade) and after a good three hours made it to the hut just as the sun was setting behind the mountains. We set up camp in the hut with the rest of the group and two random trampers (hikers) from Australia. We ate our supper of Mexican rice and beans and then went to bed listening to the howling wind. The four boys in our group opted to sleep outside…why? I haven’t the slightest idea expect for male ego. Cooba set up his mattress just out in the open, but quickly came in after a possum(!) started sniffing around his sleeping bag. Adam had set up camp in his hammock, but came in around 1:00 AM, just about frozen from the Alpine wind. Josh and Ben, however spent the whole night outside in their tents…champs. That morning, Kayla, Ashleigh, Danielle and I set out for the summit around 5:00 AM so that we could see the sunrise at the summit. While we didn’t get to see the sunrise at the top, we did get to hike above the tree line and watch it flood the valley with light and finally reach the top of Mt. Fyffe. The hike going to the summit was HARD. The wind was howling, su much so that we couldn’t even hear each other shouting. We hike on about a meter of snow that thankfully was really hard and solid, offering fairly good footing without the dangers of getting dragged down in slush. There were a few nail biter moments as we clung to a little saddle between the summit and the trail…one false step and you slid ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL the way down. No good. We kept our wits about us and finally made it to the top where we all had to hunker down so as not to get blown off. Danielle took a little video from the top and you can barely hear her words because of the wind. We stayed up there for a good 15 min. before turning back for the hut. We passed the other 5 people on their way to another hut across the summit and surrounding saddles, and warned them about the strong winds. I felt a little like a mom because I was so worried about them. Like I said…one misplaced step and whoosh…gone. We got about halfway down the mountain before taking a little snack break at this lookout. With the sun shining down and little wind due to being back below the tree line, I could have stayed there forever, eating my Cadbury chocolate and looking out over God’s beautiful creation. Ahhhh…
We got back to the hut and went about trying to start a woman fire in the wood stove, but for some reason had more than a little trouble. We tried for the better part of 45 mins, and then we heard a shout outside. It was the other group, back from the summit! They had decided not to go on that way due to the wind and the unsure footing, and we were sure glad to see them. Cooba helped us make a fire and we made hot cocoa and sat around laughing and lounging for a little while before that group rerouted and set off again. So there Danielle, Alshiegh, Kayla and my self sat, eating oatmeal and listening to Kayla read her book out loud, when we heard another shout outside. This time it was from an Iranian man name Berutz. Turns out he had been hiking for the last six days, and we were the first humans he had seen in a while. We set up his stuff in the hut with ours and then we all just sat around chatting about this and that, waiting for an hour late enough to call dinner time. As we started fixing supper, this cloud descended on the hut and you could barley see out the window. It was kind of fun/fulfilling, because that’s how I imagine it looks when you sit in the cockpit and fly a plane through the clouds. Really cool stuff. But then, it started to hail….then it hailed harder, and then it turned to snow….and then we found ourselves in a nice little blizzard that laid down about 2 in. of snow in about two hours. The wind howled and we found that we were out of water, but luckily we had enough food and wood to stay warm all night long. We had some fun trying to figure out some of Betruz’s riddles which then turned in to a debate, which then turned into a theological discussion about God’s attitude towards trials. It was a super interesting conversation since Bertuz has two PhDs in Philosophy, Religious studies, and a couple of other degrees in electrical engineering and….I can’t remember, but it was a lot of fun to hear his side of things. We finally went to sleep around 8:00, but then at 4:30 I woke up because my bed was shaking. My immediate thought was that Danielle, but bunk mate, was rolling around a lot, so I peered over the side of my bunk, but Danielle was not stirring at all, but I was still moving. The shaking stopped after about 20 seconds and then I shrugged it off and went straight back to sleep.
In the morning, we got up to a gorgeous bluebird day…not a cloud in the sky. Our Iranian friend, Berutz, jumped out of bed and exclaimed, “Did anyone feel the earthquake?” ahhhhh…So that’s what that was. Being the landlocked, Minnesota-girl that I am, I had never known what an earthquake felt like. My only memory of any type of earthquake –related thing was in Kindergarten in Salt Lake when we all had to get under tables in the library for an earthquake drill. The principle came over the intercom and spoke (in a very monotone voice I might add), “The Earth is moving.” A little late, “The Earth has stopped moving.” Yeah. So after that discovery, Danielle looked at her phone and discovered that her parents had texted her wondering if she was all right. That’s when we found out that the earthquake had been in Christchurch, and that there had been no loss of life. Praise God since about half of our group was visiting there for the weekend. So with that on our minds, we set off down another VERY steep and slippery mountain trail to the Kowhai Hut nestled down in the valley. We hiked and hiked and hiked…and then we kept hiking through snow down to a more pine forest, to a more tropical forest and then finally to a grassland area. As we descended, it was almost like this tropical heat wave hit…so there we were all bundled in snow gear and having to strip down with basically every step we took! The sun is SO intense here, and you just seem to melt if you are even the slightest bit overdressed. After about three hours of going down the steep trail (can’t stress the STEEPNESS of it enough) we finally reached the riverbed where we stopped for lunch and a little noontime snooze. We finally reached the Kowhai Hut mid afternoon and waited around for the other half of our group to show up. The arrived back from their day hike shortly after we arrived and we all just sort of lazed around. Ali, Josh, Ben, Cooba, Adam and I played a little baseball in the front yard…Mr. Peterson would have been proud…I finally hit the ball (a feat that eluded me all throughout gym class in high school). We all made supper and then sat in our bunks and talked well into the night. Played a little Would-You-Rather, and then Cooba talked about Sasquatch. Can you say nightmares? I woke up in the middle of the night and the door of the hut was shaking and banging about and I almost cried. I sat in my little corner bunk and prayed harder than I have in a while. All I could think about was the fact that we had left the wood-chopping axe out on the porch and Sasquatch has a reputation for being not very friendly to humans. Irrational you say? No. That morning I found a hoof…yes a hoof…lying in the field outside of the hut. And there was this funky smell surrounding the wooded area by the hut. All signs point to Sasquatch. I am lucky to be alive. Thank you Jesus.
That morning, the group of four girls I was with went to go and see a nearby waterfall. Turns out that you have to free climb quite a ways up to get to the pool, so we refrained for time and safety’s sake. What would my mother say if she saw me hanging from a cliff??? After that little excursion, we set off for home. The first hour and a half were totally fine and easy…just the second half of the hike gave us some trouble. We had a number of river crossings to do, though freezing snowmelt water. Thankfully the deepest water we crossed was only thigh high, but still…that cold water sure drains your energy fast. We did about seven crossing in between each we were climbing over big rocks, digging sand out of our Chacos, and doing a little bouldering to stay dry. By the time we reached the home stretch, I was just on autopilot. I am sure I sounded like a lunatic, wandering through this rocky riverbed, stuffing trail mix into my mouth and trying to sing “Just Around the Riverbend.” Yep….crazy. I was laughing hysterically at things that were not so funny and trying to find the path of least resistance when we finally stumbled upon the car park where the wonderful Ali, was waiting to drive us back to the Convent. We left a note for Betruz saying we made it on his rid Honda station wagon and then had some celebratory chocolate as we bounced all the way home listening to Ali tell us all about the earthquake and its aftermath in Christchurch.
