After returning from the North Island, I had one night in Christchurch and left again in the morning for the rest of break. I did three hikes in the mountains of the South Island, as well as visit Milford Sound, which is a large fjord famous for being exceptionally pretty. I departed Christchurch with friends Chris, Elizabeth, and Kelley in Kelley and Elizabeth's car. We departed in the morning, and arrived at Mt. Cook
National Park - where we were to do our first hike - by mid afternoon. We did a one night trip to Mueller hut, which is an alpine hut situated between the Sealy and Sefton ranges, with a great view out towards Mt. Cook. Mt. Cook is the highest mountain in New Zealand, and the whole area around it is glaciated year round - making it a stunning place to visit. The hike up to Mueller hut from the parking lot was steep, but
only took about 4 hours. We arrived just after dark, and set up our tents beneath the hut. (The hut costs $35 a night, whereas camping around it is free) It was a clear night and we saw alot of stars, and throughout the night we could hear the rumble of small avalanches tumbling down the high peaks around us. We woke up about an hour before sunrise, and made the short hike up to the nearby summit of Mt. Oliver,
where we watched the sun come up. It was truly a magical place.

The hike back down was uneventful, and we quickly got back on the road heading further south to Queenstown, where we were to meet Jess and Aaron for some ackpacking. We made it there, spent the night in a park parking lot, and met up with Jess and Aaron who were with our friends Tim and Nick, who were headed back to Christchurch. Our plan was to hike the 3-day Routeburn track, but when we finally got down to planning it we realized it was going to be difficult to arrange, because the
trail does not make a circuit. After a while, Jess and Aaron volunteered to drop us off at the trailhead, after which they would go to Mt. Cook for a few days and come pick us up at the other end, rather than do the backpack with us. We decided that this was a good option, despite not having their company, and that is what we did. The
Routeburn track follows a river valley, thne cuts up over an alpine saddle, and decsends back to the road on the other side, relatively close to the west coast. The first day of the trip was up the Routeburn river valley, and we had bright blue clear skies. On the second day, however, the clouds rolled in and spoiled most of our views of the alpine region. It rained all night and finally let up the morning of
the third day. To liven our spirits, we took a morning swim in the ice cold Lake Mackenzie, which was freezing but well worth it. It was cloudy for the rest of the walk out to the road, where we waited for Jess and Aaron to scoop us up.

The end of the Routeburn Track is about 45 minutes from Milford Sound, which is a glacial fjord on the west coast of the island. It is well known as a beautiful place, and has consequently become a huge tourist attraction. We made the short drive there in order to spend a day kayaking in the fjord before heading even farther south for our last backpacking trip. For our kayaking it was cloudy and raining all day, which was both good and bad for the experience. The bad side was that we saw almost none of the jagged peaks that rise steeply out of the water, save for their faint sillouettes beyond the cloud-cover. The good side however was the hundreds of tiny waterfalls which only appear during or just after rain, which fall off of the steep sides of the
fjord. The end result was an extremely strange and almost mystical beauty, and the kayaking was well worth it.

We now had six people, one small car, and we needed to get two hours south to the lakeside town of Te Anau to do the Kepler Track, which is a three-day backpack through the Kepler mountains. Jess and Chris volunteered to hitchhike, and the other four of us drove. In Te Anau, we met up with Sam, which made our group 7 strong. Seven is alot of people to go backpacking together, but we managed fine. The Kepler
track is essentially a loop, so getting from the finish back to the start was not a problem. At this point we were all a bit bummed about the weather, which had now been consistently cloudy for several days. This continued to be the case throughout the first day of the hike, but on the second day we made a steep ascent and ended up above the clouds. This was absolutely stunning. Looking west, there were the dark jagged peaks of so-called Fjordland puncturing the sheet-like cloud cover as
far as the eye could see. After the ascent, the rest of the day was a walk along the ridge, and the views stayed with us all day. A pretty rainbow followed us for much of this section. The third day was relatively uninteresting, with a decsent back down to through the forest to the lakeside, and then back on to Te Anau.

From Te Anau, we went to the lakeside town of Wanaka to relax for a few days. The thers drove back to Christchurch, while Jess and I waited another day and flew back rom Queenstown. Break had come to an end.

These days I'm back in the swing of things at the university. Lectures end in about hree weeks, so due dates for my final assignments are starting to appear on the horizon. Nevertheless, I've still been finding time to travel. Last weekend I went to the southern coastal region of the island, and visited some of the unique forest andscape down there, including the southern tip of the island (which is only about halfway between the equator and the south pole). On the drive back towards Christchurch, we decided to take the scenic route through some very rural farmland, and ended up on a muddy tire-track road heading up into the mountains. The van (owned by Tim, Jess, and Aaron) had a bit of trouble and we had to push it several times to get it through the mud. we eventually had to turn around and find the main road again, because the van just couldn't make it. This coming weekend I am planning on going on another trip with the philosophy department, this time to Westport, a coal mining town on the west coast. I'm also hoping to take a weekend bike trip to the west coast via Arthur's Pass with two Germans I met through the tramping club. And finally, my brother Tim will be coming to visit in mid-June, which is very exciting. We will probably do some sort of campervan circuit around the south island.

Christchurch is very pretty these days, with autumn leaves all over the ground and fluttering through the air. I'm reading Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence again, which I found in the university library. All and all life is going well here. I'm feeling pretty settled and comfortable in the society now, and am beginning to make more of an effort to get outside the little bubble of Americans I am living in at Ilam Village. There are less than two months before I leave New Zealand, which is bittersweet.

Thats all for now,

Len

So I'll continue with the story of my April break:

After spending the night in Taupo, I was a bit in limbo. I had planned on doing the Tongariro Crossing hike that day, and then continuing on to the Coromandel Peninsula which is much farther North. To come back from Coromandel to do the hike would be very inconvenient, so I waited around town for most of the day just waiting for the weather report to see if I could do the Crossing the next day. I got a ride from Ellen, a girl from the Netherlands that I had met at the hostel, to Huka Falls, a set of powerful falls that dump into Lake Taupo from the north. After learning that the weather looked bad again the next day, I caught the bus I had intended to take anyways north to Rotorua, where I spent the night. At the hostel that night, I met a German named Arthur who had been touring around New Zealand on a cheap department-store bike with about three times the gear he needed.

In the morning, I caught a publicly-run bus from Rotorua to the coastal city of Tauranga, where I immediately caught a bus to the town of Coromandel via the old gold-mining town of Thames. From Coromandel I had planned on hitchhiking to Mahamudra, the Buddhist retreat center I was headed towards. While in town getting groceries and other things, I randomly began talking to some people I had seen on the bus, and learned that they were headed to Mahamudra to work as well. They were two sisters Floor and Juri and their mother Meriam, from the Netherlands. They were catching a ride to Mahamudra from Elaine, the manager of Mahamudra, and I tagged along with them.

At this point it was Thursday afternoon, and I stayed at Mahamudra until Monday afternoon. Normally, Mahamudra is a center where people can come to go on solitary retreats that are undergone in Tibetan Buddhist practice. Retreaters are provided with a private cabin and have groceries left on their doorstep each week. Some of these retreats might be for a specific purpose, for example one common retreat involves repeating 10,000 mantras to oneself. One of the retreaters was on a 7 year retreat. The weekend I was there, there was also a course being taught by a monk from Australia on Tantra. This meant that there were about 10 additional people staying at the center, and that there was plenty to do. I worked for a total of maybe 2 hours a day preparing breakfast and supper, doing dishes, and doing general cleanup around the place. In exchange for this I got a bed to sleep on and and the use of their kitchen to cook my food. My off-time I spent reading (from their spiritually-inspired library), talking with the guests and other people working, sitting in on the guided meditations and teachings and wandering around the place. If I had to describe the experience with one word, I'd call it relaxing. It was nice to after bustling about to finally have a consistent place to lay my head and not have to worry about how I was going to get around or what I was going to eat. While I Mahamudra, I took a few bicycle rides to the nearby town of Colville, and took a day hike up a nearby hill with Sam, who was a French guy taking a year off before heading to the University of Edinburgh. The picture to the right is from the top. One night, we all went to a local barn to join in a community jam-session. The area around Mahamudra was a big hippie destination in the 70's, and many agricultural communes still exist in the area. As a consequence, there is a strong community feel and everything in the town is run as a cooperative. At the jam session, everyone in attendance was able to join in to make music as a group. By the end of the night, I had played guitar, bass, bongos, piano, xylophone, dijeridoo, and sang.

On Monday, I got a lift from a woman who had been at Mahamudra for the course all the way back to Taupo to do the Tongariro Crossing. She was driving straight across the North Island, and by chance overheard me talking about going to Taupo and offered me the ride. The next day I did the hike, in cloudy weather. The Tongariro Crossing is basically a hike through the many craters of Mt. Tongariro. The clouds prevented any real views from the mountain, and also prevented me from being able to summit the neighboring Mt. Ngarahoe, which was Mt. Doom in Lord of the Rings. The hike was really interesting nevertheless, and definitely worth it. The picture to the left is me at the so-called Emerald Lakes, about half-way through the trip.

After doing the Tongariro Crossing, I took a bus to Turangi, and hitchhiked to Taupo. I spent the night there, and started out early trying to hitchhike back north. I wanted to get back up to the Coromandel peninsula because I had booked a bus ticket from there to Auckland, where I had to be by Wednesday for my plane flight back to Christchurch. I made it as far as Tauranga, which was a bit less than halfway, but could not for the life of me catch a ride out of Tauranga. I began counting the cars that passed, and after passing 300 I gave up. I had the number of my flatmate Moana's parents, who lived in Tauranga, so I figured I'd give that a try. I rang them up (as they say here), and they said they would be happy to have me spend the night. Moana's parents were funny and interesting; her father was an Anglican priest, musician, and whiskey connoisseur. When he performs weddings, he always asks for a bottle of Scotch in lieu of payment. He made me taste a few whiskeys that he had collected this way before going to sleep.

In the morning, I took a bus to Auckland. I spent a few hours wandering around and eating lunch, and then it was time for my flight, which was fairly uneventful. This brings me to a good stopping point. We are now about halfway through my April adventures, the rest of which will include a lot of backpacking on the South Island. After I get through all of that, I'll leave some updates about life back at the university!

Wow, its been quite a while since I've made time to update this. Alot is happened, but I'll just overview the important parts.

The car that we had bought in march abruptly died about a week later, while returning from the west coast over Arthur's Pass. I wasn't there, but the cam belt snapped and all of the cams became misaligned. It would have costed more to fix than the car was worth, so it got left at a garage to be scrapped for parts. I havn't had too much trouble getting around without a car since, relying on a combination of friends' cars, hitchhiking, and using the bus lines around New Zealand.

We had basically all of April off from class at the university, so I took this opportunity to get around and see some more of New Zealand. All of the exchange students were in the same situation - wanting to pack as much in as possible - so it was funny to see everyone flocking from the international student residence halls as soon as classes ended. For the first part of break, I headed to the northern part of the South Island with Aaron from UMD, and my friends Jess and Tim. (from Iowa and California respectively). Tim's got a old Toyota Hiace van, dubbed "big blue", which has a couch as a back seat. We decorated it with fabric from the secondhand store and headed out to see some beautiful countryside. Our first stop was Kaikoura, which is about 3 hours north of Christchurch. There we spent the night at a free campground, and woke up to see a range of snowy peaks pressed up against the coast. We went to a swimming hole, which was freezing, and got back on the road again. We spent the next afternoon in Renwick, which is famous for being one of the biggest wine producing regions in New Zealand. There we rented bikes and went wine tasting at a few wineries. We moved on to Nelson on the northern coast of the South Island. There we went to a cool easter market, and camped out by the sea. We met some really interesting Israeli guys, who had been living on kibbutzes there but moved to NZ to work. We sat around drinking tea and talking to them for quite a while.

From the Nelson area, I broke off from Tim, Aaron and Jess to head up to the North Island to stay at a Buddhist retreat center and do a hike that I had intended on doing for a while. I did one day of the coastal Abel Tasman track, which is basically a flat hike along the beach. After this I took a bus back to Nelson and hitchhiked to Picton, where the ferry departs for the North Island. I got a ride from two Austrian guys on a gap year before university, and then from a woman who lived in Wellington (the capital, on the North Island) and had been visiting a friend. On the ferry, I met up with my friend Sam, who was traveling with a few of his friends from home who had come to visit. I had planned on getting a ride with him about halfway up the North Island. The ferry drops off in Wellington, where I stayed with my friend Julia (from orientation at the beginning of the semester). Sam, his friends and I departed north in the morning. We had all planned on doing the Tongariro Crossing the next day, which is a long one-day hike through the many craters of the volcanoe Mt. Tongariro. Togariro is one of three large volcanoes in the central part of the island, which are sacred to the Maori (indigenous people of NZ). While about halfway through the drive, we stopped at an information center where we learned that the Tongariro Crossing would be impossible the next day due to bad weather. Sam and his friends decided that they would stay the night where we were since there was no longer any hurry to keep going. A bit frustrated that my plans had become so shifted, I decided that I wanted to keep going north, and perhaps make it to the retreat center earlier than I had planned. I said by to Sam and the others, and started hitchhiking. My first ride took city of Palmerston North, about one hour from where I had started. The driver was a convinced but thoughtful creationist, and after he learned I was studying philosophy we talked the whole ride about evolution, creationism, and whether there is such thing as truth. It was actually a pretty fascinating conversation, and when he dropped me off I had plenty to think about. From Palmerston North I caught a ride from a pretty uninteresting guy to Bulls, which is a bit of a crap-hole town just before what is called the "desert-road", which crosses through a dry, scrubby, and completely uncivilized section of the country. I waited in Bulls for a while, and finally got a ride from a truck driver in a big freight truck through the desert road to Taupo, where I spent the night. This guy was pretty interesting too. He was driving all the way up the North Island from Wellington to Auckland, and his friend in another truck was doing the same route. On and off throughout the ride they would shout jokingly at each other over the CB radio, talking about music, other truck drivers, or whatever was on their mind. It was an interesting glimpse into the life of a truck driver - where you have to stay awake throughout the night navigating boring roads, get a little bit of sleep, and then do it again. I waited for him to have dinner and smoke a few cigarettes, and didn't get to Taupo until about 1am, where I spent the night in a hostel.

Well, that's about all the typing I can tolerate for now so I'm giving up. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through break so far, so expect some more stories soon about the Buddhist retreat center, and backpacking about on the South Island.