Oh the Places You'll Go: Pacific Edition

Feeding a wallaby at Featherdale. It's been awhile since I wrote my last blog post so I guess I have quite a bit to catch up on. Before leaving Sydney I did manage to have a couple more iconic experiences in the city. One was traveling to the Featherdale Wildlife Reserve which offers lots of opportunities to interact with the animals housed there. We started off by petting a koala and eventually even got to feed wallabies by hand. View of the Sydney cityscape. This was a cool way to get to interact with many of the iconic Australian animals since I probably won't be back to Australia for a very long time. I also went up to the Sydney Eye Tower which is the tallest building in Sydney. The entire top of the building is composed of glass so you can view the cityscape below. This was a cool way to spend my last night in Sydney since I got to see the city from a different view. When we left Sydney, we headed for Magnetic Island which is about a 20 min ferry ride off the c

It's been a little while since my last post, but things have been pretty hectic adjusting to Sydney. In this second half of the trip, I'm taking three classes instead of two so I have been spending a lot more time in class and doing homework. Despite that I still had some time at the end of last week to Outside the Sydney Opera House. explore the city beyond simply meals. Last Wednesday, I went to Bondi Beach. Bondi is a total tourist trap, but a very beautiful one at least. Laying on the beach to do my readings for class was something I could get on board with more often for sure. When I went back to Bondi yesterday, the beach was covered in purple and blue jellyfish. The purple jellies were relatively harmless, but the blue could deliver a real nasty sting if you weren't careful. That's exactly why I stayed out of the water, but several of the guys went in and Thomas ended up getting stung. They weren't kidding when they said the animals in Australia are out

Views from Abel Tasman National Park. This weekend a group of 12 of us headed to Abel Tasman National Park. Abel Tasman is located on the northern part of the South Island which meant we didn't have to fly over. Instead we were able to take the Cook Strait Ferry. While this was convenient, and cheaper, we ended up taking the 2:30am ferry on Friday morning. Since we were planning to kayak Abel Tasman, we needed to be there pretty early to get going. I ended up going to sleep at 8pm on Thursday night so that I could be functional enough to wake up at 12:30am to catch the ferry ride. We arrived in Picton at 6am to pick up our rental car which thankfully went smoothly after the last 2 weekends of rental car issues. Since I had slept some, I did the 2 1/2 hour drive to Marahau while the rest of the car slept before the long day we had before us. Our group of 12 had booked 6 double kayaks for a 2 day solo trip through Abel Tasman. The way the company suggests the trip be done is to

Where we camped that first night I had a lot of trouble choosing how to title this post because so much happened this weekend that no one-liner can really encompass it. When we left for the airport on Thursday night, I can say with full confidence that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. We flew into Dunedin on the South Island Thursday night and I had planned for several of us to stay in a hostel together. What I didn't realize until after booking was that the hostel had a cat which I am highly allergic to. I was only in the hostel for 10 minutes to check the group in and I was really struggling. Since I couldn't sleep in the hostel, I instead got to have my first experience camping. While Marissa, Megen, and Sydney stayed in nice comfy beds, Brian, Thomas, Gibbs, Nick, and I had our own adventures camping. In New Zealand the middle of nowhere really means the middle of nowhere. As in no people, or plumbing, just sheep. That's how we found ourselves drivin

This weekend a group of 7 of us roadtripped up to Rotorua and Waitomo. We got off to a bit of a rough start when I went by bus with Sydney and William to pick up the rental car on Thursday evening. When we got on, the bus driver told us we were on the wrong bus (we weren't) and we ended up at a Burger King far away from the closed rental car location. Thursday also happened to be Cruising along with Mount Ruapehu ahead. my birthday so that wasn't the best thing that could've happened, but when we arrived home defeated the entire program sang me happy birthday. My friends also bought me a cake and we celebrated despite the lack of rental car. The next morning we got up early and retrieved the rental car more successfully than we did the first time around. Once we got going, the next 6 hours were smooth sailing with me driving and Brian DJ'ing. When we arrived in Rotorua, we went to Te Puia which is a mixture of Maori culture sites and geothermal sites. Rotorua is

Deciding if the emu will try to eat me First things first...I forgot to write a blog post about my adventures last Sunday! Marissa, Sydney, and I decided to spend the day at Wellington Zoo. This turned out to be a really awesome decision even though it doesn't sound that exciting. The Wellington Zoo has lots of animals that we don't have in the US and it was super interactive. I got to feed some sheep which was way cool, and basically a life goal for Marissa, as well as almost get eaten by an ostrich. The zoo also had an Australian section with lots of the Australian animals. What was super cool about this section is when I walked through the gate, an emu just came right up to me and started walking down the path with me. Petting the friendly emu was certainly a once in a lifetime experience! Taranaki Falls This weekend our entire Pacific Program group traveled to Taupo which is about 4-5 hours away from Wellington. When we arrived, a large group of us wandered towar