Oh the Places You'll Go: Pacific Edition

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...