New Zealand Part 9

I've decided to post some journal entries from my travels in New Zealand for the benefit of those who won't get see the pictures or talk with me about it. Mind you, this is not a narrative meant to explain everything about New Zealand and my time there, only a reproduction of what I thought was worth putting into my own journal. Enjoy, post any questions as comments and I'll respond as soon as I can.

November 13th, the Blue Mountains

After being picked up at the hostal the tour bus picked up a few final passengers and went to our first stop in the Olympic Park. We didn't see much more than the 110,000 seat stadium. I found out there that our bus driver has been to Portland a few times while driving a bus for a band that toured up and down the west coast! After that we visited an aboriginal rock carving - turns out the aboriginals are treated probably as bad if some worse as the Native Americans were treated.

So the reason they are called the Blue Mountains is that the eucalyptus trees in the area create an excess amount of oil, and it evaporates of their leaves and hangs low in the atmosphere, creating a blue-ish haze. So nice sights to see in the mountains and on the ferry ride back in. Rode the steepest rail train in the world - 52 degrees! I'd compare it to northern Arizona for a similar landscape.

November 14th and 15th - Sydney

Made a nice end to my trip by meeting up with a couple of old architecture friends from the University of Idaho. This was their last stop on a 2 week tour of Oz. I hadn't seen K in years, since graduation! We met in hyde park and then I took them on a quick night tour of the harbor and the rocks. We found a cool Portuguese restaurant and had a nice dinner and some drinks. It was some of the tastiest food I've had this whole trip, but to be fair I hadn't tried any of the local Thai places yet.

We ended up grabbing a bottle of wine on the way back to their hostal and stayed up til like 3am catching up and talking about travels. I finally made the walk back to my place by 3:30 - a mere two hours before I was supposed to be woken up by my alarm.

Of course I slept through it.

And missed my flight.

So I booked one for the next morning (fortunately I had a spare day in my schedule so I wasn't going to miss my big flight back to LA) and decided to stick it out in the airport for the night for 2 reasons: first that I didn't want to miss my early flight again and secondly that it was raining really hard out - the first time I'd seen real rain on my entire vacation. I felt lucky to have fantastic weather all the times it mattered.

Staying in the airport also made it easy to use up all my Australian money, since nothing is cheap in the airport. Made some good conversation with a dutch girl after they locked up the airport. We talked about bicycling in particular, since her country is awesome for cycling and Portland is the best city for it in the states. (I've noticed that abroad it's always called "the states," and sometimes "America," but rarely ever "the U.S.) Dutch people have been a lot of fun to meet on this trip, by far my favorite nationality to meet here.

Spent the night sleeping (and it's a stretch to call it sleeping) and then following day (the 16th) flying back to Portland. I left sydney airport at 6:30am local time, and after a layover in Auckland, arrived in LAX at 6:30am the same day. I swear you have to take a time machine to travel down under.