Long Beach

The Saturday after going to Sandfly Bay (Sept. 6) Austin drove Hannah, Amy, Michelle, and I out to Long Beach which is on the north side of the harbour. It is very pretty, and there are caves and places to rock climb there. It was even warm enough to sunbathe for part of the time! I collected some shells, too.

We did some bouldering, and checked out the main, big cave. Hannah, Austin, and I crawled into a little space, and that was cool. I also checked out the second cave, which is very rectangular.












After we started getting sort of cold, we drove to Aramoana after unsuccessfully searching for New Zealand's tallest tree. Aramoana is across the harbour from Taiaroa Head, so by the tip of the peninsula. There is a long pier-like thing at the beach there, and we walked out to the end.










There were people riding on the beach!


This was another fun day trip.

Sandfly Bay

One gorgeous early spring afternoon (September 2 to be exact) I had the pleasure of going to Sandfly Bay with Liisa, Gavin, Amy, and Becky, Amy's sister, who was visiting for a little while. Liisa drove, and it was sunny with gorgeous views over the harbour nearly the whole way. We passed over a long, bumpy, unsealed (aka unpaved) road and I realised why the bus driver was right about walking there from Portobello a while ago: it would have been nearly impossible, or at least very unpleasant. The first thing you encounter at Sandfly Bay is a fence, because you have to walk through sheep pastures to get to the beach. The sheep clearly have a good view:


There is also a sign warning you that it's not a good idea to collect shellfish there. I wonder what that means for the sea lions?

Anyway, you go down a bit of a hill to a viewing platform. Here's a taste of the view that will greet you:


A little further downhill takes you to another gate. On the way to that gate we saw some lambs, which I eagerly took tons of pictures of.


Just after the gate you descend a steep sand dune to the beach. It was great fun running down, as you can tell in this photo.


The beach is breathtaking, and on this day was full of sea lions. Perhaps you have a perception of sea lions as adorable and cuddly. So did I, until I came into close proximity with them. They are huge. Intimidatingly so. And, as I learned from a sign at the top of the hill, they are very territorial and not afraid of humans. So if they feel you are encroaching upon their territory, they might attack you. Therefore, none of us were particularly keen on walking around and through these living land mines.


However, we found a DOC guy who offered to show us through the sea lions (we had to get to the end of the beach to see penguins) and assured us that it was quite safe. Here are some shots that will give you a sense of the size and proximity of the sea lions.






As you can also see, most of them were sleeping. We made it through without incident, and got to the penguin viewing hide. It wasn't long before the DOC guy pointed out penguins atop the hill to the left:


We waited a bit longer, and finally a penguin (these are yellow-eyed penguins, or hoiho) came onto the beach.



High tide was coming in and the sun was setting, so we made our way back down the beach.





Along the way we spotted 3 young sea lions playing in the waves:



Finally, we reached the far end of the beach and the colours were truly amazing.





It was a great afternoon.

Other beautiful sights:

Class Registration; Monkey Bar

Today was course registration/approval. I finally decided what I'm taking: MAOR 102: Maori Society, GEND 102: Bodies, Sexualities, and Selves, and ANTH 323: Anthropology of Health. Hopefully those will be good classes, and will leave me room to take classes through Unipol and OUSA, which I want to do. I want to take OUSA's Beginner Maori Language course, and Bone Carving through Unipol, at the very least. I'm also interested in taking Basic Bar Skills (for those who don't know, ever since I was a barista for a summer, I've been interested in learning to bartend, since I know making drinks is not too tough and fun.

I also took a campus tour today - it wasn't really that informative. The tour guide really just walked around and pointed at various buildings, saying 'that's that building.' The only thing I really gained out of it was that there are several 24 hour computer labs that you can access with your door code, which I got today. So that's cool. I sat in the library for a while with Karin, Becky, Helen, and Kate. We were debating whether or not to go to the book store, but we didn't. Then we decided to go out to dinner, and we went to Hell Pizza which is a couple blocks north on Great King Street. We took the pizzas to Helen's flat, which is on Castle. It was quite good, and Helen had orange juice. Always delicious.

We all split up and took showers and then met at about 7:30-ish to go to the Monkey Bar for the International Student Party. The Monkey Bar is a really cool converted church on the corner of Great King and Hanover Streets. We danced for a long time. It was a lot of fun. That place has $3 drinks every Thursday from 8-12, so it could be a cool place to go on Thursdays, if one wanted to go out on that night.

Tomorrow I'm going on the Taieri Gorge Train, which is free tomorrow for new international students! More on that later.

Dunedin (that's duh-NEED-in)

I just wandered around town, trying to find where my Arcadia people are living. I located plenty of flats, but no one was home in any of them. It was actually quite pleasant out, I was dressed warmer than I needed to be. I stopped in the Dundas Street Dairy for a Telecom top-up, only to discover there were already 500 texts on the phone! Well, now I have 2500. No worries. I couldn't figure out how to get to the actual flats at Toroa, and besides, I don't know where Amber and Kate live exactly, anyway. As I was walking, I was thinking how Dunedin really is a lovely little city. I know it's much bigger than anything I'm used to, but at least right now it has more of a little city feel. The campus is beautiful. I live about a second away from the clocktower and the river. I was feeling a little pessimistic earlier about living so independently, but after talking to Jeff, feeding myself, and making plans for tonight, I am much more confident. There's that feeling of 'oh, it's cold and the days are short and I'm so alone' but it's just a feeling. I'm not alone. I have friends in Dunedin, and I have so much love back home. I must say that I'm fully becoming a scarfie - I've worn scarves often and even bought -gasp- more today! I need to get another sweatshirt or two. I'm currently attempting to decide on what classes to take. Two of them are certain: Maori Society and Anthro of Health. I can't decide on my third. There's Maori Language, NZ Politics, a gender studies class (bodies, sexualities, and selves), Music in Popular Culture, Love and Heroism: Religions of South India, Religion and the Internet, and Concepts of the Self. I think most of them would fit into my schedule. It's just up to me to decide. I promise I will actually update on my time in New Zealand up to now at some point, I am just not extremely motivated to since I need to wait for library internet to actually upload photos.