Tricky Wellington and Otaki

I had this entire post typed up yesterday, and then it suddenly disappeared.  An hour’s worth of writing gone, gone, gone.  Disastrous!  I hope this covers everything as well as it did yesterday.

Wellington has once more proved to be a tricky place to live.  I fully expected a downpour all day long yesterday, and what happens?  I wake up at 8AM to perfectly clear skies and bright sunshine.  I took advantage of the morning and went down to the waterfront to listen to a podcast and enjoy the water.  I love sitting down by the waterfront.  The Wellington coast is so pretty.  The water was an exceptional colour, not quite blue but not quite green, just a great aquamarine colour.  I went over to the café in Te Papa for a chai tea latte and sat in the sunshine, reading the weekend paper and feeling very ‘Wellington.’  I wandered around Oriental Bay for a bit, enjoying my favourite spot on that side of the harbour, before heading home.  I am glad I got out when I did, and went home when I did, because the clouds started rolling in about 20 minutes after reaching Mckenzies.  It was then cloudy and cold and rainy for the rest of the afternoon.

The weather in the afternoon was a lot like the weather on Friday.  It was cold, windy, rainy, etc, but it didn’t really matter to me.  I was already wet and in a wetsuit!  How come?  Well …

Last Tuesday I was checking out a potential new flat with Meredith and Claudia (I am going to try to move out of the hostel that I am currently living in; the one we looked at is nicer, and I would get to live with Meredith and Claudia over the summer, which would be nice) when Claudia starts talking about some activity thing she had signed up for at the Rec Centre on Friday.  I don’t have class on Friday, so I decided to go along.  I just signed up for it, not really knowing what I was getting myself in to.  I figured it wasn’t a big deal because there isn’t much I won’t try or attempt, seeing as how I jump at every opportunity available.  I just put my name down, paid my money, and showed up at the Rec Centre at 8:15AM on Friday morning.

Turns out our first activity was bridge swinging.  This involved going to a random dilapidated bridge somewhere about an hour outside of Wellington and jumping off into the canyon and river below.  First, we were strapped in to a small harness.  Then, you climb over the side of the bridge, facing inwards.  Next, you jump backwards as far as you can into nothingness, fall until you reach the length of the rope, and commence swinging back and forth under the bridge like some big swing.  This was so much more nerve racking than skydiving in my opinion.  You really had to work up your nerve to jump backwards over the river off of the bride.  It is hard because you can’t see what you are doing, where you are going, and the harness isn’t particularly bulky or large.  It was a great experience, though.  I got a little bit of whiplash, nothing near as bad as I did in my car wreck, but it was worth it.  There is a second ‘guide’ down on the ground under the bridge, and she caught your foot to stop you swinging and pulled you down to the ground.  We all did this, clambered back up the hill through the bush, piled back into the van, and drove off to our next destination.

We drove a little longer along the Otaki River until we got to a campsite type place.  We piled out into the structure/hut thing to eat lunch.  Our leader from Vic definitely made a comment to the extent of ‘Wow, so the stereotype is true!’ when I pulled out my peanut butter and jam sandwich.  After lunch, we all pulled on our wetsuits and put on our protective helmets and harnesses.  I had never worn a wetsuit before, so that was an experience.  Keep in mind that I still had no idea what I was in for!  I am happy that Claudia over packed and had some extra clothes and things for me to wear under the wetsuit.  Her surfing gear really helped keep me dry, especially considering the fact that my wetsuit had several holes in it and was really worn down in others.

After we were all decked out in our protective gear, we began our short tramp up to the top of a part of the river.  This is when I discovered that we were going to be abseiling (that’s rappelling for you Americans) and trekking down a river that led into the Otaki River.  This was so cool.  I hadn’t abseiled in ages, and then just on indoor rock walls and the like.  The water was freezing, my shoes are still soaking wet, and I am all bumped and bruised from slipping on rocks, but it was such a cool afternoon.  We abseiled down three different waterfalls.  It was so different from being inside because you had the water pushing you down, splashing you in the face, and it was hard to get a good grip with your feet sliding all over the wet algae-covered rocks.  If you slipped too hard, you crashed into the waterfall wall.  This only happened to me once.  When we were just trekking down the river, not abseiling, we would still get bruised and soaked because of the changing depths of the water.  The level would suddenly go from your mid-calf to above your waist, effectively dunking you in the water, and then you would stumble on rocks and the level suddenly became shallow again.  There was one other cool thing, too.  At one point we had to do a ‘flying fox’ type thing.  Of course I was closest and ended up going first.  You strapped your harness to the rope, climbed down about a meter or so, turned so that your back was to the rock wall, and jumped out over the waterfall into the air.  There was nothing around you; you just zipped down the line until almost running into the tree at the end.  After you had slowed, the guide at the top lowered you down until you could step on the triangular rock sticking up out of the pool.  That was very fun.  Before we knew that was what we were going to do, we had been joking about flying down over the waterfall like on a zip line.  Crazy experience!

Of course, we all pretty much passed out in the van after that.  I kept it a quiet night.  Dave cooked a really good meal for me and two other friends, Bex and Louise, so I just went over to his house, enjoyed the roast chicken and vegetables, and watched part of a movie before heading home to pass out.  I was more active last night, heading out to a party out in Kilburnie.  It was thrown by Meredith’s boyfriend’s friend, which meant that I didn’t know anyone except Meredith, Lauren, Jay (the boyfriend), and Ash (Jay’s brother).  No matter, though.  Lauren didn’t know anyone either, so we stuck together in the beginning, and by the end I had met some really fun people.  It was an entertaining night.  After the party began to wind down, we all grabbed a cab and headed back into town to go dancing at Jet.  Fun evening all around.

Before I leave you today, I do have some random closing thoughts.

• It may not be popular in America, but texting is the way to do things here.  I have gotten maybe 8 phone calls the entire time I have been here, with only one of those from a non-Rotarian non-insurance related person.  Texting is such a big part of life here that even government officials are savvy into this.  I was reading in the paper last week that a current government minister who was tipped to have an even more prominent position in the next (likely to be led by Helen Clark) government took himself out of the race through a text message to Helen Clark’s phone.  It really is the way to do things here.


• I know why Victoria University can have such a small cleaning budget.  The tons of pigeons wandering around are like super vacuum cleaners, slowly finding every crumb dropped by hungry students.  I was hanging out on the bridge, reading the paper and studying, when I got distracted watching a pigeon as it methodically ate every little crumb on the ground around the benches closest to me.  The pigeons are always everywhere because doors and windows are always open (no central air conditioning means that you have to circulate the air somehow), and they follow the students.  I have finally become used to pigeons in the classroom and hallways.