Welcome to NZ

Upon deciding to head south to New Zealand for a 6 week trip here the reality that it is there winter hit when I landed. It's really cold here, and apparently my wardrobe consisting mainly of shorts and t-shirts wouldn't do the job of keeping me warm. Fortunately in came Sarah Robb. My first familiar face since traveling who I met up with in Christchurch. She'd been studying abroad here for the semester and pretty much made my life my introducing me to the "wooly"....an 80's wool top that is warm, and obviously looks awesome. She also told me about the kumera. It's a red sweet potatoe that puts all over potatoes to shame, and as it turns out if you want to live cheaply in New Zealand you have to cook for yourself, so I'll be sure to be eating those just about every day.

We went around the city of Christchurch, checked out some botanical gardens and ate pb&j for lunch.....another staple of mine these days. The city is weird, almost superficially done and didn't appear to be a "New Zealand" city. Some piece of the puzzle was just missing with this place. No worries though because I wasn't staying too long (and as it would turn out the rest of the NZ is insanely nice).

That night I went to happy hour at the bar in the hostel we were at and there was a rock, paper, scissors tournament that someone ended up winning and selling the prize to me. The prize, a $550 bus ticket....my price $100. So I basically was given $450 worth of a bus ticket. I was planning on spending something like that for travel anyway so I was in 7th heaven when I got the ticket for dirt cheap. The ticket was with Kiwi Experience, which is a hop-on hop-off service. It has a fixed route and goes through certain towns that you can get off at and stay as long as you want then get on whichever bus comes through the town next (the buses run 5 of 7 days of the week). The ticket is good for a year but you can't back-track, so once you move on you have to keep going. It's in theory a great way to travel, the drivers are guides and stop at all of the cool highlights along the route that you would probably miss otherwise and you they do all of your bookings for housing and activities which is huge since there are so many tourists in New Zealand. For instance, the dolphin swim that I did (more on that later) has 16 spots on the boat, 6 of them are permanently reserved for Kiwi. So in theory its amazing. The people on it are another story, but I'll save that rant for another day.