On the way up Mt. Roy!Merry Christmas all,
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and happy Boxing Day. Boxing Day??? That's right. For those of you who are confused over why anyone would have a national holiday celebrating all things pugilistic, wikipedia states that:
"Boxing Day is a traditional celebration dating back to the Middle Ages, of which the primary practice is the giving of gifts to employees, the poor, or to people in a lower social class. The name has numerous folk etymologies[3]; the Oxford English Dictionary attributes it to the Christmas box; the verb box meaning: "To give a Christmas-box (colloq.); hence the term boxing-day."
So there you go.
Anyway, back to us. Drea and I spent the first part of our holidays (with the excpetion of Christmas day) relaxing around the house. We've been trying to sort out what we want to do with our two week (minus a few days for Drea's work) vacation. We ended up deciding that we would go up to Wanaka to do some hiking over Christmas. We left on Christmas Eve and turned a leisurely 4 hour drive into a leisurely 9 hour drive. The landscape early in the trip is famous from Lord of the Rings as the place where Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli were chasing the Uruk-hai across the plains. Along the drive, we stopped for a short hike, ate fresh homemade strawberry ice cream at a little side of the road fruit stand, stocked up on food since we weren't sure if we would be able to buy anything over the next couple days(with Christmas closures and all), and learned an amazing amount about the central Otago gold rush and methods for separating gold from rock. Did you know that the new zealand gold miners were the first ones to use dredging equipment to mine the gold out of their rivers? (by the way, this blog does not condone fact checking) We also found a couple neat tracks along the road to Wanaka that look like they might be fun to explore.
We arrived in Wanaka at around 5:30pm. We found a little hole in the wall restaurant where we had pizza and garlic bread.(Aside: 'Hole in the Wall' is also a Japanese-originated game show, also known as Human Tetris, in which contestants attempt holding correct poses in order to try to fit through cutouts in an oncoming wall. Please watch this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=lam_1J65mes ) I think this was probably the best garlic bread ever. It was a whole loaf of fresh baked bread smothered in garlic and butter and chives. So good!!! After dinner we decided that we hadn't been in the car enough so we went to the movies. It wasn't a drive in but there was a drive in option...
We saw Elizabeth. Both Drea and I liked it but were unsure of its historical accuracy. The movie theater was a neat little one-screen place. They stopped the movie half way through for intermission during which they sold enormous fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. Brilliant!!! We, of course, took the bait.
We camped in our car that night (surprisingly comfortable!) and were woken early in the morning by some guy who wanted access to his boat ramp. Whoops! Nice views across the lake though.
Once were we up and refreshed we decided to hike up to the top (and not anywhere short of the top, dammit!) of Mt. Roy. It was a 6-7 hour hike straight up and straight down (it seems a lot of the best hikes are like this). It was gorgeous but I'll let the pictures and movies tell the rest of the story.
That's dave, still about 300 meters from the top of the hike.
From the top!!!! Note ominous storm clouds behind us.
They're sooooo cute!Anyway, we're back home now. Drea is working and we're planning our trip to Stewart Island.
Talk to you all later,
Love,
Dave and Andrea
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