And now for some more

Hola. Also, holla (for you Pi house gang).

Wow, so turns out that if I ever had the ability to pass out and sleep in any condition presented to me as many of my similarly young cohorts seem to, I have officially lost it. Not a good thing to find out after staying in multiple people rooms or a tent that was blowing over for 2 weeks. Tired does not even begin to describe the cracked out state I was in. Exhausted does a better job.

I did in fact hike up that mountain that the gondola goes up in Queenstown. It was a surreal and slightly creepy hike, as the trail wound back and forth and then around the dark back of the mountain through giant rock outcrops and tourists zip lining above. At on point near the end of the trail, the course set you right through a dark pine forest where all of the dead pine needles proceeded to rain down on you in a pine needle blizzard. At the end, I was greeted with a cool view of the lake and the ear shattering screams of small children having fun bombing down the luge tracks. Ah, the peace of nature. Even though I tried to tire myself out with a mountain hike, I was still not able to grab the best shut eye that night...which might have something to do with two of my roommates rolling back in pretty late. It was ok though, because not sleeping again just led me to philosophize and do some deep thinking...which mostly ended up with me concluding that I in fact was not a huge fan of how my hosteling experience has been going so far and I didn't know how much longer I was going to string it out and keep paying $30 a night to NOT SLEEP because I always ended up sharing a room with complete idiots who not only lacked basic social graces, but I also some how always wound up on the top bunk. While some of you are surely reading this and thinking 'well, the top bunk is kind of fun. It's not so bad,' you are in fact wrong because the bunk beds you have slept on were probably built well, like hand crafted by the Amish, while the bunk beds I have been sleeping on were akin to someone duct taping two weak beds on top of each other. Actually, using duct tape would probably strengthen most of these flimsy stacks of insomnia. In each case, if either the person on the bottom or top bunk moved during the night at all, both parties would be shaken violently by the bed. I was sooooooooooo lose to snagging a bottom bunk in Invercargil before that elderly traveling lady came along. Really, the only way that I think I can sleeping in shaking bunk beds is with the assistance of sleep aids, like when you get your wisdom teeth out.

That morning was an early one, as I was taking an early bus to Dunedin and Angie was finally sky diving after being cancelled on three times. My new hostel in Dunedin was cozy but of COURSE I ended up on another top bunk, his time over a shy Japanese girl who liked to watch Anime loudly. Sweet. All of the good bits of the room were already taken up with mountains of stuff from the two girls who had been living in the room for months, so I made my way around Dunedin in a sleep deprived haze before I cemented my cool status to the lurking teenagers by crying on a public library bench. SO TIRED.

After getting a few hours of sleep (wew 4 hours!) I had a great day walking to and up Baldwin Street, the world's steepest residential street. The day got even better when I went on the Speights Brewery tour. Our tour guide was great, the tour was hokey, we had two massively tall Australian old guys in our group, and it concluded with each of us getting to pour our own glasses of 6 varieties of Speights brews. Don't worry, I managed to get all six in. This day was a day of serendipity that seems to run rampant in NZ. On the street corner before we got to Speights, Angie and I bumped into this girl form our 30 person bike class from UCSC who JUST HAPPENED to be standing on a street corner in Dunedin just as we walked past. WHAT!? ALso, one of the women in my hostel room turned out to be from Suffolk in England, which is where I was born and my Grandparents still reside. WHAT!? I think that this proves that NZ is actually not a country but really an episode of the Twilight Zone. People are happy here. They are friendly. The standard of living is pretty nice. Even the idiot who stole my bike parts probably did so as kindly as possible. I think soon I will be looking for the third eyeballs on the backs of their heads where they beam things to their alien leader and magicly transport themselves to random remote locations they know I will be passing through. In reality, after watching the NZ newscaster talk about Donald Trump challenging Obama's birth certificate and the fact that 25% of Americans still think that Obama was not born in the U.S., I think that I'd rather join whatever alien serendipitous force is at work in NZ over going back home to a circus.

The long and the short of it is that now I am safely back in Auckland and sorting things out. And now, for some pictures.