I am now officially done with classes for this semester, and it is getting tantilizingly warm in Auckland, so much so that I actually wore shorts today. It is very counter intuitive to be getting into the end of school, start of summer mood in OCTOBER. Not only should I be thinking about Christmas and Thanksgiving, and snow, but I should be in the middle of Midterms, not Finals. Well, to be fair they would have the same level of stress, but still. I have...

Auckland, New Zealand is a strange place. On the surface it appears as though it may have some New York City quality to it, maybe a touch of London, a pinch of Seattle.But after a few months of living here and settling into a groove of the city centre I have found that Auckland really is like no other place I have ever been.First of all, it is not pretty.I will just put that out there.It does not have the ageless beauty of Paris or Amersterdam where even the...

Caving.Yep, that's what it is called. Not "walking through really small, dark, creepy places where there is that dripping sound that echoes across unknown distances".I think that would be more appropriate. However, in movies when characters enter a cave, that dripping sound is actually really cool.And when there is not a killer after you, you aren't searching for your long lost son or something melodramatic like that, the eerie caves can have their...

After a weekend of nursing my bruised knees, aching muscles and the rest of my sore body I embarked on the third little adventure of my semester break, to the Whirinaki Forest, nicknamed the "Dinasaur Forest". After some last minute planning and organizing and finally getting in the car and heading off for another 4 hour drive down south we got to the jungle rainforest of Whirinaki and of course, it was raining. When we (me and three guys) entered the...

Only a few short hours after I returned from my epic road trip up North, I was packing again for my departure to Mt. Ruapehu in the opposite direction.I quickly went food shopping to tied me over for the next 4 days and then went out to get some extremely last minute gear that I needed to go hike up a mountain, like a coat, and you know, those things they call pants.After dishing out far too much money for them I made it back to my flat in time to collapse into b...