New Zealand day 10-14 end

Hello once again,
     Day 10 started with us driving to the humble town of Wananka situated perfectly between mountains and a lake. We arrived just before noon had some lunch and got our rooms and the rest of the day was ours. I choose to take a hike up a near by mountain with some friends. There was a really steep section that provided us with a good hour of entertainments just by rolling rocks down it and seeing how far they would go (despite getting older im still easily entertained). We spent the afternoon just taking in the views from the top. When we got back to the hostel it was time for dinner and then later some Karaoke which got pretty wild!

     Day 11 we said goodbye to Wanaka and headed off to Fox Glacier in an even smaller more remote town. In about 1 hour of driving in this area we went from a beach, to a rainforest, to mounatins and a glacier, talk about seeing it all. Once there they hooked us up with some gear for climbing then bussed us over to the Glacier. This glacier is one of only two spots in the world where a glacier descends into a rainforest. New Zealand has over 3,000 glaciers and this is one of its most famous. I found the drive over the glacier to be very entertaining. Along the way we passed many signs that told us where the glacier had been previously in history, it was incredible to see how much it has receded even in the past 50 years. Also while we were driving our tour guide told us to pay attention to the next little stretch of road ahead and see if we noticed anything. I only felt us go over a medium sized dip in the road but nothing major so I wondered if i had missed anything. Our guide proceed to tell us that that dip was us driving off one tectonic plate onto another, specifically driving off the Indo Australian Plate and onto the Pacific Plate. This contact point is the reasons these mountains and the rest of New Zealand exist. We parked the vans and it was about an hour walk up to the glacier.

 The walk up was spectacular to see how the mountains have been carved out by the glaciers after thousands of years of erosion. There were many mountains that just stopped abruptly and turned into cliffs, you could tell that at one point the ice had been that far down the valley and that high up the mountain. There was even a point in history where this glacier flowed 10km out to sea.  On the glacier it was quite cold and a little rainy but that just adds to the experience. We hiked around for a while and got to see some neat features and even some people doing ice climbing and repelling.

     After the hike we headed off to get settled into our hostel for then night. This was my favorite hostel during the whole trip. Our room was separate from the main area, it was basically our own little house with a private kitchen and living room.  After dinner a group of us spent about 3 hours in the hot tub sharing stories, reminiscing about the trip, and just looking up at the stars which were phenomenal!

     Day 12 was our last day traveling with the tour. We drove back from Fox Glacier to Christchurch and made many stops along the way, including a black sand beach.
     When in Christchurch our bus drive Seagull was kind enough to drive us around and show us the devastation by the recent and powerful earthquakes that have ravaged Christchurch.  During 2011 Christchurch got hit with a string of very powerful earthquakes and their subsequent after shocks. The most damaging of which happened in February of 2011 killing 185 people. An astonishing 75% of the buildings in the city center had to be demolished and rebuit. We drove through the city center and there was flattened properties everywhere you looked. Theres still even a significant number of properties that have shipping containers stacked up 7 high and 3 deep to keep the building from crumbling into the streets bellow. The hostel we stayed at in the beginning of the trip was a black away from an old stone church that had been destroyed. The whole face of the building was gone, it was pretty erie to see clear into a second story room with a table and chairs still set up, a safe that had busted out of the wall, and a single lightbuld barely hanging form the celling. Unfortunately this scene still describes a lot of the structures in the city. Everyone we talked to had their own special stories about the event. One guy was in a bar and he just kept on drinking because he said "you're more likely to get killed if you run out side." Another lady told us about one of her friends that got shook literally right out of her house and woke up on the lawn, and of another person who run outside only to get trapped in their front yard up to their waist because it had liquified from all that shaking. The citys doing their best to come back, making most stuff out of shipping containers, but they've still got a long way to go.

      We then made our way to the hostel which was basically some crazy cat ladies house and spend part of the night there before heading to the airport to fly out.
     Day 13, we got the the airport just after 1am for our 7am flight. No shuttle service would pick us up early enough to catch our flight so we had to get there late the night before to be safe. This mean ending the trip with just the way I had stared it, with a night sleeping on the floor of the airport.

All in all I had the time of my life in New Zealand! I had so many great experiences and got to venture to  hidden gems of the world I never thought existed. I even got to do it with great people who became great friends.

-Evan