Apologies for being super late (like 4 days late) for this entry. I’ve been overwhelmed with things to do and laziness that it took me so long to get this done.
Right now, I’m sitting on my bunk bed in a 4-bed dorm in Te Anau. Haven’t heard of this place before? It’s located on the south/west coast of South Island and it is the ‘gateway’ to Milford Sound. Hope I will finish this post before I fall asleep.
So.. what happened last week?
I went on a 3D2N road trip (Wanaka>Oamara>Oamaru>Timaru>Lake Tekapo>Wanaka). I really enjoyed the company with this group of friends as everyone is very nice, friendly and talkative. We were practically talking non-stop the entire trip, from the car rides, to the penguin waiting, to the long wait for the clouds to be blown away and even climbing up mount john. They were talking and singing non-stop. Well, it was kind of a farewell trip for one person as he was heading back to Taiwan and he wanted to see Lake Tekapo for the last time before he return.
For the first day, we started off to Oamaru, which was a lovely town with a really cool vintage street. We stayed in a really comfortable AirBnB. The highlight was visiting this really huge playground (yea, no longer kids but.. it was fun). The sunset was very beautiful that evening too. How I wish I can really get down to uploading my photos so you guys can see pretty it was that day.
Photo added: June 2020
I know I’ve been procrastinating like crazy (yea, for the past 16 weeks) but I’ve been going out too often and that ‘free’ day is no where in sight. We were really lucky for the penguin sighting. We spotted 2 penguins returning home from the ocean/sea (there were only 6 to 8 in total) but it was a good 2 hours wait.
The following day, we drove to Timaru and visited the beach in an attempt to look for abalones that we could bring home The cool thing about New Zealand is that you are able to bring seafood home as long as it is within the size and quantity limits. Sadly, we were ill-equipped and had to give up as we couldn’t see anything much. We continued our journey to Lake Tekapo and had dinner at the popular Japanese restaurant, Kohan. This time round, I had the bento set ($29) which was both delicious and filling. Our fate with the milky way and night sky was short-lived as it was too cloudy. We played card games during the night as well and as usual, hanging out with friends can only mean that you don’t get enough sleep but.. all was good.
The next morning (our last day), to the dismay of my lazy body, the weather was decent enough for a climb up Mt John. It was a one hour (considered relatively easy) hike and halfway through, it started raining. Our plan to hitchhike down didn’t work out as there wasn’t even much cars going up the mountain. We had to trek down in the rain and the weather kind of got better. We had a super late lunch in the town of twizel (had indian food which was pretty decent) and visited the high country salmon place where I bought sashimi salmon belly ($18 for 100g; but it was so good). After that, we headed home.
Guess what? Seems like we couldn’t get enough of each other and.. we met up again for another round of card games. This kind of reminds me of my secondary school days where we met up so often cause we were going to get separated to different schools. Despite only knowing most of them for approximately a month, it still felt so good to spend time and hang out together..
As the trip was so awesome, I kind of had a ‘how I wished I didn’t have to work’ feeling on Wednesday night (somewhat similar to Monday blues) and.. woke up on thursday morning to see that the resort was closed for the day >< which was YAY I DIDN’T HAVE TO GO TO WORK AND CAN FALL BACK TO SLEEP AND urgh, there goes my day of wages; down the drain.
I attempted to go back to sleep for a while more but I couldn’t make it past 10am. Messaged some friends and soon enough, I was out of the house again; in town shopping at MacPac – bought a cap + socks. It was continued with grocery shopping (what’s new) and a dinner at a friend’s place. We even played Nintendo Switch that night and I re-concluded that I was bad at video games. Oh; and I won $30 for my first Lotto ticket that I bought!
(Wondering why I had such a good memory? Cause I kind of post everything on IG Story and I refer to it whenever I need to trigger my memories)
Finally, Friday was a work day (my first work day that week) but as expected, the weather was crappy and I didn’t ski even when I ended early. The lame part was that I looked at the wrong roster and wasted one hour of work because I reported to the wrong venue. I ended up going to my friend’s house again for dinner; we had cream pasta and mussels *yum yum* and then I went to watch ‘Joker’ at the cinema.
It was a really good movie in a super old school cinemas which was free seating and didn’t have any online booking system. The seats were like damn random (they even had this retro car) and random couches and sofa and basically it was like a mixtape of chairs put together in a family setting. The worse/best part of it was.. THERE WAS A FREAKING INTERMISSION HALFWAY THROUGH THE MOVIE? I heard that this was very normal in the olden days and it gave people time to go to the toilet or grab some snacks > the super famous intermission freshly baked cookies. Obviously I had to get one.
Saturday, was a work day but as usual it was pretty slack as the weather was simply meh. I ended at midday and went over to Queenstown with some friends. It was blue skies at Queenstown (but not on our fields) and I had Mrs Ferg ice cream and we did some Pak n Save grocery shopping as always. and I had dinner at the same friend’s house again. Did I meet them like every single day?
Finally, it was Sunday; the last working day for me at Cardrona. Now that I look back, my time spend at Cardrona didn’t even feel like work. I had such a fun time at work everyday (or perhaps the hours were too little to make me even realise that I was indeed working). As it was the last day, there was a staff party and we dropped by a while. As my work stint was rather short, I didn’t have any separation issues with the job or people. I was pretty cool with the farewells and life goes on!
Monday, it was time to pack up and move out. I have no idea why I decided to move out and stay in YHA for one night when the price was the same. My YHA Wanaka experience was pretty average and I sadly got the upper bunk (which I don’t exactly enjoy). Anyway, after I moved out of the house, I had a beautiful afternoon walk around the Wanaka lake; watching my friends kayak and enjoying some me-time amidst the peacefulness of the surroundings. Can’t seem to remember what was on my mind that evening but I remember the very relaxing walk. I was thankful to be invited for dinner again at another friend’s place as she was clearing her fridge/ingredients as she was leaving soon. It was a wonderful dinner as I haven’t had spicy food in a long while but as usual, by the time I went back to my hostel, everyone was pretty much asleep and I had to blow my hair at some ulu toilet at the other end. I still can’t bear to not wash my hair, even for one night >< (okay, for my time in NZ, I’ve only not washed my hair once and the reason was.. I came home after midnight and there was no way my hair could dry in time or use the hairdryer as sound proofing is as good as none over here).
Yep, and thats it. The end of my weekly update (ending on Monday night, like all my usual posts). Now that I’m typing, it is 10:08pm and my hostel roomie has fallen asleep and I’m shamelessly keeping the lights on but I should sleep soon as well.
The next time I will be updating this, I should be suffering from the aches of doing fruit thinning. I can’t give up.. need to get my 3 more weeks of payslip otherwise I’ll be home before Christmas.
Thanks for reading my once again lengthy recap of my daily musings. Hope it had keep you entertained so far =p