Tsunami survivor, 28/2

It is certainly serious business moving across the globe – today I survived my first tsunami! I was woken up at 6.30 in the morning by family calling me from Denmark, warning me about the potential threat caused by the earthquake in Chile. They sounded very worried, so I got up and on the Internet to try and figure out what all the fuzz was about. At first, the info was quite sparse, but from the very beginning it seemed safe for me to stay (which I was expecting, since I live a few kilometres from the coast). Water levels were expected to rise up to one meter at most of the east coast, and up to three meters at a few places, and when the tsunami struck later today, all that happened was that the water front went back and forth a few times, not rising noticeably higher than at high tide later on at the same day. Surely the forces in play have still been incredible, but as long as we stayed away from the beach there was nothing to be worried about, and it was only those camping or living right down to the water front that were advised to seek higher ground.

The more interesting aspect of the whole tsunami deal was to compare the news in the Danish and New Zealand press. In Denmark it was said that a tsunami would be threatening all pacific coastlines, not mentioning anything about the expected strength of the rising waters, which of course brought back pictures of the big tsunami five years ago and scared my family in Denmark. The kiwi news was that a tsunami would strike, but with waves no higher than one meter in my area. In fact, they had to emphasise the danger that is still connected to waves this “small”, since the police and civil defence feared that people would rush to the beach to watch the water coming in. Therefore, I went back to sleep for a few hours before getting up, and when the tsunami came in around 10 and proved itself to be as small as expected, I texted the guys in DK to tell them that I was sure to survive the wave.

University life, 23/2

Today has been my second day of proper university life at UC. Lectures started yesterday, and I am very pleased to be back in the game again. Lecturers seems to be nice, down-to-earth people, and my courses look doable, even though anatomy, physiology and pathology might require some late evenings or early mornings to get hold off. I am expecting a slight change in my study routines, since my courses here seems less focused on equations than my undergraduate courses in Aarhus were, but I am confident that I will find a good way of absorbing knowledge here as well. This semester I will be taking the following courses:

• MDPH401 – Anatomy and Physiology
• MDPH403 – Radiation Physics
• MDPH404 – Radiation Biology and Radiation Protection
• PHYS407 – Research Tools (covering scientific writing in LaTeX and some programming in MATLAB and possibly another programme as well)
• PHYS411 – Advanced Quantum Mechanics

So far I have had introductory lectures in all courses but PHYS411 which won’t commence until 15 March, and they do a lot of mid-term tests, which will count a certain percentage of the total grade if we pass the exams. This means that there is no slacking off during term-time, but hopefully, this also allows for breaks to be spent as breaks and not as extra study time.

The director of the medical physics programme is a really nice guy, who is very helpful when it comes to very basic questions about how exams and everything works here, as well as with more specialised questions regarding the courses he is teaching. Today, he almost offered me a PhD-position if I do well at my coursework (at least he encouraged me to keep the option in mind when doing my coursework and planning the years ahead), and the whole atmosphere at the physics department is nice and relaxed, and a bit more personal than in Aarhus I must say. This might have something to do with there being quite few postgraduate students at the department, but nevertheless it is nice to feel welcome and appreciated in the corridors. I am hoping to get a desk within a few weeks, but nobody seems to be quite sure on what the department policy is on the matter, so I will just have to cross my fingers and be patient.

Another part of the university life is all the different clubs organised under the University of Canterbury Student Association (UCSA). They have such vast a variety that it is some task to choose between all the different clubs. So far, I have signed up for the UC Climbing Club, Canterbury University Tramping Club and Canterbury University Snow Sports Club, and there is a few more I would love to join, but I seriously doubt how much time I have left to dedicate to these clubs. Maybe I will just sign up for the whole lot, memberships are around $20, and then choose to put my time and effort into whichever is more fun and with the right people involved. I don’t have to make up my mind by tomorrow, but since a lot of clubs start their activities by next week, it would be a lot easier to get involved if I have decided during this week and can show up to the first meetings where there will be lots of others as new and as confused as myself.

On Friday I will donate my house-building-skills to a project called Habitat for Humanity, that is building a house on university grounds to house a family that needs housing due to economic trouble. Everything is build by volunteers, supervised by professionals, and I am certain that it will be good fun, and maybe a place to meet some cool people. Friday evening I am attending a welcome diner at “Operation Friendship”, an initiative aimed at getting international students to meet and have diner with local kiwis who have chosen to open their homes and welcome a bunch of foreign students into their house. The initiative appears to have started within local churches, but it appears to be a non-religious project that I look forward to taking part in.

Ilam Village, 12/2

A week ago I checked in at the Ilam Village, apartment no. 83 room 1. I got to sleep in a proper bed for the first time in a month, and as from today, three of my four flatmates have moved in as well. My room is probably 4.5x2 square meters, and the buildings are only a few years old, making everything quite new and not worn out like one could fear when moving in at student accommodations. All of the rooms where I live are furnished with a bed (for unknown reasons I have only been given a single when I am entitled to a King Single – big issue, which apparently takes more than a week to solve), a desk and chair, a wardrobe without doors, two pin-up boards and a bookshelf mounted over the desk. Unfortunately, my room is on the ground level, so I have quite a lot of traffic passing by during the day, but as long as I don’t have to study full days in my room I guess I will be fine.

The apartment has two bathrooms, where the showerheads are mounted in the wall only 175cm above the floor. We saw this at a few holiday parks in January as well, but I still can’t figure out why they would do such a thing. It’s not like Kiwis are particularly short, and the money saved on those 20cm of water pipes can’t be much. But with a combination of bending down and leaning against the wall, plus a bit of limbo dancing, I am able to wash my hair, and I would rather have it this way than an old, mouldy tub in a dark brown bathroom from the seventies.

Our kitchen is very sparse equipped, and this is probably the one thing that will bother me the most. We have a tiny fridge, with less than one shelf for each of the five in the apartment, and instead of a proper oven we have a microwave with a convection programme. In addition to this, there is just one plate, one glass, one cup and one set of crockery for each of us, and the utensils are pretty much non-existing. I really do not understand how they can imagine us cooking for five with two tiny pots and a small frying pan… But we will be all right, I have already talked to two of my flatmates about getting extras for the kitchen, and they are more than happy to pay their share.

The most important part, however, is that my flatmates seems to be really nice people. So far I am living with a Kiwi girl and a girl and a guy from USA, and I have no reason to believe that it will be an issue living together with them.

The last week have been spent on getting a lot of practical things sorted before international orientation and enrolment kicks off next week, and lectures begin the week after. I have gotten a mobile phone, a bike and all sorts of different stuff for my room and our kitchen. I have been to visit Eva & Nic, have had the last visitors from New Zealand Explorer before they all moved on – thanks a lot for stopping by, I will miss you guys!, and been for a few walks around the proximity of the university plus a long walk to central Christchurch. My bike will come in very handy, since it is a half day project to walk to the city centre, do whatever needs to be done there, and walk back to campus. By bike I imagine the trip can be done in 15 minutes, making it possible to go on days where I need to study as well. Besides, Christchurch is absolutely flat, and thus the perfect city to bike around. I even managed to find a bike that is neither a road or a mountain bike,  but it took some effort to find the right shop with the hybrid I was looking for.

Tomorrow I am biking to The Paddock and staying there overnight. We will be going to Aprils 21^st tomorrow night, and I am looking forward to meeting some of the people that I will be seeing from time to time at The Paddock, plus seeing a bit of the Kiwi family traditions. Sunday we are all going to the Riccarton Market before Åse & Connie drops by to see my apartment, and in the evening the village offers “speed meeting”, where it will – hopefully – be possible to get to talk to some of the others staying at the village and have a bit of fun. So far, the only introduction the village has offered was an open lunchBBQ yesterday and today, and to be honest I expected a bit more in terms of getting to know the place and people around. I guess it will all come naturally in time, but it sure would have been nice with a tour around the facilities instead of just “Welcome, here is your room and your keys, any questions?”.

When I moved in last Friday, Nic and I went for a walk around the university, and I happened to meet one of my lecturers when we were looking around at the physics department. He seemed like a really nice guy, genuinely interested in why I am here studying medical physics, and just as down-to-earth as I am used to from Aarhus University. It is a big comfort to have met one of the lecturers and seen for myself that they are relaxed and helpful, and given the fact that we are only ten people following the medical physics classes, I am sure I will get to know a few of the staff pretty well, even before I start on my thesis next year.

Ball Pass Crossing, 24-25/1

Sunday the 24^th, we got up to a rainy morning at a campsite by the side of Lake Pukaki near Mt. Cook Village, but since we only had 3-4 hours of tramping planned that day, we decided to stay dry at the campsite for another hour before driving up to the parking lot near the Tasman Glacier where we started the tramp. Stalling for an hour did the trick – the rain stopped, and we saw nothing but dry weather for the rest of the crossing.

Day one was more or less flat, and took us to Ball Shelter (altitude 950m), a flat area with a longdrop and collected rainwater for drinking. The tour offered views of Tasman Glacier and the lake beneath it, as well as The South Alps all around us. We arrived at Ball Shelter between 3 and 4PM, pitched our tents and relaxed in the sun. Diner was prepared at 6PM, and the evening ended up being quite chilly as the wind had picked up during the afternoon.

Prior to departure, we had been split into different groups doing different tramps on day two of the tour. I made my way to the longest and most difficult tramp, crossing Ball Pass, and looked forward to an expected 12 hour tramp on day two including snow crossings with crampons and ice axes. Only four students (myself included) asked for and were allowed on the crossing, the rest was looking forward to a shorter day two with a few hours tramping without backpacks before taking down our camp and carrying everything back out the same way as on day one. Unfortunately they had a disappointing day for several reasons, which caused a few clashes when we all met up in the evening on day two – some related to the specific tramps, and some “just” related to us being 22 travelling together for three weeks.

The six of us doing Ball Pass Crossing (4 students, 1 teacher and 1 helper) woke up at 4.30AM on day two, had breakfast and got everything packed. During the night, Keas had been checking out our camp, sliding off our tents and knocking on our pots through the tent fabric. We left everything unnecessary behind, thanking the rest of the team for carrying this out later on the day. At 5.30AM we started climbing up the steep slopes towards Caroline Hut (altitude 1830m) and further on to Ball Pass (altitude 2130m). The morning was very cloudy, but when the sun rose above the mountains around 7AM we had made our way up over the clouds, and the most magnificent morning light coloured the snow-clad mountains in different shades of orange. The Tasman Valley was still covered in clouds, and we hoped that the others would not be put off by this as they were getting up around the same time as we were standing above the clouds enjoying the view.

All day long, the path was much harder to find than the other tracks we had been walking previously on the tour around NZ, and the terrain proved to be quite difficult. Not only did we meet a fair bit of snow, requiring ice axes to cross safely (the crampons might not have been essential, but they certainly made it a whole lot easier), the path went through all different sorts of typical alpine terrain including loose rocks, big boulders from rockslides, and sometimes we had to do a bit of scrambling to make our way forward. We did not manage to keep track of the path at all times, and this might of course have made our path a bit more difficult than if we had stayed on the proper path, but we made it to Ball Pass where we arrived at 11.30AM after climbing a total of 1180 meters. On the other side of the pass awaited our descend down to and past Hooker Glacier. Lunch was an ongoing project this day, we had a sandwich every 3 hours or so not to get too full and tired after a long break in the middle of the day. This turned out to be a great solution, none of us got too hungry or too full at any point, and we kept our breaks to a maximum of 15 minutes.

After a long morning climbing up to Ball Pass, it was a relief to get to the high point of the day, and though the descend was longer than when we did the Travers Saddle Crossing in Nelson Lakes, this one turned out to be easier on the knees due to loose sand and rocks that gave in to our steps. All day long we had to watch out for rock falls, caused by our own steps, but we managed to get through the entire day without any injuries and just one minor incident where I had to do a bit of tap dancing to avoid a sliding rock.

The descend to The Playing Fields and further down to the East Hooker Valley was a bit tricky with respect to finding the path, but when we finally got down to the glacier after approx. 10 hours of tramping, we still faced a couple of hours making our way out of the valley to the campsite where the others were waiting. This last bit was quite flat, and it was a huge relief to just be able to walk at a fast pace, not having to consider every single step to avoid slipping on the steep slopes of the mountains.

Around 6PM we met the others at the DOC campsite in Mt. Cook Village after 12½ fantastic hours offering spectacular sceneries as well as a physically demanding trip where you had to pay attention to every single step in order to stay upright. We came down to a well deserved beer, diner, and a weird discussion on whether it would be safe for us to drive to Queenstown that night or not. We ended up staying in Mt. Cook Village overnight; I went to bed at 9PM and the next morning we drove to Queenstown at 6.45AM to be ready for rafting at the Shotover River at 1PM.

Tramping in Nelson Lakes National Park, 19-21/1

We got up to an early morning Tuesday 19^th and drove from Motueka to St. Arnaud where we hired a water taxi to take us down Lake Rotoiti to Travers Track. As usually, we were split into two groups, and the group I tramped with set off for Upper Travers Hut on day one, a tramp estimated to take eight hours. We started tramping at noon, spent five and a half hours to get to John Tait Hut, before continuing for another three hours to get to Upper Travers Hut where we arrived at 8.30PM, exhausted but thrilled that we made it. The surroundings were absolutely spectacular, through untouched forests where dead trees were left to rot, down by the river with magnificent views of the mountains, and when we finally got to Upper Travers Hut we had just reached the tree line. In the hut we prepared diner, ate and went straight to bed. In the hut were two Israelis and a Czech, who might have been a bit annoyed by us, scrambling around until 11PM, but they never complained.

Wednesday morning we got up and headed to Travers Saddle, a climb of 450 meters. This day we had plenty of time, and at the saddle we chose to climb one of the summits in close proximity, and had a spectacular view of the valley we were about to descend into.

Onto the track again, we had lunch above the tree line and had time for a nap or a game of cards. We then continued down, and before reaching West Sabine Hut we had descended about 1000 meters. A rough day on the knees, but we had plenty of time and good weather conditions and a nice and easy day. In wet conditions though, it must be a pretty demanding day, since everything is very exposed and there are many meters to climb and descend. West Sabine Hut was welcoming us with the Sabine River just next to it, and most of us jumped into the river to get washed after a warm day of tramping and sweating. After the dip, we all took shelter in the hut before the sand flies got the best of us. The day was estimated to a 6-9 hours walk depending on the conditions, and we cruised through in what I recall as being around 7 hours, taking quite a few breaks.

Thursday started out in rain, but we had to meet a water taxi at Lake Rotoroa at 2PM, which left us with no choice, but to put on our waterproofs and get going. It had been raining during the night, so the trees gave little shelter since they were already soaked. Fortunately, the rain stopped at lunchtime, and about one hour before Lake Rotoroa we found a neat spot by the bank of Sabine River where we had our lunch, all hidden away behind our mosquito nets to avoid the sand flies. We got out alive though, and when we reached Lake Rotoroa at 1.30PM, we surprised two guys who had gone for a swim in the lake, not expecting 11 Danes to show up while all their clothes was hung in a bush on dry land!

In all, the tramp was a fantastic tour through forests and mountains, offering great views and the feeling of being all on your own, even though the path was clearly marked by DOC. On the last day I had a bit of an off-day, but in the middle of everything a small bird flew down and sat about a meter away from me on the path. It jumped around me in a semi-circle, being patient and calm enough to let me get my camera and take a picture of it, and the mere presence of this curious little being lifted my spirits back up. This is exactly why I enjoy the outdoors as much as I do!

The Paddock, 2/2

3 days ago I arrived at The Paddock, which will be my second home while in NZ. The last days in Queenstown offered Bungy Jumping off Kawarau Bridge (the original site where A. J. Hackett invented the byngy jump), canyoning close to Wanaka, and a few nights out with the rest of our NZ Explorer team before we all headed our separate ways around the country.

Thursday 28^th, almost all of us went to the Kawarau Bridge to do our very first bungy jump. Some had been incredibly nervous since we booked our jumps the day before, and we were all expecting quite an experience, one way or another. First, the bus was more than half an hour late because of a hung over driver who did not show up, but when we finally got to the bungy site, it was all efficient and cool business. We were asked to line up in front of a counter where we were all weighed, then there was time to go to the bathroom before going out on the bridge, putting on a harness and after just a few minutes in line I got tied up to the bungy cord by a guy named Rambo! From then, it was a matter of slowly jumping out on the platform, hearing Rambo count 5-4-3-2-1-Bungy, leaning forward and letting gravity do its thing. I got a fair bit of water, as asked for, and 1½ minute after stepping on to the platform I were in a boat at the bottom, and could go see the others again, having spent $175. I must say that I expected a bit more of a kick than I got from it, maybe I am just too used to heights and putting my life into some random guide’s hands, who tells me that the bungy will hold? Nevertheless, I am glad I did it with the NZ Explorer guys, and we had a few great laughs when some of the others refused to jump at the guides count.

Friday, I went canyoning with three others from our group, and we had an incredible day of fun and games in The Niger stream, close to Wanaka. Long abseils through waterfalls that just kept smashing water in your face, fun slides – one which ended in a 10 meter drop, which the guides chose not to tell us – and incredible jumps, up to 6-7 meters, where you had to land within a square of 2x2 meters if you wanted to keep your legs from breaking. In total, we spent four hours in the water, and none of us could stop smiling. On top of this, the scenery was just like postcard pictures, all the way down, except for those eight wetsuits and helmets that had been thrown into the stream.

When we got back from Wanaka we had diner, before going out the last time with the majority of the group, who left early Saturday morning. A tired, but good evening out, and the perfect way of saying goodbye to some of our travelmates in the past 3½ weeks.

To get to Wanaka on Friday, it turned out to be cheaper for the four of us to rent a car than to go by bus, and we had to rent it for two days since we needed it before the rental companies opened in the morning. Therefore we had a car available during Saturday, and we chose (a bit randomly) to go to Arrowtown for lunch, an old town where the gold miners used to stay. When we got back, a few hours was spent relaxing and getting everything packed for an early morning Sunday, and around 7PM we went out for diner and had a fantastic evening with good food and wine, and fantastic company.

Saturday I got on the bus from Queenstown to Christchurch at 8.50 in the morning, and had a smooth ride, arriving in Christchurch at 6PM where my aunt Eva picked me up. Since then I have been at The Paddock, relaxing and slowly getting ready to move in at the Ilam Village on Friday. Luckily, I can look forward to a few visits from the NZ Explorer group during the weekend and next week, but from then on it is all down to getting ready to go back to Uni – and I am looking forward to it!