West Coast Trip!

We returned a couple of days ago from our ten day trip to the West Coast of the South Island. I guess the best way to describe it would be rugged and beautiful. Only 40,000 people live on the West Coast, which is a very small population for that large of a land area. Our class that we were taking was called forest ecology, so most days we spent some time learning inside and then went out into different forest ecosystems to study them. The first 5 days we stayed at a lodge in a little town called Makarora. Myself and the other three male students had a nice little tee pee as our room. After Makarora, we drove farther West all the way to the coast of the Tasman sea and stayed at a Maori Marai (meeting house). It was built in 2005 and it was a beautiful place to stay. We took some adventurous trips into the thickest bush that I have ever been in, which was a lot of fun. Some of the forests we were in were 6,000 years old, and there was so much growing that it was almost impossible to walk through. On Sunday myself and four others went on a glacier walk at Fox Glacier. It was an awesome experience! We strapped spikes to the bottom of our boots so that we could walk without falling, and our guide used a pick axe to carve steps for us in the ice. The glacier is one of only three like it in the world, where a glacier exists so close to the sea in a temperate environment. One of the other three is the Franz Josef glacier right down the road (which we also saw), and the other one is in Argentina.

The semester is quickly coming to a close, so this will probably be my last post on my blog. Thanks for reading about my semester, and I can't wait to talk to you about it when I get back!