Well I haven’t been writing much, but a lot happened since the last blog. I’m back in civilization again, after spending a while traveling in places whiteout internet or cellphone reception which was Great!! We left Christchurch soon after I came back from my presentations in Auckland and drove towards Raikaia gorge. After more then an hour over small roads a lot of curves and less and less houses we arrived at a bridge, a beautiful blue river flowing under it, inviting us with it’s beauty. We walked along for a couple hours and decided that we wanted to explore this river a bit more. So the next day early we packed up my little red dinghy out of the car and started walking along the river, upstream. Our plan was to leave the car behind, hitchhike up river and then peddle back to the car, but there were so little cars on the road that we didn’t manage to catch a ride and ended up walking 15km with the dinghy in the backpack. We found a good spot to launch and before we even knew it the fast flowing river grabbed hold of the dinghy. We were now racing down the river at about 7/8 knots and faster in the rapids that we encountered every couple hundred meters. The landscape changed in every corner while we flew over the crystal clear water each holding a peddle to get trough the rapids without capsizing. We managed, not completely dry though… After 3 hours of peddling down the river and a good night of sleep back in the car, landscape changed again, mountains and a beautiful blue lake showed up at the road-horizon. At the end of the lake, Mt Cook (3754m) was making the view even more amazing, his white snowcaps glittering in the sun. We hiked up one of Mt. cooks little brothers to Muellers hut. A really beautiful hike 1800 m up, where we found some snow and a lot of wind! During the hike big black clouds came rushing over the mountain peaks, taking our beautiful view over the mountain range away. But we were lucky as the rain just started when we were a descend walk and 1810 steps back down at the car-park. More windy roads brought us to Wanaka and Queenstown where we met some amazing people that are into flying! a different kind of flying I was used to though. They took us up to the top of a mountain and attached us to something that looked like a strange chapped sail. ‘ if I say run you start running down until we are up in the air, got it? ‘ I looked up at the wings above me on which I was attached with a rope and then down at the steep hill that we had to run off. My hang-gliding pilot started running so I did the same and before I knew it off we went, high up in the air. In tandem I experienced hang-gliding and Para-gliding around the beautiful mountains and lakes of Queenstown. It’s both a lot of fun!! and a awesome experience! Using the wind to move, just in 3D instead of just 2D like on a sailboat. After the flying experience we came safely back down to the ground and did some great day walks in the Fiordlands and Milford sound. We encountered some Ice and Snow and got told of a mountaineer for doing longer day-walks on Sandals. If the ground wouldn’t have been so icy I would have preferred to walk barefoot… After that we drove down to the southern most point off New zealand and from there took a ferry to Steward Island, where we hiked for 2 days. I gave a talk to the local preschool kids (7-10 year olds) and a school group from Invercargill that was visiting there for a week. They had just been reading about me and were all really exited to hear the story. The school class from Invercargill went on the same ferry back as us and the whole one hour ride they kept asking questions which was really nice. Before Steward Island we had just hopped along the Catlins coast and saw some Yellow eyed pinquins and sealions. But after all these days out with just nature we had to drive back to Christchurch as Dan (the earthling) had to fly out from there to Australia for a couple months work and I had to do some presentations there. I met up with two girl friends I knew from Auckland. So I’m still in good company and we hope to travel back up North together with Joy (my car).

Laura