Tramp Report

Today I went tramping! I went to a meeting of the Christchurch Tramping Club on Thursday and introduced myself. It just so happened that a guy named Alister was leading a trip to Mt Catherine, and asked if I wanted to join. Here's the route description from the CTC website here:

Mt Catherine is a superb peak overlooking Lake Heron in the Clent Hills area. We'll access via a 4WD road and cross the flats then ascend the south west ridge - about 1000m sustained climb, some of it fairly steep, tussock at first and then rock - to get to the commanding summit of Mt Catherine (2085m).

We set off from Christchurch at 7am and were hiking by 9:30. In the party was Alister, a programmer like me, Keith, who seemed to work in one of the many vineyards of New Zealand, and Christina, an accountant. The drive out was delightful. I finally found out what the giant hedges I was seeing on my way to Arthur's Pass last weekend - they're wind breaks. Of course I saw lots of sheep, too.

The weather started off nice.

Stopping for a break.

Tramping in the south island seems to follow that mantra of Kiwis I mentioned previously - "do it yourself". There wasn't any path to take after the farmer's 4x4 road ended. We hopped a couple fences and just started up the creek bed, nothing particularly fancy. Alister mentioned that Catherine probably only sees five or six summits in a year, so there's little purpose in having a trail. Besides, there was quite a bit of snow travel involved.

The other neat thing was that no one really knew where to go exactly, we just figured it out as we went. By we I mainly mean Keith and Alister, though we all joined in guessing which of the peaks was actually the tallest, since at times it was hard to tell.

On the way up.

The weather in New Zealand is rather temperamental, at least in the mountains, since it changes often and can get quite brutal compared to weather systems I'm used to. The weather today wasn't stellar, but it was nice enough to make it to the top, and it was a good introduction. Something that I've never experience before today was a gust of wind so sudden and strong as to knock me off balance and almost completely over. We were never on a knife-edge ridge, so there was zero danger of falling, but the concept of being blown off a mountain I can imagine to be literally possible here, even at relatively low altitudes.

Summit!

On the way down
And now to finish this terribly laid out post, here's a terribly shot video I took while slogging up the snow valley about 200m below the summit:

Specialties

Adjusting to New Zealand has been pretty easy. People speak English, are terribly friendly, and the culture is (relatively speaking) almost identical to Canada. They drive on the left, "Anne" sounds like "Ian," and I've now heard someone referring to a "chilly bin" (a cooler), but it's not actually a big change. There are of course small differences here and there that a visitor will delight in noticing.

Where I work there is a giant commercial espresso machine; it has 4 brew heads and 2 steamers. I believe it operates on an auto-volumetric method, so it doesn't take *that* much skill to operate, however I'm finding it easy enough to screw up royally quite often. My tamping skills are slowly getting better. This speaks to the strange dedication New Zealand has to coffee. I'd be curious to know the per-capita coffee consumption, in particular espresso consumption. It's a strange surprise, but my sister gave me fair warning about it. A week in and I'm now most definitely addicted to coffee again.

My barista skills leave something to be desired. No art ..  yet.

The cost of stuff is pretty interesting to someone who is used to buying things from companies with purchasing power (like Mountain Equipment Coop). As my ski bum from the bike shop put it, "to get things to the end of the earth costs a lot." I forgot my climbing shoes, and thank god that was the only thing I really forgot. Stuff is not *that* much more, but I'd say it's up to 150% of the price of an identical item back home for general sporting equipment. I tend to forget that in Canada, for example, tax (13%) is not included in the price, while it is here; it's also $1.00 NZD = ~$0.80 CAD, so I may be overestimating things slightly. However, it goes both ways - kiwi fruit and royal gala apples are reasonably priced. I assume lamb is too. Still, most imported goods are going to cost you, big time.

$12.79 for 250ml of maple syrup. I didn't bother to check if it was actually from Canada.

Living in Christchurch means living with earthquakes, so everything is super low-rise. It reminds me of my grandmother's old neighbourhood in Kitchener. Everything is one or two floors, with the exception of a few buildings downtown (or what's left of it). It's a sad reminder that the Anglicans of 200 years ago didn't have much sense of seismic risk when constructing their colony. It does mean that every little height change can give you a glimpse of the stunning southern alps. This pic doesn't do it justice, but the drive to work is definitely out of the ordinary.

Earthquakes

I just felt my first Christchurch earthquake! My suspicions were confirmed by taking a look at this really nifty website, the Christchurch Quake Map. The one I felt was only a 3.3M, but it was fairly shallow, at 5km deep, which I suspect is why I felt it.

In other news, I had my first day of work at the Christchurch office. It's a very nice office indeed! My main concern, other than getting work done, is to learn how to use the extremely huge and impressive looking espresso machine. My first two attempts today were truly pathetic, though I liked the coffee well enough. Burnt milk, crema-less brews, you name it, I really screwed it up. Soon, however, I will master this machine...

Botanical Gardens

I took a trip on Saturday (October 20th) to Christchurch's Botanical Gardens. I thought I'd post some of those pictures. By the way, I figure I'd point out that these pictures suck from a photographer or videographer's point of view. The idea is basically to be rather like a cheesy travel blog, not to really impress anyone.

Skiing in New Zealand

In a frantic attempt to do something fun this weekend, I thought about heading up to Arthur's Pass to do some "tramping" (i.e. hiking). It turns out a lot of the tracks (i.e. hikes, paths) up there are still rather avalanche prone, so I decided otherwise.

While conversing with a guy working in a bike/ski/climb store, he starting talking about the few remaining ski clubs still open. October is really, really late in the season for New Zealand - think mid-April for North America. However, there have been a couple recent heavy snow dumps, so there was still a 2-meter snow base in some places, including a place this guy mentioned called Broken River. He suggested I do a "mission" up there* to hike up to the base.

I started reading the website when I got home and discovered there's still plenty of skiing to be done there. By the time I decided skiing was a possibility it was about 3:00pm on Saturday. Somehow, through some stroke of luck, I emailed a ski rental place, that happened to have a guy working, and happened to be open until 6pm... long story short, I ended up skiing this weekend!

New Zealand ski clubs are different.

Small ski clubs are different in New Zealand than in other parts of the world. For one, there are no chair lifts; they use rope tows that require the use of "nutcrackers". I'll note that I just happened to have gloves, pants and a shell for skiing since I had packed my mountain gear. I also had my harness, which I learned I should bring to use the rope tows more easily. I even lent a spare carabiner I had to a man and his little boy for the boy to be towed up. As someone I met there described it, "there's a do-it-yourself attitude to skiing in New Zealand," and I have to agree. Want to go jump off some rock outcrop? Go ahead! There's a different attitude to personal responsibility here, and I like it.

I was even encouraged to ski down to one of the bowls way out north, which I was assured reached the car park at the bottom (way, way down - about 500m). "It'll be a great end to the day" as well as pretty convenient since I was staying the night at the lodge just a tram's ride away from the car park. As it turns out the snow has melted at the bottom so skiing right to the car park isn't really an option any more, so I had to hike down a little ways to the bottom of the tram - no easy task in ski boots. However, it made for about the greatest spring ski run of my life.

I experienced more in one day than I can believe. The snow in New Zealand is apparently heavy anyway, and in spring it is downright cement-like. I had stop mid-run several times, and it wasn't a terribly large bowl I was skiing in most of the time. There were dozens of Kea hanging around, which is pretty common, but novel to a foreign skier like me. Lucky for me the staff decided to do some night skiing, which is basically just keeping one of the tows open and having a party at the lodge, complete with a bon fire and lots of beer. The whole experience was just surreal.

Kea, just hangin' out on the cornice.

I had to forego skiing on Monday, since the tows were closed until the evening due to gale-force winds (~80-100km/hour) and heavy snow causing low visibility; plus said snow was beginning to accumulate on the steep dirt road that led to the car park, and I didn't have chains (a big no-no around here) so I had to make a quick exit. Who cares, I went skiing when I thought the ski season was over.

*I've heard people use the term "mission" a couple times, and I can only guess the rough equivalent is "trip", "quest," "adventure," or if it's a really a big deal, perhaps an "epic". I'm still trying to figure it out exactly.

First day in New Zealand

I arrived Friday in Christchurch. I was invited by my company to help communicate and work on techniques for routing along road networks. Really, though, I came because New Zealand has everything I think I want right now in my life: mountains and adventure.

The flight over went pretty well, all things told. The long haul, from Los Angeles to Auckland, was on a Boeing 777, a relatively new plane. Because of this, it maintains a higher cabin pressure, relieving some of the symptoms of "post-plane" fatigue. I felt pretty good, and was able to sleep quite a bit.

Decent digs.

I arrived to a guy holding a "Michael Rooke" sign, the first, and perhaps the last time I'll ever get that classic greeting at an airport. It was on to the office, then to the car rental place to pick up the car that is to be my vessel of adventure for the next three months. The flat I'm staying in is very nice - a 3 bedroom, 2-floor townhouse, well furnished and very livable. I went to do some errands in the afternoon - mainly to find a cell phone SIM card and to get some groceries. Going to the Bulk'n'save or whatever it's called was really fun. That's one thing I find strangely fun about visiting other countries - the supermarkets. In the kiwi supermarkets you can buy kiwis and apples without feeling guilty about how long a journey they've taken to get to you.

After doing that I came home to plot how my long weekend would go. Tramping in Arthur's Pass is not possible at this time - surprisingly, the tramp called "Avalanche pass" is too high of an avalanche danger at the moment :(. Another time, for sure; it sounds like a great day hike.

Don't Buy Fiat

Something happened to me tonight that is too weird, funny and alarming not to write about.

I was walking back to a friends house from a concert at about 11:20pm, when the group of friends I was with turned north from Bloor St. onto Howland. We noticed a car projecting an ad for Fiat onto the side of a building. The car had a projector on the roof, powered by a small generator beside the car resting on the side walk. I think we all got the feeling this kind of thing was bullshit; not only because it was probably an illegal billboard display, but because it was just obnoxious. One friend decided to mimic something they had seen someone else do - turn off the generator to turn off the ad. No one was in or around the car, so it seemed innocent enough. Someone switched off the generator, and we all had a mischievous laugh. About 20 seconds later, a guy comes up to our group as we were walking north and tells us sternly:

 Guy: "That was very rude"
Me: (really sarcastic) "Yes, you're quite right, it was very rude".
Guy: "You just cost me ten thousand dollars."

 The guy then whacked me in the face with this aluminium piece of a tripod:

It was a decent hit, but I was too stunned to care about any damage. It was just weird. He hit me with it, then dropped the tripod, or else it broke off on my chin. It was strong enough that my chin was decently bruised and had a knick of blood on it, and my shoulder had a welt on it, but we're talking a *really* minor injury. Too minor to make a fuss or escalate the situation by either going back and talking to the guy, or calling the police. If he had hit me elsewhere in the face, though, it might have been a different story. We joked that if we really did cost him $10,000 for interrupting his advertising for 2 minutes, he was either extremely well off and probably shouldn't be beating guys up over a single night's inconvenience, or else should be insured against this kind of thing. I find it unlikely we were the first liquored hooligans to hit the off switch. My friend went and threatened to call the police on the guy, but he didn't seem to care; he moved the car about 30 minutes later.

 Realistically I felt bad for the guy. He's clearly doing a crummy job, and was pushed over the edge by some wags trying to disturb his business. I don't think I deserved a hit to the face with a blunt object, though. I'll tell you one thing, I'm not ever buying a Fiat.