My second summer in New Zealand!

If you had told me when I wrote my last New Zealand blog 10 months ago that I’d be spending my entire summer back in Christchurch I would have been in a state of disbelief, excitement, and gratitude. That's how I still feel now and I’ve been back from my second stay down under for a month! I have been incredibly lucky to spend 9 months of the last 15 abroad and I can only wonder what the next entry on this blog will be considering I graduate in only 5 short months!

My second stay in New Zealand was completely different than the first. I was working (unpaid of course) in an internship at Habitat for Humanity instead of studying at the University of Canterbury. I was living with my lovely boyfriend Bernard instead of living in student housing with all of my study abroad friends. I was completely surrounded by Kiwis instead of hanging out with Americans a lot. Essentially, it was real life instead of study abroad fantasy travel life, and it was awesome!

I thought it would be fun to do a recap with some pictures of what I did in my 3 months of NZ “summer” (remember, their seasons are opposite ours, so this was actually my 4^th winter in a row)! First of all, we did some awesome trips.

About a week after I arrived Bernard and I hopped on a plane and went up to the amazing capital city Wellington for the weekend. We had a lot of fun out on the town with his friends but the most significant thing that happened is that I ran my first half marathon! 

Welcome Flats - the group

Welcome Flats - one of the most awesome hikes! 

Welcome Flats is an overnight hike to incredible hot pools in the mountains that we did last year. It was so awesome we had to do it again! It was unfortunately the only overnight hike of my summer because Bernard sprained his ankle and other things took priority but we packed a lot of fun into one trip - road trip across the island, great company, amazing scenery, and of course you can't beat the hot pools! 

Hanmer Springs

For our one year anniversary (woohoo!) Bernard and I drove up to a nearby resort town with natural hot pools with our friends Greg and Suyi. An excellent celebration! 

 Queenstown

Probably the best weekend trip Bernard and I made was to the beautiful tourist destination of Queenstown. He hadn't been since he was a kid and I only spent one day there last time so we really enjoyed the amazing scenery, the nightlife, and the gondola and luge despite our bad luck with weather! 

Arthur's Pass - Foggy Peak

Arthur's Pass - Castle Hill

Arthur's Pass - Lake Coleridge

Bernard and I got a good deal on a hotel in the middle of Arthur's Pass National Park so we had a great time on this weekend getaway - one of my favorite weekends. We had a lot of fun exploring various gorgeous (and I mean GORGEOUS) spots along the way and the best part is that all of this is within 2 hours of Christchurch! These Kiwis take their backyard for granted.

Mt. Somers

We spent one of our last weekends doing a day hike around the very pretty Mt. Somers. There are so many beautiful spots in NZ, I still haven't even come close to seeing everything I want to see! 

New Zealand is stunning, obviously, and all of these trips were ‘heaps’ of fun (sweet as, mate!) but what I really loved about my second stay in NZ was that I was actually living normal life. I was going to work every day, going to the grocery store and the movies, enjoying the highs and lows of living with a boyfriend for the first time, and just hanging out with Bernard and his friends and making the most of the crazy experience of assimilating into his life. It was really cool to get to a point where Christchurch just became home and I stopped noticing all the little differences so much (accents, money, driving on the left). Some snapshots of my normal Christchurch life: 

The Habitat for Humanity office where I worked for 20 hours a week - a great way to fill my time and build my resume while still getting to spend my summer where I wanted! 

Many a weekend spent watching the All Blacks kick butt at rugby :)

Our extremely successful pub quiz team, Team Boom, where we spent every Monday evening! 

Silliness at Suyi's birthday party

Exploring the city - there's been some rebuilding over the year I've known Christchurch so that continued to be something that interested me. Lots of cool art and shows and cafes popped up during the summer that weren't there last year! 

More city exploring - the coastline in Christchurch is beautiful and I wish I'd spent more time out there! On this lovely sunny day I went for a walk/wander after work and it was probably one of my favorite days because it reminded me of first exploring this area a year ago and how much things had changed and how happy I was to be there again. 

Surprise birthday brunch for Bernard at the awesome restaurant across the street from our house

Hanging out at home - lovely normal life! 

All in all, an incredible summer. I loved what a fun and unique (and yes, sometimes challenging) experience it was to settle in to real, normal daily life in another country and those little moments of novelty that still persist. Most of all (cheesiness alert!) I am so thankful that I had the chance to spend 3 months with Bernard actually getting to be together in semi-normal circumstances and how fun and easy that turned out to be. Bernard - thank you for some of the best months I can remember. All this madness has been worth it and I hope we manage to keep riding this roller coaster together a little longer so I can have more amazing NZ photos to put on this blog! :) It has been a crazy year but I've also had more fun and learned more about myself this year than in the rest of my life combined. Coming home has been rough, just like last time, but I'm excited to see what the future holds for me once I graduate in March and I'm hoping that New Zealand will be seeing me in 2013! 

x

Response - Conservation Philosophy

This is a response to the book Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs for the Honors class I'm taking this quarter. Mostly posting this here because the photos make the file too big to send any other way :)

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The thing I found most interesting about The Secret Knowledge of Water was how the desert, a rather unconventional environment, served as the backdrop for a classic story of solitary, adventurous, and even spiritual travel in the desert. It made me think about the desert, and in thinking about the desert I realized I’d never really given it any thought before. I definitely fall into the camp of associating wilderness with mountains, probably because I’ve grown up around a lot of mountains and it’s where most of my outdoor experiences have taken place. Thinking about wilderness and why we care about it in the context of the desert helped me think more about some of my own values and assumptions and realize that the reasons I value mountains and forests can apply more broadly to all environments.

Many of the benefits I think wilderness can give to people are in the traditional romantic view of wilderness. The most important is that being in wilderness allows us to test ourselves and be humbled by our own powerlessness. I think being in nature can humble you and awe you with the beauty and complexity of the environment and that can be a very profound experience. I also think wilderness can offer people a place to escape from all the technology and stress of normal life, which is only becoming more important with time as our society changes. What surprised me so much when reading Childs’ story was that he experienced all of these benefits in a place I’d never imagined could amaze and humble you because I’ve never thought of the desert as very complex or beautiful.

The personal nature of this book made me think about my own experiences outdoors and it surprised me to realize how similar the things Childs thought about in a desert are to things I’ve experienced too. I grew up mostly in the Pacific Northwest and my parents are Park Rangers so I spent a lot of time outside as a kid but have only really come back to hiking and such on my own in the last few years. I find myself very drawn to mountains, possibly in a similar way that Childs identifies with deserts because they represent home and his family/parents, so almost all of the outdoor experience I’ve had has been in mountains. What I’d like to do now is go through a few photos from my most memorable outdoor experiences and connect those experiences to the similar ideas I found in Childs’ book.

(Mt. Fyffe, New Zealand)

One similarity that I’d never considered before reading Childs’ book is between mountains and deserts. I think in the desert Childs feels fear and awe at the power of the inhospitable environment around him and that the challenge of living in that environment is a test that sharpens your senses and makes you appreciate the fragility of life. This is clearly true for mountains as well. This day hike was the first real mountain I’ve summited and even though it was an easy, non-technical climb I was still struck by how extreme the environment was and how easily I could take what I was looking at, extrapolate it to a few times higher and steeper and more technical, and imagine how scary and invigorating that would be. 

(Welcome Flats, New Zealand)

(Routeburn Track [Great Walk], New Zealand)

One difference that was really noticeable between New Zealand and my limited knowledge of conservation in the US is that the protected lands in New Zealand are substantially more developed. The best example of this is the huge number of backcountry huts, which range from the really nice huts pictured here (containing mattresses, running water, drop or even flush toilets, often firewood that’s been lifted in by helicopter, and sometimes a hut warden) to small bivouacs that contain only two mattresses and maybe a candle holder. They have an immense network of trails with various degrees of maintenance, from awesome suspension bridges to just occasional orange markers on trees where you have to cross rivers in between. The high-end example of developing protected land for tourism is the nine “great walks”, including the Routeburn Track, which provide a lot of revenue for the Department of Conservation (high season hut tickets are $50 a night). These are very maintained with multiple huts along the way. When I did the Routeburn Track it was just towards the end of avalanche season so they had been using dynamite to bring down snow above the trail and were offering a subsidized helicopter ride across the one remaining part of the track that was closed so visitors could complete the whole trail. I think this is a great example of different views on conservation.

(Abel Tasman Track [Great Walk], New Zealand)

The main reason I bring up how developed much of the protected land in New Zealand is is to make the point that meaningful experiences with nature can happen outside of what’s strictly defined as “wilderness”. None of the places pictured are wilderness, and in fact, I’m not sure that I’ve ever been in a true wilderness. The closest I came to wilderness was a few hiking trips where we carried tents and water and hiked on less of a trail and more of a bushwhack between markers – but of course there was still a visible human impact in these places. However, I still often had a sense of having these places to myself – when the environment around you is so huge and beautiful and stunning I don’t think another few people makes a difference. This is shown above in pictures of a 3-day hike in New Zealand’s most visited National Park where we rarely saw other hikers.

(Welcome Flats, New Zealand)

To go back to the powerful experiences that people can find in nature, as found in Childs: wilderness can test you, help you realize how little you know and how sheltered your usual life is, give you time and space away to think and connect with the environment, humble you with your insignificance and the power of nature, and amaze you with the beauty and complexity of the environment. I want to argue that all of these experiences are possible outside of wilderness, too. Of course there’s a certain romantic appeal to the solitary adventures of Childs or Muir, but the fact is that a lot of the meaning of those experiences comes from exclusion – that they’re the only ones in these places and that most people cannot, for whatever reason, do the same. I think idealizing that sort of experience is harmful because it’s not something that the general public can have. If we want people to care about the environment they need to be able to experience it, and we need to admit that just because an area isn’t wilderness doesn’t mean it has no value. One of my greatest moments of appreciation of the environment was hiking 7 hours in the rain to get to the natural hot pools in the picture above and soaking in the pools with my friends appreciating how unspoiled they are despite all the visitors and then seeing an avalanche come down one of the surrounding mountains.

(Milford Sound, New Zealand)

Accepting that there is value in places where people have visited is, in my opinion, the first step towards a better philosophy of how to manage the land. There is an inherent contradiction that wilderness advocates don’t seem to address, which is that these powerful experiences of Childs and Muir can only happen in sacred untouched places where you’re the only one. It is not possible for all of us to have that, but if we admit that a view is beautiful regardless of if you’re standing on a trail or other people are around, it becomes clear that we need to change our value system so the value of an environment is not determined by how many people are there but by its actual ecological and aesthetic value. We should set some land, like wilderness, aside for biocentric purposes regardless of human concerns and then allow access to other areas. I think only by seeing nature with your own eyes can you appreciate and value it, so we should not demean places like the Grand Canyon or Milford Sound because they are touristy.

The last point I want to make is that valuing landscapes other than the traditional romantic wilderness allows us to be amazed by a wider range of places and appreciate the environment as we interact with it in everyday life. We should not say that just because we’re in a city people can’t feel elated as they walk through the quad when the cherry trees are in bloom. I think we should encourage people to stop and look even for a few seconds when the mountain is out because that kind of connection of the environment to us is what makes people want to protect the environment. I think one of the greatest lessons I learned from all the time I spent hiking in New Zealand is that you should notice the beauty all around you, no matter how much it is wilderness.