Dear January,

A year ago, I had just finished applying for schools. I had no idea where I'd be when you rolled around, but I sat down on my Saturdays and started dreaming.

January, you have been beyond imagining. You have brought be across the world and through weeks of adventure and trials and dreams slowly realized. You've been terrifying and terribly large, filled with things to do and places to see and the strangeness of the need to move-move-move and to dig-in-and-down set side by side. You've brought unexpected friends into my life, friends who I hope will continue to be a part of my world even after we've left New Zealand. But that, January, is up to me, I suppose, to make happen.

You've brought along your fair share of beauty: rolling hills, dramatic cliffs seen through bus windows, tiny starlights dotting dark caves, the art work of millions of years, and light splashed across the sky.

You weren't supposed to be filled with hair-raising thrills. But you were. Getting lost, getting locked in a stairwell, burnt food and fires, jumps backward in the dark, and more bumps and scrapes than my body has ever received. The last thing on my mind was action-adventure, but, January, I think you've changed my mind. Somehow, you've convinced me to take a deep breath and try somethings, new and scary. You brought me over and under waterfalls, up along old volcanoes, and forced me to start conversations with strangers. You've gotten me to close my eyes and step forward, trusting that everything will be okay.

And you've also taught me how to rely on myself. Reminded me how to trust my judgement. How to stick with my decisions.

January, you've been a lot of things. You've been huge and grand, and while you haven't slowed down, I've been able to soak you up. You've given me moments that I'll hold on to forever. Moments that I'll tell as stories for years until everyone I know is sick of them. Moments that will worm their way into all my stories. Moments that I'll think back to twenty years from now, like learning how to quickly dry cutlery, caning apricots, baking a legendary black current tart, phone calls that turn my eyes inward and across the ocean towards home, and the endless walks, washing dishes for a wedding.

But perhaps the most important thing you have given me and what I will always thank you for is the reminder you gave me. The reminder about why I want to study what I want to study. The reminder of why I want to pursue what I want to pursue. The reminder of why I want to surround myself with good, energetic, inspiring, intelligent people and work together with them towards something good. You've given me back the original reasons for having the interests I have. Reasons I'd forgotten, and inspirations I'd lost. You've made me confident that it is possible to do everything I want to do.

I can't thank you enough for that.

P

If My Life Were a Novel: Lord of the Rings, part 1

Whenever I told anyone that I would be in New Zealand for part of my gap year, a surprisingly large number wanted to know if I would be visiting as many Lord of the Rings sights as I possibly could. Maybe they knew how much of a Lord of the Rings geek I am. Or maybe they were just as interested in the movies and the locations where they were made.

Regardless, no one would be too surprised to learn that the Lord of the Rings was a pretty hefty reason for me deciding to go to New Zealand of all places (I mean, besides the fabled beauty of the land and kindness of the people, but that was the second most common thing for people to tell me—that it was so beautiful and that I would love it, but yeesh, people, you’ve gotta stop hyping up this sort of thing, you make it too easy to picture NZ as the digitized Lord of the Rings landscape you find in The Hobbit movies.)

Yes. I, along with countless others made the pilgrimage to this country just because of a trio of epic films. Call me a geek. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt my feelings: I wear that title proudly.

In all seriousness though, I owe the Lord of the Rings films a lot. They’ve had an unimaginable impact on my life.

Honestly. They have. That’s not overstatement. That’s just not a dramatic turn of phrase.

I mean it.

Don’t believe me? Let me tell you a story.

As a little kid, I easily understood that sometimes imagined things are more real than the things you can taste and touch and feel. After all, it was imagined things that crept through the shadows and terrorized me in the dark. And it was stories that lit up my world at night. It was words floating through the air telling of far of peoples, and places, and adventures that rocked me to sleep. It was the games I played, spinning strange plots and dangers that kept my mind up in the clouds all day long.

I was a kid who grew up surrounded by the lexicon of fantasy. And Lord of the Rings only added fuel to the fire. We rented the first movie when it was released on dvd, back when there was still a Blockbuster a few blocks away from us. My little brother was too little to watch the movie, so my other brother and I would “go to bed” and only once the little guy was soundly asleep would we creep back downstairs and turn on the movie.

At this time in my life, Lord of the Rings was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Up to that moment, I’d been fed mostly on lighter things. Fairy tales and myths. Bed time stories meant for children. Talking animals and sparkling magic wands.

But Lord of the Rings was something else. It was bigger, grander. More solid. It had heft and history and depth. Strange languages and ancient songs. War and death. Love and loss. Loyalty, friendship, courage, and fear.

I could keep going.

The only other story I had to compare it to was Harry Potter, and I’ve already written plenty in other places about what HP has meant to me. But I think what set Lord of the Rings apart was its otherness. It did not take place in this world. The world it exists in is bigger, much more ancient, and familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I set out in search of other stories with a similar flavor, and for a long time most of what I read was the fantasy novel that took place in a medieval, middle age world. The sort of place Renaissance fairs try and evoke.

But there was something compelling about the stories as well, something beautiful and heartbreaking, something uplifting and profound. This was the first story whose possibility of meaning struck me to the core.

And, well, the plot is pretty amazing. How much I wished I could enter the story and join in I cannot tell you. But for any number of years my day dreams were dominated by my adventures as a member of the fellowship.

Lord of the Rings was one of the first stories that taught me what it is to be swept up and consumed by another world. But the big connection, the big shifting point, the moment that I can point to on the timeline of my life and say “This was important” didn’t happen until I was in eight grade...

Caving in the King Country

Last Tuesday, I did something new. And I might just need to have another go at it because it was amazing. Good thing I’m going to a certain school next year, because it may just be pretty easy for me to try my hand at caving.

Yes. I said it.

Caving.

Have I gone crazy? Nope. At least, I don’t think so.

But why, suddenly, do I like the sound of crawling, climbing, squeezing through caves?

Well, I went caving last Tuesday and it was pretty great.

Okay, okay, maybe it wasn’t actual caving, but it was pretty intense.

Getting ready to abseil into a 100+ ft crack in the ground

In the North Island of New Zealand, there is a region called Waikato. Tucked away in this region are a lot of lime stone caves. Many of these caves happen to be filled with a beautiful little creature known as the glowworm. As their name suggests, these babies glow, dotting the caves with constellation-like light. It really is a sight to see.

And see it I did.

As you might be able to imagine, these caves are quite the curiosity. And a lot of people (yes, even Kiwis, too) enjoy visiting them. But these days, the options of going through the caves are slightly more varied than a simple tour of the easier to reach bits. And since New Zealand has a reputation for being a bit adventurous, you can probably guess the nature of these other options.

In my case, the other option included rappelling (or abseiling for those of you who prefer that term) for 35 meters down through a crack in the ground; zip lining through a massive cavern in near dark, save the light of the glowworms; jumping, climbing, and crawling over, under, and through waterfalls and muddy tunnels; and yes, floating peacefully in an icy underground river, staring upwards at the glowworms.

Source

This adventure lasted a little over three hours. And three great, but exhausting hours they were. Towards the end, despite the full wetsuit I was wearing, I was chilled through—wading through chilly mountain streams in the dark can do that. And I was getting a little tired (despite the fact that I had been fed twice in the caves—hot chocolate, home made granola bars, chocolate, and juice helped give me a bit more energy), only to have the two guides of my tour turn to the rest of the group and say, “Okay, now you’re going to climb up a waterfall. It get’s pretty loud, so just watch us and we’ll point to where you should go. Got it?”

I was just a little intimidated by the image of trying to climb up a waterfall. A little one yes, but still, there would be water falling on me. While I don’t have a problem with climbing things, and I love zip lines and ropes courses, I’ve always sort-of-maybe hated rock climbing. There’s just something that strikes me as very claustrophobic about clinging to a wall, scrabbling for handholds and not really being able to lean back, so I wasn’t to fond of the idea of climbing up a cave through a water fall.

But it wasn’t too bad. Not bad at all in fact. It helped that my guides pointed out the good footholds, but I got through rather quickly, up to the top bit of the water fall and all I had to do then was pull myself up over that edge.

So. Yeah. Caving.

I’d give it another go.

Emerging from the cave

Not just because of the adventure, bragging rights, epicness of my time in the caves, but because they are rather beautiful (the glowworms are a plus). And I’d love to get a chance to spend more time in similar places

There was a little museum about the caves, too, that I got the chance to poke around in and learn a bit about the geology of the area and some cool cave stuff that I didn’t know about. But what I also though was interesting was the history of the discovery and exploration of the caves and the challenges of conserving the beauty of the caves presented by human activities in them. This was the start of my little investigation into conservation/restoration in New Zealand, so look out for a rambly, maybe rant-y and lecture-y post about that inspired by my visit to a wonderful place outside of Wellington called Zealandia…

A Little Out of Character?

None of you could have seen this post coming, could you?

After staring at the bizarre sights of Rotorua, I hopped on a bus for a little tour of the lovely countryside. The Waikato/King Country area of New Zealand is all about dairy farming, so the hills are spotted with a lot of cows. More cows than sheep if you can believe it.

After a pretty good drive, a rest stop at a café in a little town I never learned the name of, I stepped of the bus in an area that was surprisingly familiar…

Green, rolling hills. Lovely gardens. Beautiful houses. A lake. A pair of unique trees.

Yeah. Yeah. You’ve guessed it (if you haven’t already laid your eyes on the pictures).

I visited Hobbiton.

And I bet that absolutely none of you are surprised that I went there.

There isn’t much more to say about a visit to hobbiton except that I loved gettinga  chance to walk on the set where they actually filmed the movies. Call me a geek, but getting to walk through the areas where the likes of Ian McKellan, Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, and Peter Jackson have spent a lot of time is pretty cool. Also getting a little inside look at how they filmed certain scenes and where they filmed certain scenes was nearly all my little geeky heart could take.

I challenge you to watch the first movie and find the shot of this path

Full view

The Party Tree

The set itself was surprisingly small and big at the same time. It is probably only on two hills or so but the landscape in this area is so hilly and roll-y that two hills provide more than enough tucked away corners and hidden nooks to cram in over 40 human- and hobbit-sized hobbit holes.

A nice Hobbit-sized hole

Sam and Rosie's house that features in the last shot of the movie

So far I haven’t seen much more in terms of Lord of the Rings sets and scenery, but New Zealand does have the perfect area for the Shire. On the drive to Hobbiton, my eyes were glued to the window. It’s pretty obvious, even when you’re nowhere near the movie-set that this place was practically made to be the Shire. The hills are unlike anything I’ve seen, and they just go on and on and on.

It’s really quite beautiful actually. But, as I’ve been told, and as I’ve seen, so is pretty much the rest of this country.

Rotorua

Stop one on my unexpected journey was a little place in the North Island that’s been causing quite a stink for a couple hundred years.

Rotorua is filled to the brim with all sorts of interesting geothermal activity—geysers, sulfur deposits, mudpools, boiling ponds.

Most tourism reviews of it warn of the pervasive smell of rotten eggs—but I actually wasn’t bothered by it at all, and talking to some other people, they hardly noticed it, too.

I had a brief 24 hours in the area. Enough time to drink in the fascinating geothermal activity going on in the area. With only a few hours before dark, I set out on my first day on a nice walk around the town, the nearby geothermal park, and the lakeside (yes, ever the Minnesotan, I always enjoy a good lakeside stroll).

The next day, I spent most of the morning at a cool little place called Whakarewarewa: The Living Village. It's a living Maori village set precariously atop a lot of geothermal activity. Scattered thickly throughout the area are boiling hot springs, bubbling pits of mud, and geysers that shoot hot water up to 30 meters into the air. 

It's a cool little place to learn about Maori culture intertwined with the crazy geological makeup of the area. 

Lakeside

DANGER: Geothermal Area

Village/Hot Spring/Sulfur party

The Geysers