quickie
okay, now i'm officially back at my "home" in mount maunganui and i found out that my dive trip this weekend has been canceled. i think this must be the work of god, in all seriousness, because i was picturing bad things happening this weekend. it's a long story, but you should be able to figure it out, if you care, if you have been keeping up. so for universal good, it's probably better that the trip was canceled. but this still leaves me with three days of nothing to do. so i might go off to the coromandel peninsula with this english guy i met on the northern circuit track. he's a nice guy, and i like to say i've picked him up, which i did and then drove him here, but it doesn't mean anything. :)

since i am back tonight, i am going to meet up with some classmates for a birthday celebration. i think it will be nice because he wasn't expecting me. the thing about birthdays is that they're not an excuse to drink, because we're all adults and we don't need excuses. it's just nice to celebrate another person's existence.

but enough about that. the hike was just amazing. my pack was too heavy and by the end of the first day, i made a conscious effort to eat as much food as possible. this meant shoving trail mix (peanuts, raisins etc) down my gullet all day long, and eating more pasta than i needed for dinner, and then waking up and shoving more oatmeal than i wanted down my gullet. i may be the first person to GAIN weight on a three day tramp. and therein lies part of the problem. i planned to do the hike in four days, so brought enough food for five, but then ended up doing it in three. huh?

the walk itself was through some really intensely interesting terrain. much of it was volcanic, and you could see actual real lava flows and craters and explosion lakes, like they were straight out of textbooks. then there were stretches of tussock grass and other sub-alpine features. and even though i was following a group of other hikers (trailing far behind...), i never really saw them. so i had the security of people expecting me at the huts, but the lonesomeness i was looking for. i can't wait to get my pictures developed and share them. one of the things i am realizing that i love about new zealand is that the geology is so young. like i said, it's textbook, because erosion just hasn't had time to wear it away like it has in a lot of the states. and it's just a striking reminder of how awesome nature and all those forces are.

in other news, i went to the counter mail place to get my package that i was expecting, which was supposed to contain my long-awaited ipod. long story, but i broke it right before i left and a friend took care of getting it fixed for me and then sent it to me. instead of the package, i had a letter from the nz post waiting for me, telling me that i had to pay NZ$68 tax on it before they would send it to me. so, in essence, this means that i have to pay MORE tax on something i already owned and paid tax on, only because i had it mailed to me. but if i had brought it in my luggage, i was told, there wouldn't have been a problem. god almighty. and to make matters worse, i was on the phone with them for five minutes, waiting to give them my credit card number, but no one would answer. it just rang and rang and rang. this freaking god forsaken country.

also in other news, i made a decision about my future while i was tramping. and that decision was not to make a decision for a month. until my birthday, let's say, when i'll start looking at jobs, in nyc, baltimore, los angeles, new zealand, and wherever else the spirit moves me. this is really stressful and difficult and i don't want to ruin my time by obsessing about it or making any moves prematurely. so that's that.

toodle-oo!