Contrast

My email is subscribed to a yahoo group that links all my uni mates and today, I decide to clean up my yahoo mailbox. First there is an announcement of someone getting engaged and after reading emails after emails of congratulations, suddenly there's one email to say that one of our uni mates passed away in an accident last Saturday.

I'm a little stunned by both news. To be honest, I don't remember this girl, perhaps just remember her name faintly mentioned here and there. It is sad to see someone at 27 have her life end in such a tragic way.

As for the engagement, it's a little quick for this guy but hey, it's his life. What gets to me about it is that he easily shares about his engagement to everyone in the uni while I quietly get married without announcing it to any of them. It makes me wonder why I don't share the same openess with my uni mates and I realise perhaps we all run on different circuits and it's difficult for me to openly say what's going on in my life to these people whom I hear of but hardly interact with.

Realisation will hit me soon enough to say that I am who I am. Bear with me...

Another lovely Sunday

"This is the first time I have tasted your cooking!" Janice exclaimed over dinner. I gave her a what-rubbish-are-you-talking-about glare. Of course I have cooked before... the last time being er... then it hit me. Yup, I don't think I've really cooked for my family before and later on, my mum was called and informed of my successful tom yam baked chicken and I was ordered to cook the next time they come down to PJ.

It was a good meal ending a good day. We hung around home, tidied up the place, cooked instant noodles although we've consumed so much MSG during our NZ trip our heads are almost bald followed by a good movie of Bourne Supremacy and then we started cooking for dinner.

Eric came over and we had a good time catching up and using glasses that haven't seen daylight and partially consumed a bottle of shiraz which was starting to become vintage just quietly lying in the fridge.

As we prepared for bed, I just started to reflect on the day and decided I've landed myself a great husband. He did the laundry, cooked lunch, cooked 2 dishes out of 4 for dinner, took the garbage out, weeded the garden, trimmed a dying tree just outside the house, cleared up his car... What a gem.

Work is goooood...

I actually like work. Yes, I'd rather be super busy instead of sitting down waiting for people to get back to me. It's more fulfilling and I feel like I deserve my neopet game now.

Risks

I recently met up with a friend who is owns a business. What startled me was the way he ran it. He promised a client he would be able to deliver his product in a few days although he did not have a supplier at that point. After promising his client, he then only proceeded to call his supplier to see if they would be able to meet this demand. Defies all my common sense but he's the one owning the business while my darn common sense is telling me all the risks I would take if I were to start my own.

Prejudices

As much as we'd like to deny we are not, all of us have some form of prejudice. I have plenty and have made a couple known to the world, of course only to those on my side of the fence.

Somehow, I've let one slip on numerous ocassions on this particular person who is not on my side of the fence. It's horrifying to realise after I've said something and try to eat back my words.

And recently, I've also started categorizing people who own a certain type of dog, say RSB. I met someone recently whom I would categorise under RSB but she didn't share if she had a dog. As I was fitting her neatly into my prejudices, I had to stop myself from carrying on. Yikes! I'd better go confess to KS...

Missing Jay

Jay has been missing for the last 2 weeks. I don't have a good feeling about his disappearance despite people trying to assure me he might have found a girlfriend and shifted off somewhere for a while.

I got home all excited wanting to hug him but he wasn't there. Sad way to end my holiday.

Franz Josef Glacier

It's hard to picture someone like me who never exercises would want to go climb a glacier. And climb we did.

But wait! First we had to walk to the bottom of the glacier - for 2.5kms! That was tough enough but we finally made it. Then, we were told we had to climb this hill beside the glacier in order to get to a part of the ice where we could start our climb - for 20 mins on very steep loose rocks and stones. By the time we reached up there, KS was ready to give up and just stay put there. A couple more minutes of rest and we were once again motivated to move on.

Clipping on our "claws", we took our first steps on the glacier on steps created by the guides followed by an extremely steep drop on the other side of 2 feet steps going down vertically. We hung on for dear life in these areas for a slip would have easily caused a bone to snap, especially your spine.

All the way up and we rested halfway up the glacier. At first we were adviced to go for a full day of climb complete with pickaxe but God was kind to us and gave us enough wisdom to select the half day route instead. Again, nice view but we were so exhausted we couldn't really concentrate on anything but catching our breath.

The worst part was, we had to go all the way back from where we came from. I mean, climbing up was hard enough but having to gingerly step on the loose rocks was really trying. THEN the 2.5km walk back.

My recently discovered muscles on my legs protested for 4 straight days with us hobbling and moaning every time we had to sit down or take a step up or down. This is something I would not really recommend to those who do not thrive on such exertive activity.

South Island - Milford Sound

It was a challenging time for me for the first day. We rented a manual car and the last time I drove one was when I just got my license like 8 to 9 years ago! There were a couple of instances when the car simply died on me in the middle of the street but bless the souls of those behind me who waited patiently while I tried to sort out my first gear.

The first night on the South Island was spent in Oamaru right after we drove to Lake Tekapo. Gorgeous sights of snow capped mountains cascading into still lakes.

Lake Tekapo. Blue clear waters, snow capped mountains and crisp fresh air.

Church of the Good Shepard, Lake Tekapo. You can imagine many weddings take place here.

The view from inside the church looking out to Lake Tekapo. Sigh, blue waters and snow capped mountains!

Oamaru is a quiet little town and the backpackers we stayed Swaggers was really cool. I loved the bathroom and spent a considerable amount of time there trying to bring the coldness out of my bones. The attraction there was to see blue penguins and yellow-eyed penguins returning home from the ocean. We didn't go as I've seen them in Philip Island, Victoria, Aust years ago and KS wasn't too keen as he wasn't able to touch them. Dinner was instant noodles, one entire head of broccoli and yummy fresh mushrooms.

The next day we went to visit Dunedin. Didn't have much time there just visited the only castle in NZ. Not worth it. A very sad place since the owner shot himself over family problems. And later, his son also shot himself. What a tragic history!

Stayed the night at Te Anau called Grumpy's, the most expensive backpackers of the whole trip. It was beside the Te Anau lake and had an en suite. Maybe that's why the price. Met this American there who took upon herself to be chatty and had told us where to go, what to do for the next couple of days. Bless her heart! We would have missed out the Blue Pools if it weren't for her!

Te Anau Lake. While waiting for the bus to take us to Milford Sound

So off we went to Milford Sound the next day. It was a beautiful bright sunny day and we could see hardly seen peaks of mountains. Milford Sound receives the most rain anywhere in the world of an average of 80m. The record was 90m over once and the amazing thing about this creation of God is that the whole area just soaks up all this water and runs it to the sea. Trickling streams will turn into gushing rivers and rivers will swell without flooding the area. Many breathtaking sights here although I was told that it would have been more spectacular if it were raining then I'd be able to see more waterfalls. Ah well, the bus guide/driver said we were lucky to be seeing Milford with clear skies.

A beautiful stream of melting ice along the way which I drank from. Ice cold and refreshing!

Waters so still that it's called Mirror Lake

Milford Sound

Sterling Waterfall, Milford Sound

The boat ride into the open sea was fantastic too although it's a little bit difficult for me to top my expectation of Milford anyway. So I was neither blown away nor too disappointed. Great trip and also highly recommended. Just don't let your expectations get too high and lose the exhilaration of viewing the gorgeous scenery there.

Black Water Rafting

Now, if you have a natural resource that is exploited for the benefit of the tourist, one would assume that there isn't just only 1 company doing so. Anyway, we booked for a Black Water Rafting (BWR) trip with this company by dialing 0800 WAITOMO.

Upon reaching Waitomo, we stopped by the first one we see and I marched up to the counter and demanded they tell me what to do next since I've already booked via phone. Not finding my name on their system, they then discovered I was at the wrong company. Shame faced, we moved on to the next shack down the road.

Unfortunately, it was the same company as the first one so again, we had to back away apologetically and discovered the right one in the end.

All in all, BWR is really fun. KS has done it 3 times now but the first 2 were with another company. According to him, this was the best one. On my part, I thought it a little strange that they called it "Tumu tumu toobing" when the portion of time spent actually on the tube was just very small. Most of the time we were crawling into holes which I thought I'd never be able to squeeze through and balancing on crevices and rocks or swimming in the icy dark waters in the dark. Thank heavens for the wet suit otherwise I would have been scraped, bruised and frozen.

I'd recommend it to anyone who thinks of going there but perhaps not this one that we went for. Reason being was because as we were getting ready to go back, one of the guys in the team mentioned seeing an advert for 5 hours, doing 5 things including abseiling for just $4 more! We paid a good NZD95 for half the day!

Anyways, I won't compare but I did feel a bit cheated. Plus, the rest also discussed that the parts we were on the tubes could have been skipped as we could have easily waded in the water since it wasn't very deep anyway. The glow worms were pretty cool. Highly recommended.

Touchdown

I'm back at Changi and have several hours of wait. NZ time is now past midnight and I'm feeling a tad sleepy.

Our flight from Singapore to Auckland was horrifying as the seats wouldn't recline from a sitting position to a still sitting position and I had nowhere to park my lolling head as I tried to catch 40 winks. But the worst part of it all was that 2 rows behind me, there was this kid who was experiencing some kind of pain (I hope that was the case otherwise the 10 hour non-sleep marathon for all of us on the flight would have been really wasted).

When we reached Auckland, we just crashed out at Kenneth's for a couple of hours. That night, we met up with Joanna and Graham. It's a strange thing, having to have flown all that miles and to hear news on Caroline (who's in Sabah) that she married and is now a mother! How ironic.

I'll write each significant episode of my trip in different headers for easy reference.