Week 13- Where are you from?

As the semester begins to wind down, due dates for big projects tend to draw closer. I spent the entirety of Monday finishing off my design report for the wind turbine project. It definitely made the week feel a day shorter! To make up for the lost day, I decided to buy myself a tent. It’s a local brand called Orson Outdoors and it is very much a one-man tent but it’ll be perfect for my adventures. I collected the tent on Tuesday and that evening I went to a showing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. During my trip to the Abel Tasman I spent quite a lot of time quoting various parts of the film and I’ve been told that I do a particularly good re-enactment of the French taunter scene. Ulysse (The Frenchman), who was away with me on the kayaking weekend, had never seen any Python so was in stitches when I did my impression. He needed little convincing to come to the showing and he continued to laugh all the way home after.

On Wednesday, we finished the gluing of our wind turbine blades and I had a lab examining the natural frequencies of a bar in torsion. Thankfully I had a good run around at frisbee afterwards to clear the brain. A quick switch to the breathalyser project on Thursday saw the arrival of my printed circuit board and we were also able to calibrate our alcohol sensor ‘officially’ (One member of my group had done some calibration at home with a few beers already). We then downed tools and headed for the semi-finals of the indoor intra-faculty engineering ultimate frisbee. I had been playing with two teams as I am taking modules here from different faculties. Thankfully, they were in separate semi-finals so I could play both. For the first I was playing for the 3rd year engineering science class against the postgrads and staff. We rather excitingly came from 3 down to win by a point. The second semi saw the 2nd year biomeds face off against the 3rd year biomeds. My team lost this game but perhaps this is a blessing as I don’t have to choose which team to play for in the final!

After frisbee I went to visit Mark, Clare and Jack for some afternoon tea. It was great to catch up as Mark had been in the UK and I hadn’t seen them in a while. Jack is now into his end of high school exams and was working hard so I didn’t stay for too long, though I was delighted to hear that we both made the same club frisbee team so would be getting to play together. As I was leaving, Clare told me that she had heard that our president, Michael D. Higgins, was coming on a state visit to New Zealand. She had written to him to welcome him and say how much of a fan her mother had been of his. Next thing she knew she had received an invitation to go to a reception in the war memorial museum to meet him. I thought to myself that it all sounded too good to be true so I decided to have a little experiment. That evening I wrote an email of my own to the president. Low and behold, the next morning I had received the very same invite as Clare! The only trouble is that I will now have to source a proper pair of trousers for the occasion.

This particular Friday was Friday the 13th. Is it just coincidence that this would happen during week 13? Or did I plann it from the start? We may never know. Back to the wind turbine and we didn’t let it phase us. By 4pm the build was complete and we were ready for testing on Monday. By ten past four I was in the car headed for the Coromandel peninsula. I was driving Harry’s car with Harry, Charlotte and Mathias for company. This brings us to the lesson of the week. Do not attempt to leave Auckland between 3pm and 7pm on a Friday. It is a little-known fact that traffic jams move backwards down the motorway at 12 mph, a faster pace than we were achieving trying to get out of the city. Not only is Auckland an extremely spread out city, there are huge numbers of commuters, poor public transport, carpooling is almost non-existent and only one road out of the city. Consequently, we spent a few hours parked on the motorway before we got going and arrived at our first stop of the weekend, Hot Water Beach, about 4 hours later.

The clue is in the name with Hot Water Beach. When the tide is far enough out, it is possible to dig a hole in the sand and it will fill itself with hot water. We walked down a path, illuminated by glow worms to get to the beach. The fact that it was so late in the day meant we could reuse holes that other people had dug (we also didn’t have a digging implement). We spent about two hours enjoying the hot water, running into the sea, disturbing the phosphorescence in the water and running back to the warmth. We were somewhat covered in sand when we left and it had started to rain by the time we reached camp an hour later. We pitched our tents in the dark and went to sleep. It had rained all night, thankfully my tent had survived its first outing, but the clay on the ground held the water well and Charlotte happened to be sleeping in a small hole which meant she woke in a puddle. We packed up the tents in a hurry, went for a quick hike up castle rock (a peak near where we camped), but it was still very foggy so we couldn’t see much. We left Harry there to do some rock climbing while the remaining three drove to the beach. On the way, we couldn’t help but go for a swim in a waterfall we spotted.

Once at the beach the clouds had been burnt off and the sun was splitting the stones. We spent a few hours swimming, drying tents and throwing the frisbee then went for a walk before dinner. The first bay we reached was called gemstone bay. It was supposed to be excellent for snorkelling and it was aptly named. We went for another swim here (some of us without clothes) before reaching the next beach at stingray bay. There’s definitely a common theme with the naming of beaches here. As you might expect there were three stingrays in the water so we didn’t swim here. We walked back to the car for dinner and waited to hear from Harry. While we waited a strange Canadian man came up to us and opened with ‘Where are you from?’. We had a brief conversation, he was visiting his son who works in the wine business, before he toddled off. Harry rang and explained he was headed back to Auckland and as dusk fell the three of us set out for Cathedral Cove to camp for the night. We arrived under the cover of nightfall and climbed around the rocks on the headland for about 15min to reach an otherwise unreachable beach (Technically you’re not allowed to camp here).

We woke to the most gorgeous sky at sunrise before packing up and setting off. We spotted a cave in the headland on the way but it was only accessible by water. We duly stripped off and went for a morning swim into the cave. As we finished our expedition we spotted a familiar face who again opened with ‘Where are you from?’. We had great fun explaining that we had already met him the day before! Once back at the car I drove us home, content after a relaxing weekend in the sun.

You can see all of the photos and videos from the weekend here.