For pictures from Mendoza, click here. Quick final post. I´ve got 20 minutes to wrap up this blog, pick up my laundry at the Bubbles Lavados up the street, and meet the group for supper, and a briefing on tomorrow´s activities. We arrived early in the morning to this beautiful city. Jody and I opted out of any city tours or any responsibilities. Instead, I got some laundry together, and explored the city on my own. Local busses, trolleys, and just plain locals in general. I´m really enjoying practicing communicating down here. I ended up getting a private tour of the city hall by a security guard, who took me to the roof of the building for some very impressive views and chit-chat, even though we were both out of our language comfort zones. It was quite cool. I then went to a very large park honoring San Martin, the man largely responsible for liberating Argentina. There is a mountain-top monument to this, the greatest of National heros. The location is known as Cerro Saint Gloria. It was a nice view, and nice moment. Then, local busses back here, and now I´m writing you. It was a bit funny, because a lot of the tour group opted to take a bus tour of the city, paying a bit of coin for it. My personal city tour, using local busses and my own two feet, was almost the same thing, but cost me 3.5 pesos, instead of 25+ pesos paid by the rest of the group. Of course, I didn’t go quite as far, but I still saw most of the main sights, and even crossed paths with them twice! Well, gotta go. Just realized it´s October 31st. Hope everyone´s having a spooky night, and I guess we´ll see you in less than a week now. Till then, enjoy the week!
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Well, another day has passed, and certainly not any less interesting than the past few for me. It seems that wherever I go, interesting things will follow me. When I last wrote, I was reporting from the Sunrise Lagoon Resort, where we had been storm stayed as a result of the cyclone that had just passed through. Well, not only were we stuck there, the boats travelling between the islands had actually been canelled as well, so even if I wanted to go somewhere, there was no way for me to move around anyway. Not only that, but my nagging illness wasn’t going away either, and it seems to follow me in waves, with hours of feeling okay, followed by hours of feeling totally crappy. Those crappy hours are increasingly annoying, and has resulted in people offering me all sorts of medications and remedies from their homelands. I’ve accepted a few, but none seem to actually be doing me any good yet. Besides that unfortunate stuff, read on for more tales of fun from Fiji with ActiveSteve!
10/02/08
Hi gang. Well, here I am, about to tell you about my day off in Wanaka. Not exactly a true day off, as I decided to tackle the Skyline Track, a hike that takes you up two mountains to some great 360 degree views of the whole area, and is supposed to take 10-11 hours. Well, I don’t know what the people that take that long are doing, as it took me less than 4 and a half hours. Of course, that is moving time, as my total time was more like 5.5 to 6 hours, with my snack and picture breaks. Still, as you can imagine, I was going a bit fast on my way up. I can’t help it. My biking legs just want to climb mountains faster these days I guess. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself as usual. Feel free to check out the map, and the pictures, as well as read on to hear a bit more about my day in the hills.
Okay, so another day of biking is in the hole. I crammed in an astonishing 76km into this day, trying to make up a little percieved lost time, but have decided that I can’t really make up any lost time. There are just far too many biking challenges up in these parts. After a heavenly sleep in Helensville, I slept in until 8am. I had a 7am alarm, but when it went off, I was soooo cozy, that I opted to bump it by an hour. It was a good call. When I finally got up, there was a nice breakfast basket waiting for me in the common area. Two yogurts, two little bags of cereal, a banana, a kiwi, and some bread and jams. Talk about a power breakfast. I ate it all save the Kiwi. I also had some extra groceries from the night before, and decided to just take them with me as road snacks. Read on for more about torture day #2.
Jody and I had plans to go see Monty Python’s Spamalot at the theatre in Toronto on August 12th, along with Alix, Matt, and Andrew Raven. The tickets were bought months ago, and the time was finally approaching. Well, rather than simply go see the show, Jody and I decided we’d make a long weekend of it and hit Paramount Canada’s Wonderland for some serious thrill-ride action! We took the Friday off, so we could hit the park outside of the crazy weekend window. I think it was a good plan. Even though we did end up waiting an hour for one of the rollercoasters at mid-day (Top Gun, if you’re interested), most of the waits were much more reasonable. We also got to do a lot of front seat rides, and multiple trips on our favourites. There are a lot of rides at the park. We had some faves, and some not so good. The thing that sucks on some of the rides is the beating your body takes. They have a new ‘flying’ coaster, called Tomb Raider, and we really didn’t enjoy the bone rattling that went with it. As usual, our favourite was the old-school woodies. Wooden Coasters are just more thrilling. Sure, they don’t do inverted loops or anything, but they feel rickety, and you only have a little lap bar holding you in while you whiz around at top speed! We like them so much that we capped off our visit with seven consecutive runs of the Wild Beast, without even getting off the coaster. It was pretty quiet late at night, so the ride attendants said we could just stay on. It was crazy! When we finally went to bed that night, I still felt like i was riding a coaster! If you’d like to check out some pictures of that day, check out the folder on Flickr.