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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28/12/07
Today was another day of firsts for ActiveSteve. It was the first day that I got to jump on a trampoline. Yes, I nearly killed myself in the process, but that’s just par for the course in my world, isn’t it? I kid of course. I didn’t get hurt or anything, but I did have some near misses. The other first of the day was this was the first day that I biked on the Coromandel Peninsula. I had originally been unsure whether I wanted to do this section of NZ, but after today, I’m quite glad that I did. The scenery is very nice, and the roads were uber-cool. A drivers paradise. Maybe not a cyclists’ paradise, but I still enjoyed. Read on for a little story about it, and the map too!
Hey gang! I just thought I’d bring you all up to speed on how my trip preparations have been going. As I sit here writing this post, I realize that in 14 short days, I’ll be heading to the airport for my four month trip-of-a-lifetime to Fiji and New Zealand. Although I’ve been saying all along that I’m not planning my trip in any detail, there is still a fair amount of preparation to undergo in order to make sure that all the loose ends are tied up. In this post I’ll try to give you folks a sense of what’s been happening on my end. I’ve also put up a folder of pictures on flickr to show you some of the stuff in detail. Head on over to the flickr folder to see them. On with the tale.
10/03/08
Well folks, today has to rank as one of the greatest days of my entire trip so far. That’s saying quite a bit, because I’ve had 3 months of pretty great experiences to measure up against it. However, it was just one of those days when everything seemed to be going my way. I had a good night’s sleep, the weather was fantastic, and I just felt happy all around to be up here in the Mount Cook National Park. The plan for the day was to do some awesome hiking up in the mountains. I had planned just to head up to Mueller Hut and soak up the views there, but I also decided to tack on a summit by climbing up to Mount Olivier since I was already up there. After all, this was the first summit that Sir Edmund Hillary actually summited, so that should make for a pretty cool experience, right? Well it was, read on and check out the map.
03/01/08
Hi friends! ActiveSteve here again. Well, you might start thinking that I’m getting lazy with all these days off, but you know what? I came here to experience New Zealand, not just thrash myself biking all around it, so that’s just what I’m doing in Rotorua. Today was my day full of cultural experiences of the Maori civilization. It actually started a little last night with a self-guided city walking tour I went on that took me to a Maori village in town. Today, I continued that theme by going to Te Whakarewarewa Marori village, the Rotorua Museum, which had oodles of Maori stuff, as well as my evening at Mitai Maori Village for a concert, nature walk, and traditional Hangi meal cooked by Maoris. Although I’ll probably keep the post relatively short, the experiences were nothing short of remarkable, and memorable. Or at least I hope they’ll be. Tomorrow, I’m sticking around, and planning to do some serious mountain biking in Whaka forest, where the Worlds were this year. After that, off to Taupo. Check the map and read on for more.




