Moving further south..

Hey folks,
We're in a small, college city named Dunedin right now, home of Otago University. We just got finished with a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate company. It was interesting and Gay got more than her share of a chococlate fix. Later on tonight we'll do a tour of the Speights brewery which I hear is a good tour and afterwards you get to try a lot of beer. Yesterday we drove up to the worlds only inland colony of Albatross birds (second largest birds in the world). Unfortunately we didn't see any. We were also hopeful to see some yellow-eyed penguins but no luck there.
We just got done with a couple of days in glacier country which is an area that has 2 of NZ's biggest glaciers; Franz Josef and Fox glacier.

Glaciers...
Franz Josef was the first one we hit just because of how the geography works but we had decided before hand to do a guided hike on Fox glacier, which was about another ½ hour down the road from Franz. As we spent a whole day driving from Greymouth in torrential rain we decided to stay a night in Franz Josef and wait out the rain. What I didn't know at the time was that this area is NZ's wettest part of the country, which means it rains about 50% of the year. This little factoid was given to us by a British guy we met who had spent the last 6 days in the hostel because it hadn’t stopped raining. This poor guy was so bored he figured out the codes on the TV remote to unlock the cable movie channels. Fortunately, we were able to break him away from the "tele" that night and we had a good conversation about politics, popular culture and Gary Coleman. Unfortunately, the conversation had to end because the movie "Old School" was coming on and he’d been waiting all day for it.
The next day the rain was still coming but we decided to move on to Fox anyway for fear of ending up like our friend. The next day we were scheduled for our hike and luckily it was just an overcast day with no rain at all during our outing and we had a great time. We spent pretty much the whole day walking on a huge slab of slow moving ice. I got to wear crampons, which was a big one for me. I pictured myself getting ready to climb Everest as I was gearing up. Anyway, we had a lot of fun and got some really nice shots. The pictures are below.

Another one bites the dust...
You know how people have a list of things they would like to do before they die? Well here's some of my top items from the list:

• -Ride my bike across the US


• -Swim with a dolphin


• -Jump out of a plane.


• -Earn enough money to buy property on the Queen Charlotte Trail (recently added)

Ok, now push and look back at the list.
Yes folks, that corny display of Dynamic HTML is tell you that I went skydiving!!!

I went Skydiving!!
Yes, it's dangerous. Yes, it's expensive and yes, it's the cheesy, touristy thing to do. But, screw all that, I loved it. I loved every part of it. I loved the plane ride up to 12,000 feet in the rickety Cessna, I loved hanging off of the plane before the jump and looking straight down, I loved each second of the 45 second free fall, I loved going down slowly under the parachute and finally coming down on the grass.
Freefalling was the coolest. After I hung out of plane's door and smiled nervously for the company's wing-based camera, I crossed my arms in front of me like a mummy and the professional I was hooked on to, jumped out of the plane. In midair he rolled us over so I could see the plane flying away then he rolled us again so I was facing the ground. As the wind hit me hard against my face I realized that I was, simply, falling, and it was the scariest, most raw and intense feeling. After 45 long seconds of some serious freaking out there was a slight tug on my back, I looked up and the parachute was open. My tandem partner told me to take in a deep breath and let out yell, which I did, feeling incredible like I had just cheated death. From then on I enjoyed the view as the objects on the ground grew bigger and bigger.
After the jump the woman ringing me up asked what I was doing the rest of the day. I told her we were just going to start driving south. She said something along the lines that it sucked that I had to drive after my first skydive. I didn't understand what she meant until I was in the car about a good 2 hours later and I was still reeling from the flood of endorphins or serotonin or whatever it was that was making me feel good.
I was allowed to my bring my camera on the dive, so I took some nice shots during the plane ride up and my tandem partner took some nice (and cheesy) ones after the parachute was opened..enjoy.

Pictures
Fox Glacier and around
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Skydiving with Jon
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As a bonus, this is a short video that my tandem partner took with my camera as we were going down..click here

Hiking the Rob Roy trail
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Driving further south toward Lake Wanaka
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