Adventure two: in which we take a really long walk to Taylor's Mistake

A few things to note about yesterday before I begin on today:

I didn't do much during the day as I was still tired/burnt from the day before. I wandered around campus and unfortunately forgot my camera. It is (like the rest of this country) beautiful, full of trees, streams, ponds, flowers and winding paths. I didn't have anything specific in mind, I just wandered. So in other words, I still don't know my way around! Later I decided to take pictures of the ducks. As I took this one they all stood up and started walking toward me. As (some of) you know, I'm terrified of birds. So that wasn't a pleasant experience. I went inside to grab my backpack for some groceries and heard ducks outside my window!
They're onto me.

Later I marinated some mushrooms and Paul, Katie and I joined a bunch of kids that live in the village for a barbaque. Most of them have been here for a while, but they were all very welcoming to us. And OH MY GOODNESS New Zealand has done the best thing EVER to the potato. I don't know what it is, but it's like a giant tater-tot that come in packages of twenty for dirt cheap. Mmmmm I want one right now. (In case your wondering, the other kids grilled some and that's why I thought of it!) After dinner we went to an Irish pub where we played pool for a couple hours. Despite my terrible pool skills, we all had fun and my team actually ended up winning most of the time. Apparently there's a bar on campus that has pool, so we're going to check it out later this week.

ANWAY! On to the good stuff. Today after doing the dishes, spilling granola all over them, eating breakfast and not cleaning anything up again (I was worried that my roommates would think I was a slob, as a lot of people began moving in today, but luckily mine didn't come!), I met up with Katie and Paul to go hiking. We took the bus out to Sumner Beach (not the same beach as Saturday...that was South Beach and I was confused). Again, beautiful:These are the houses that look out onto the water. The amazing thing about NZ is that the houses are ALL different. There is no such thing as Cookie Cutter Mcmansions. America should really take a page out of...I digress. The water itself was just as breathtaking:

What I found funny is that the rocks are all completely covered with mussels.
The notable thing about this beach is that there's a gigantic cave you can explore when the tide is low:

That's Paul.
That's the back of Katie. The light was very dark and I didn't even know she was there.

The cave totally reminded me of something out of The Goonies. After I had found a good corner I changed into my bathing suit and jumped into the ocean with Paul. We got our fix in, and decided to find the hike. It consisted of walking up and over a peninsula to another beach called Taylor's Mistake. The pictures say the rest:

Starting out on our adventure. The hill behind Katie is part of the cave.
Walking along the esplanade. The actual trail didn't start until we reached those houses up on the hill.
Whitewash Head Road=very steep. But that wasn't even the steepest part of the walk. Oh, and the ocean was to the left and straight down!
An alley between two houses...I thought it was a secret garden.
This is where we ate lunch after about fifteen minutes. It was a fantastic view looking north onto the ocean and Christchurch. Little did we know that we had a ways to go otherwise I doubt we would have stayed for so long!
We walked along these cliffs. Our destination was the second-to-last inlet seen at the top of this picture.
A sweet tree.
Giant yucca plants. That's a house behind it to give you some perspective.
Spider webs. Apparently there aren't any poisonous snakes in NZ, and there's only one poisonous spider that's rarely seen.
Probably the best bench on the trail...we're about half way at this point.
Getting closer!
This is for Patrick. It says, "The white-flippered penguin is a unique-to-Canterbury form of the little blue penguin. They nest in burrows or nest boxes between August and November.

"Fiordland crested penguins and yellow-eyed penguins also visit occasionally."
Katie and Paul walking across a bridge (haha duh).
As I said before, all the houses here are different. The ones along this trail were absolutely magnificent. This was obviously prime, prime real estate and the residents pulled out all of the stops. I thought this one was hilarious, it looked like a tape player to me. It was all one level!
This was my favorite house. The bridge in the top photo led to the building in the bottom photo.
The trail was dotted with these flowers.
The luckiest donkeys in the world.
Some real ocean front shanties. You can't really tell in this picture, but these houses came right up to the water, and some even came out over it. They weren't accessible by car, only steep trails. We figured they were probably pretty sparse on the inside as you couldn't even haul a refrigerator or a couch to them.
Katie and Paul on another bridge, haha.
Another neat resting spot.
Taylor's Mistake beach. Finally!
Even though the waves weren't great (according to a local), there were tons of people waiting to catch one. When we got to the beach (after about three hours of walking!) we rested for awhile. And by that I mean we sat down and watched the surfers, barely talking as we were all so tired. We soon realized that it was nearly 5pm and we had no idea what time the buses stopped running at Sumner. So we quickly walked back. We took a short cut on the way , going through the neighborhoods on roads instead of around, so it only took about 45 minutes.
This is a tree in a park we encountered along the way. We swung on the swings for a bit and all agreed that they were the best swings ever! Once you got going high enough, you could see the Sumner beach, Christchurch and the ocean for miles.

Once we got down, we got some ice cream and caught the bus back to campus. We each made dinner and quickly passed out. It was easily one of the best days of my life!