Lots of wandering, and me being an idiot.

The being an idiot part didn't happen til Thrusday, so we'll get to that in a bit.

Think I last wrote on the Monday when I got my new longboard, which is AMAZING. Its a 34' wheelbase, carbon fibre drop through, and its beautiful. Messing about with different bushing duros atm, will hopefully find something I like soon.

So Monday was mostly taken up with skating, and as I was heading back I met everyone leaving dancing by chance. We ended up eating watermelon and Danielle taught me how to do some modern jive, which was annoyingly quite fun. I've gone to dancing twice since then, throwing down some mad shapes!

Tuesday wasn't overly exciting; we went to an Irish pub in the eve which was nice, but reading the song lyrics was quite sad (at least I thought so) as most of the songs were to do with the war and bad times in Ireland. I have no idea what happened on Wednesday, it evidently wasn't overly memorable!

Thursday was my night of being a moron. We al went to dancing, and were planning on going out after. Part way through Josh and I left to get our passports for after, and in a moment of clarity I was curious to see if I could jump off a balcony onto concrete. Apparently I can, it just really hurts my ankle, and makes me think I've broken it, followed by a trip to hospital, where I got told that as I was walking on it, its not that swollen and the wait is 4 hours, I should get over it. Fun times. That put a damper on my weekend in which I was planning on skating and hiking lots.

So the next day, and in a fair amount of pain I proceeded to go surfing. The surf was a nice few feet, but with a massive rip. I had a lot of really nice waves, but had to get out after an hour or so as didn't want to really mess up my ankle. Also found a second hand clothes shop where I got a load of really cheap polypropylene hiking clothes. I had no idea what to do for the weekend, and was talking to Sarah when she suggested going with her, Brady, Josh and the UC Navs to Arthurs Pass for the weekend. The Navs are a christian group, but it wasn't a christian themed weekend to encourage more to go which was interesting.

We ended up staying in a massive hut for around 50 of us at Lake Lyndon (if anyone wants to google earth it), and it was incredible. I was pretty exhausted that night, so went to be around 11.30 after swimming with a load of people in the freezingly cold lake!

We all woke up at 6am the next morning (Saturday) to catch the sunrise from the top of the mountain behind the lake, which was flawed for a number of reasons. A) it was super foggy. B) no-one knew the path, so we were winging it. C) we managed to walk into the middle of the only gorse thicket on the whole mountain.

I ended up going back down with about half the people and went back to bed where I had a very detailed, strange dream. Odd. The rest of the day was fairly awesome. Sarah and I took a good couple of hour walk around the lake, and I found an amazing rock. I'll bring it back with me I think. Then we went to an incredible (I'm really starting to run out of adjectives here!) river cave thing. It took 25-30 minutes to walk through the cave in the river. It was pitch black and I forgot my torch, so followed others. At the end there was a pool you could jump into once you'd finished clambering out, a great finish.

From there we went to Castle Hill which is one of the best bouldering locations in the world (apparently). Its also where one of the main scenes from Narnia was filmed, I think its the one where the bad witchy woman dies. I need to watch that soon.

That evening was spent lieing outside in sleeping bags watching the stars, seeing shooting star, and generally being really peaceful. I also decided (along with a few others) to watch the sunrise again the next morning, as we'd found the track and the weather was meant to be good. Oh, and by this point my ankle was doing a whole lot better thanks to a support and ibuprofen!

So, 6am comes by and apparently Brady and I were the only ones who wanted to watch the sunrise. We nailed up the mountain in about 35 minutes, and lay at the top for about 40 minutes before the sun began to come up. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and words can't descirbe how beautiful it was. Photos really don't do it justice.

It was very hard to leave there it was so incredible, I felt like I would never have enough time to truly appreciate its beauty, even if I spent the rest of the day there. We returned to the hut and I had a morning swim by myself with no-one else in sight. Apprently Sarah had gotten up and went up another mountain and saw me from the top which I thought was quite cool!

Before leaving we went back to Castle Hill, and I walked to one of the nearby hills by myself whilst the others limbed. It was so nice just being by myself in such incredible surroundings.

I'm not overly sure what happened on Sunday night, I think we all just met up and talked about our weekends (everyone did something different), followed by lots of sleep.

Monday just involved lab work and dancing (and no being an idiot and jumping off things this time) followed by stir fry. Yum.

Tuesday (yesterday) was St. Patrciks day, which is celebrated massively here, as in America. I don't think we really care about it, do we? After lab work I got fairly drunk by 7pm, then got really bored at about 10 when we were in an Irish pb, sobered up a bit and went skating for an hour. Once everyone came back I met up with them and Sharon and I wandered for ages talking about religion, gossip, life in general, you knows the deal! I much prefer being with friends and chilling that pubs and loud (well, most of the time).

That brings us to today, which was highly uneventful.

Hope you're all well,

Rob x