Hi everyone!
Last weekend I went on a trip to Arthur’s Pass, a national park roughly 100 kms from Christchurch. I splurged and took the train there and back which turned out to be quite convenient because it leaves Chch (the local abbreviation for Christchurch) in the morning and arrives in Arthur’s Pass by 11am and the return trip leaves around 4pm. The bus route follows an opposite time frame so I managed to gain ~12 hours of time away from Chch by going by train! I took 452 images, of which I have done a quick pairing down of obviously out of focus/duplicates to a mere 366 locatable here. Over the next few days I will (hopefully) go through them to add captions like I have done for the rest of the images so far.
I spent most of the daylight time hiking (or tramping as its called in NZ) and stayed the nights in a bunk house at the local YHA But I’m getting a head of myself, there are probably 2-3 blog posts about my 3 days there.
So I’ll start off with the Train trips there and back and regurgitate some of the more interesting points that were mentioned by our driver over the intercom as we went. The Tranz Alpine train travels along the midland route which bisects the south island from Chch to Greymouth.
Here is a map of its route, found produced from a third party (took me ages to find a decent map too)
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(I'd recommend checking out the larger map link as you can play with what it shows you with the tick boxes on the left)
The line is very dramatic in terms of scenery, moving over many viaducts, through numerous tunnels and over the Waimakari river several times. It was finally finished with the completion of the 8.5km long Otira tunnel in 1923. Prior to then coaches would bridge the gap between the rail lines along Arthur’s Pass. The route was initially started because of a gold rush but that ended before the rail line was finished. Now the line’s main use is transport of relatively clean coal from the west coast to the deepwater port of Lyttelton where it is mostly exported to China for high grade steel production. In total 10 000kg of coal is moved per day over 7 train trips.
The Train departed the Christchurch station at 8:15 am on Friday the 19th, I got there by an easy bus ride from campus. I got my ticket, loaded my backpack into the luggage carriage and found my seat. This was all very civilised when compared to traveling by plane, no metal detectors, no xrays, barely even a boarding pass check. I spent the entire trip hanging out in the observation car.
For the first hour the train moved along the Canterbury plain which is almost entirely agricultural. There were many animals grazing, (according to one of the people I met in the hostel NZ has no factory farmed beasts) mostly sheep, but there were cows and horses too.
By the time we cruised through Sheffield (9:06am) the mountains had leaped into view filling more that 180 degrees of vision. According to our friendly conductor the average elevation was 83m above sea level while Chch is on average 2m abslvl. Arthur’s Pass is 737m abslvl, so there was clearly a lot of climbing coming up! The steepest part of the track I was on was 1:15, which our conductor assured us to be very steep for a train, and the steepest part overall is in the Otira tunnel which is 1:33!
By 9:37am we passed through the first of 16 tunnels and the viewing car was starting to fill with blokes with recording apparatus of diverse value. From then on we moved across 4 viaducts, the tallest of which was 240m above the river below before having the Waimakari river rose up to meet us for the last half hour of the trip to the pass station where I disembarked at 10:50 am. After that the train immediately enters the Otira tunnel and desends back down to the coast on the other side of the Southern Alps.
The return journey was similarly spectacular, leaving A’s P around 4pm and arriving around 6ish (I didn’t keep as accurate notes on the way back) except that this time I knew which sides of the car to stand to get the best pictures. At the end our conductor treated us some absolutely biting standup comedy about how the shopping malls of Chch were the bane of his existence and how teenagers would just hang out txting each other thinking they were having the time of their lives.
That’s all for now, I’ll try to get another post detailing what I actually did (besides standing on a train) tomorrow, though the pics I have up right now give a good teaser.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Orientation and Enrolement
This week has been a busy one as things finally start to feel like I’m at a university again. We started off the week with an orientation for international students on the 15th and 16th. It had been so long since I got here that I had almost forgotten that I was supposed to go somewhere! We went over the usual things, being safe, looking right not left before crossing the street, how to get medical exemptions from exams/assignments and what to expect during enrolemnt. We were also sent around campus on a sort of orienteering exercise where we had to get stamps from our department offices, the health center and the (archaic ;) procedure of looking up physical books in the library.
Today was enrolement for me, it was a fairly straightforward process that involved bringing my passport up to one desk, where they checked my visa and then gave me more paper. From then on I accumulated paper until the second last booth where I was able to divest myself of most of it and then pay for my international insurance. The whole process took only half an hour when I was expecting massive lineups and hours of waiting.
Then I had to get my student card and that took a while. It seems like every bank and IT store in the country had booths lining the queue so I came home with hectares of forest in a bag handed out at the start.
I’ve also been chewing through bandwidth (I pay by the byte) at a prodigious pace watching parts of the Vancouver Olympics. I have to tunnel through the UBC VPN to watch on CTV because they, like all networks I’ve tried, don’t let people outside of the country stream videos. I’ve seen the opening ceremonies up to the march of athletes, I liked the delegation from Bermuda in their shorts!
Today was enrolement for me, it was a fairly straightforward process that involved bringing my passport up to one desk, where they checked my visa and then gave me more paper. From then on I accumulated paper until the second last booth where I was able to divest myself of most of it and then pay for my international insurance. The whole process took only half an hour when I was expecting massive lineups and hours of waiting.
Then I had to get my student card and that took a while. It seems like every bank and IT store in the country had booths lining the queue so I came home with hectares of forest in a bag handed out at the start.
I’ve also been chewing through bandwidth (I pay by the byte) at a prodigious pace watching parts of the Vancouver Olympics. I have to tunnel through the UBC VPN to watch on CTV because they, like all networks I’ve tried, don’t let people outside of the country stream videos. I’ve seen the opening ceremonies up to the march of athletes, I liked the delegation from Bermuda in their shorts!
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Sun and Surf
On the 12th I went on another bike ride, this time to the Travise Wetland, Bottle Lake Park and Waimairi beach, North East of the city, about 1 hour's bike ride from the Ilam apartments.
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My first stop was at the wetland, or as it was also signposted, swamp. There were some birds hanging out, but it was really the wrong time of day (close to noon) and, according to an infomation booth, the wrong season too (it was molting season). But I strolled around and saw some neat birds anyways. I also think I saw some Canada Geese! I saw (and heard) what looked like some flying in the distance, but thought that that couldn't be right. Then I found a list of birds that might be seen, and they were mentioned, so there you go. I wonder if they migrate from Canada or if they just move up and down New Zealand?
After that I went just up the road to the beach. I had a good time just sitting and watching the waves come in for an hour and then I splashed about in the surf for about 15 minutes. I waited to dry off abit and then went home with slightly red cheeks from the sun.
Some people have been commenting about the sun in New Zealand and why the UV index seems to be higher in NZ than Canada.
There are a few reasons for this. First, because of the very limited industry, low population and distance from other population, the air around NZ is very clean. This means that fewer UV rays are intercepted by airosols and ground ozone.
Second, the Earth is actually closer to the sun during the southern hemisphere's summer, so it gets more energy per area in summer than the Northern hemisphere.
Finally there is the hole in the ozone layer. in the Southern Hemisphere the Ozone layer is a bit thinner. This is most pronounced in their spring (as the sun is just coming up to warm up a reaction that uses a catalyst that requires the very cold temperatures of the Antarctic winter) so currently is less of an issue.
View Larger Map
My first stop was at the wetland, or as it was also signposted, swamp. There were some birds hanging out, but it was really the wrong time of day (close to noon) and, according to an infomation booth, the wrong season too (it was molting season). But I strolled around and saw some neat birds anyways. I also think I saw some Canada Geese! I saw (and heard) what looked like some flying in the distance, but thought that that couldn't be right. Then I found a list of birds that might be seen, and they were mentioned, so there you go. I wonder if they migrate from Canada or if they just move up and down New Zealand?
After that I went just up the road to the beach. I had a good time just sitting and watching the waves come in for an hour and then I splashed about in the surf for about 15 minutes. I waited to dry off abit and then went home with slightly red cheeks from the sun.
Some people have been commenting about the sun in New Zealand and why the UV index seems to be higher in NZ than Canada.
There are a few reasons for this. First, because of the very limited industry, low population and distance from other population, the air around NZ is very clean. This means that fewer UV rays are intercepted by airosols and ground ozone.
Second, the Earth is actually closer to the sun during the southern hemisphere's summer, so it gets more energy per area in summer than the Northern hemisphere.
Finally there is the hole in the ozone layer. in the Southern Hemisphere the Ozone layer is a bit thinner. This is most pronounced in their spring (as the sun is just coming up to warm up a reaction that uses a catalyst that requires the very cold temperatures of the Antarctic winter) so currently is less of an issue.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Downtown
Yesterday I went down town to have a gander at the local tourist traps. I started off checking out the visitor's center to grab a bunch of pamphlets, and found several interesting options that will help me get further outside the city. Then I wandered around the Cathedral square for a while. It was quite busy, according to the fish and chips vendor who sold me my lunch a cruise ship hand just come in. There were many stalls selling touristy type jewelery and clothes, I passed on them for now but expect that I will probably have to go buy some things of that nature before coming back. Off to one side was a large chess board. It seems to be very popular with the locals as, over the course of eating my lunch and the wandering around some more, I saw three games played out back to back.
I think the most interesting part of the trip was visiting the old campus grounds which have been turned into a hub of arts and tourism. This is the university where Ernest Rutherford first experimented on the structure of the atom and they had a little exhibit set up that introduced his experiments and had some replicas of his apparatus. They had also preserved the cellar in which these experiments were done. It was very low with an A frame, apparently the main draw was the flat concrete floor which permitted greater accuracy than the wooden ones upstairs. As I am now getting emails from my advisers about thinking about what to do for my honours thesis project, seeing old experimentation was interesting. Unfortunately I was not allowed to take photos in the museum.
As I hinted, the rest of the campus is taken up with artistic endeavours. There are stone carving workshops, music studios, a wood turning shop, a live theater and a movie theater. There is also a candy shop that will run tours of its fudge production on Fridays, I may have to go back there at some point.
I also enjoyed the architecture of the campus, something about the stone and grass with courtyards on the outside and dark wood with tiles and stainglass on the inside appealed to me.
I think the most interesting part of the trip was visiting the old campus grounds which have been turned into a hub of arts and tourism. This is the university where Ernest Rutherford first experimented on the structure of the atom and they had a little exhibit set up that introduced his experiments and had some replicas of his apparatus. They had also preserved the cellar in which these experiments were done. It was very low with an A frame, apparently the main draw was the flat concrete floor which permitted greater accuracy than the wooden ones upstairs. As I am now getting emails from my advisers about thinking about what to do for my honours thesis project, seeing old experimentation was interesting. Unfortunately I was not allowed to take photos in the museum.
As I hinted, the rest of the campus is taken up with artistic endeavours. There are stone carving workshops, music studios, a wood turning shop, a live theater and a movie theater. There is also a candy shop that will run tours of its fudge production on Fridays, I may have to go back there at some point.
I also enjoyed the architecture of the campus, something about the stone and grass with courtyards on the outside and dark wood with tiles and stainglass on the inside appealed to me.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Cooking
Yesterday I managed to get my hands on a second hand bread machine through a Kiwi version of ebay for NZ$50. Today I gave it a whirl with mixed results. On the one hand, it worked, on the other hand the recipy that was supposed to go with that particular model (found on the internet because the seller lacked a book) produced a very small loaf, more of a large bun really.
It called for 2 1/4 c flour, 3/4c water, 1tbsp sugar, 1tsp salt, oil and 1 1/4 tsp of yeast. From my previous experience with bread makers at home that seemed like way too much yeast and not enough flour and water. Turns out I was pretty much right. So I'll try again later adlib.
The other interesting cooking experiment I went through today was making some cookies. Those of you who know anything about me know that I like to make cookies among other things, so you might understand how shocked I was to discover that the complex I'm living in has no oven. That isn't quite true, it has a combination oven/microwave that claims to be able to do the best of both. I was rightly skeptical of these claims.
To begin with, it is the size of a regular micorwave, meaning that it does not fit your average cooking pan. The smallest cookie tray I could find at the local supermarket was too large... so I returned it and have bought a browni tin instead. This has the disadvantage of only being able to cook six-eight cookies at once, and that is if you don't mind them running together. When I'm used to making 20+ cookies at once at home, this feels like a considerable drawback. Strike one.
Secondly, its interface is mindboggling. If I want to cook with it's convection feature (instead of grilling, which doesn't work very well anyway because the grill is so high up, or microwaving with won't cook my cookies) I have to first cycle through the other options to get to convection bake, and then tell the thing what temperature I want. It then proceades to warm up. So far so good. But then, when it is warm, it turns of!!! After reading the instruction booklet, I learned that, once it has warmed up, I have to cycle through all the options again, choose the same temperature, set a timer for the cooking duration, and then press start again! Strike two.
Finally, there seems to be something wrong with my understanding of the temperature, or New Zealand eggs and butter are heat proof. Normally I cook my cookies at 300-325 f on convection. This gets them done in about 8-10 minutes depending on if I'm using butter or margarine, have put more or less flour, have added milk, the size of the eggs etc. For this "oven" I started off at 150C. By 10 min the cookies looked like anemic pancakes, not like cookies. I had to turn the temperature up to 230 C (446 F according to my online converter) to get them done! Strike three.
Oh well, at least they have chocolate in them. But I had to grate Nestles (yes mum, the baby killers, no other brand else seems to make good chocolate in the Countdown superstore I currently frequent) cooking chocolate bars in because the NZ equivalent of chocolate chips, "choco drops" seem to be made out of Easter bunny chocolate, ie sugar and emulsifiers with dirt for colour. Actually that is a bit too harsh, I happily chomped through a hand full or two as I was biking the other day.
To end on a cheerful note, I figure that, since I've got a brownie tin, I'll be making a lot more of those in the future because cocoa is cocoa every where.
Finally, I just got back from some fencing, first time in several weeks, had loads of fun fencing the only other epéeist there (apparently the rest are still on vacation) and what is best, they let me use their storage lockers for my gear so I don't have to lug it all back and forth every day and stink up my meager living space!
It called for 2 1/4 c flour, 3/4c water, 1tbsp sugar, 1tsp salt, oil and 1 1/4 tsp of yeast. From my previous experience with bread makers at home that seemed like way too much yeast and not enough flour and water. Turns out I was pretty much right. So I'll try again later adlib.
The other interesting cooking experiment I went through today was making some cookies. Those of you who know anything about me know that I like to make cookies among other things, so you might understand how shocked I was to discover that the complex I'm living in has no oven. That isn't quite true, it has a combination oven/microwave that claims to be able to do the best of both. I was rightly skeptical of these claims.
To begin with, it is the size of a regular micorwave, meaning that it does not fit your average cooking pan. The smallest cookie tray I could find at the local supermarket was too large... so I returned it and have bought a browni tin instead. This has the disadvantage of only being able to cook six-eight cookies at once, and that is if you don't mind them running together. When I'm used to making 20+ cookies at once at home, this feels like a considerable drawback. Strike one.
Secondly, its interface is mindboggling. If I want to cook with it's convection feature (instead of grilling, which doesn't work very well anyway because the grill is so high up, or microwaving with won't cook my cookies) I have to first cycle through the other options to get to convection bake, and then tell the thing what temperature I want. It then proceades to warm up. So far so good. But then, when it is warm, it turns of!!! After reading the instruction booklet, I learned that, once it has warmed up, I have to cycle through all the options again, choose the same temperature, set a timer for the cooking duration, and then press start again! Strike two.
Finally, there seems to be something wrong with my understanding of the temperature, or New Zealand eggs and butter are heat proof. Normally I cook my cookies at 300-325 f on convection. This gets them done in about 8-10 minutes depending on if I'm using butter or margarine, have put more or less flour, have added milk, the size of the eggs etc. For this "oven" I started off at 150C. By 10 min the cookies looked like anemic pancakes, not like cookies. I had to turn the temperature up to 230 C (446 F according to my online converter) to get them done! Strike three.
Oh well, at least they have chocolate in them. But I had to grate Nestles (yes mum, the baby killers, no other brand else seems to make good chocolate in the Countdown superstore I currently frequent) cooking chocolate bars in because the NZ equivalent of chocolate chips, "choco drops" seem to be made out of Easter bunny chocolate, ie sugar and emulsifiers with dirt for colour. Actually that is a bit too harsh, I happily chomped through a hand full or two as I was biking the other day.
To end on a cheerful note, I figure that, since I've got a brownie tin, I'll be making a lot more of those in the future because cocoa is cocoa every where.
Finally, I just got back from some fencing, first time in several weeks, had loads of fun fencing the only other epéeist there (apparently the rest are still on vacation) and what is best, they let me use their storage lockers for my gear so I don't have to lug it all back and forth every day and stink up my meager living space!
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Going for a bike ride 2010/02/06
Hi again, today I went for a bike ride up Evans Pass and then along the Summit road:
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I took the bus from Campus to the foot of Evans Pass Road, that was about 45min not including waiting for the but. Fortunatly the Christchurch bus compangy just started putting bike racks on their buses in December of 2009, and my route is one of the ones that has them.
Evans Pass was predicably steep while the actual Summit road was rolling up and down. There were a surprising (to me) number of cyclists on the road with me, most of them were spandex clad roadsters but there were also some mountain bikers who were, I assume, enrout to the numerous trails that fell off of the road. Cars were also relatively common. I think the best analogy to compare the area is Grouse Mountain. It is close to the city and clearly used by tourists and locals alike but for slightly different purposes.
The cyclists on the road were all very friendly, most would give encouragement in the form of thumbs up if they were on the down hill and I was on the up hill, a practice I took up as well. One one long but gentle up hill a roadster pulled up beside me on my undersised mountain bike (see the photo if you haven't already) and commented on how nice the weather was now, apparently the rest of the summer was quite wet, and asked me which hill was the worst in my oppinion and comented on which was his nemasis (apparently the one we were on) before leaving me to eat his carbon fiber dust. (probably a carcinogen :P)
The worst part of the trip was getting back home after the down hill of Dyers Road. For some reason Christchurch has a habit of changing the names of most of its streets. Several times as I was going home I got disoriented as street signs changed from the ones I was expecting to different ones. Twice this changes happened three times in under 10 minutes! The main problem is that these changes are not reflected on my map of the bike routes so I'm not ready for them and then get confused.
View Larger Map
I took the bus from Campus to the foot of Evans Pass Road, that was about 45min not including waiting for the but. Fortunatly the Christchurch bus compangy just started putting bike racks on their buses in December of 2009, and my route is one of the ones that has them.
Evans Pass was predicably steep while the actual Summit road was rolling up and down. There were a surprising (to me) number of cyclists on the road with me, most of them were spandex clad roadsters but there were also some mountain bikers who were, I assume, enrout to the numerous trails that fell off of the road. Cars were also relatively common. I think the best analogy to compare the area is Grouse Mountain. It is close to the city and clearly used by tourists and locals alike but for slightly different purposes.
The cyclists on the road were all very friendly, most would give encouragement in the form of thumbs up if they were on the down hill and I was on the up hill, a practice I took up as well. One one long but gentle up hill a roadster pulled up beside me on my undersised mountain bike (see the photo if you haven't already) and commented on how nice the weather was now, apparently the rest of the summer was quite wet, and asked me which hill was the worst in my oppinion and comented on which was his nemasis (apparently the one we were on) before leaving me to eat his carbon fiber dust. (probably a carcinogen :P)
The worst part of the trip was getting back home after the down hill of Dyers Road. For some reason Christchurch has a habit of changing the names of most of its streets. Several times as I was going home I got disoriented as street signs changed from the ones I was expecting to different ones. Twice this changes happened three times in under 10 minutes! The main problem is that these changes are not reflected on my map of the bike routes so I'm not ready for them and then get confused.
What is all this about anyways?
Hi everyone! For those of you who don't know, I will be spending a term studying at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand.
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The idea of this blog is to try to keep others up to date with what's going on. Fortunatly for me school doesn't start until the 22nd of February so I have a bit of time to explore before getting caught up in the whole rigmarole of studying .
While school is still out, most of my trip will be recorded in picture format at my Picasa Account. My thought is that pictures are generally more interesting that words and most people have broadband nowadays so a bunch of images shouldn't present any access problems. I've set the blog up so that if I ever get the urge to write up essays or provide other general info that doesn't really work in image captions I have a easier time of it.
View Larger Map
The idea of this blog is to try to keep others up to date with what's going on. Fortunatly for me school doesn't start until the 22nd of February so I have a bit of time to explore before getting caught up in the whole rigmarole of studying .
While school is still out, most of my trip will be recorded in picture format at my Picasa Account. My thought is that pictures are generally more interesting that words and most people have broadband nowadays so a bunch of images shouldn't present any access problems. I've set the blog up so that if I ever get the urge to write up essays or provide other general info that doesn't really work in image captions I have a easier time of it.
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