Merry Christmas/New Year, etc

Yep I'm still alive... barely. Fuck I'm tired though.

The Milford Track was amazing. For Christmas a big storm rolled in through Fiordland and planted about an inch of snow on the peaks. When the clouds lifted we could see all of the fresh snow... awesome! All night I played Euchre with some Canadians and drank Black Russians. So it was a real Christmas: snow, Euchre, drinking. Good times.

After Fiordland Drew and I headed up to Mt Cook/Aoraki where we felt the need to step it up a notch and do something a little bit more hard-core than the basic tramping we had been doing. So we picked up some ice axes and crampons, headed 3 hours up the Hooker Valley, camped under a tarp, woke up at 5:30am and headed strraight up an ice field to the Ball Pass, 2,121 meters and right on the ridge of Mt Cook/Aoraki. The entire trip took us 15 hours, over snow, ice, boulders, alpine veg, etc. AMAZING. But fuck we were tired, and I swear to god I don't want to hike for another half year after that one.

Feeling tired of walking, we headed up to Castle Hill to do some climbing. I've gathered from word of mouth that Castle Hill is one of the most saught after bouldering spots in the world. Turns out I was right. After climbing the first day, Drew and I decided that we needed more time to explore the vast boulder fields, and decided to hang around for the rest of our time on the south island. We found a killer campsite (free) that had a shelter that was inhabbitted by 20 climbing bums that were roughly our age. So we celebrated New Years with a raging fire/drunken time with people from all over the world, people we came to like and know quite well. It was great, and I hope your New Years celebration was just as great.

So now it's back to the North Island. I'm currently in Christchurch waiting for my bus to take us to Picton, across the Cook Straights to Wellington (arriving at 1am), waiting around until 8am to take the next bus to Hamiton. Gonna suck, but once we get to the North Island we're going to do some caving, hang out at Raglan, and hopefully do some more climbing. Basically not spending money and enjoying the last few days in the Land of the Long White Cloud...