Women's Hostels and Sheepies

I've never stayed at an all women's hostel until Christchurch. Let me tell you, it is an experience. One popular meal that we saw a many hostels (both sexes) in Australia was baked beans on white bread. Now, the meals in a women's hostel are a whole different story. In our 2 1/2 days there I saw freshly baked bread, souffles, casseroles, omelettes and toastie sandwiches. These girls are serious about their food on the road. And the woman who ran the hostel were all about providing the appliances needed for all of their cooking needs. The other thing about an all womens hostel is everybody is walking around really confused about who is straight and who is not. Nobody can tell, and most don't want to ask. In the end, I think it's about 50/50. But I could be way off. Oh, and there was a lot of pink.

Our time in Christchurch was greatly spent trying to get good deals for the rest of our time in New Zealand. I got a little practice in my math when adding up the different costs for taking buses on different fares and passes. They promote all these passes here to the travellers, but you can actually get a better deal if you just buy tickets individually a lot of the time. At least if you're not going to stop in every podunk town up the country. This was probably took one half day. The rest of the time we spent looking for gear for our upcoming 4 day tramp. That's right. You read correctly. We're going on a 4 day tramp, Kepler Track. It's one of the Great Walks of New Zealand, and we're very excited. We're also becoming very poor because of it. We had to get some more clothing layers, a little stove, some emergency stuff, food and who knows what else. But we are now prepared. And in order to make the expenditures worth while, we will hiking like crazy people for our two months in NZ.

Yesterday we took the most amazing 10 hour busride ever from Christchurch to Te Anau. It was on a double decker bus. We got the tip off that we should get to the bus early and snag the front seats on the second story. Waiting for the bus to show up I felt like I was a Macy's shopper at 6:00 am the day after Thanksgiving. I think I was ready to throw some elbows and trip some people to get those seats. Fortunately nobody got hurt, and we got the good seats. And it was worth it. There were rolling green hills, mountain views, ocean views, cows and more sheep than I've ever seen in my life. New Zealand is crazy. Apparently, in 1999 the sheep:human ratio in New Zealand was 15.2:1. That is a lot of sheep. And now we're in Te Anau waiting eagerly to leave for our tramp.