Craziest Week of My Life! - Part One

These last few days have been absolutely insane. It started with me leaving orientation on the 8th and heading down south to Christchurch. I met up with 5 other people (Morgan, Tiffany, Bryan, Linda, and Pai) for a 10 day road trip to the south island. The first day was just driving and more driving, but even though we had to drive so much it was super picturesque. Everything looked like it was straight out of Lord of the Rings. For our first stop we drove over to Fox Glacier and spent the night in a nice little hostel. The next morning we all went hiking on the glacier! It was a fairly nice day so we got to see a lot of the glacier and our guide, Sam, was super cool and showed us all the cool cracks and picture opportunities on the glacier. He even let a few of us use his ice pick to swing away at the ice. Fun stuff. The glacier hike was amazing. We had to were special spikes, called Crampons, in order to get enough traction on the ice. We managed to go up and down without falling and took tons of cool pictures of truly breathtaking views.

The next day, four of planned on going sky diving. However, the weather was really rainy and cloudy and they were unsure of whether we would be able to go at all. We waited for 5 hours and it had only cleared slightly. The others who weren't jumping were getting impatient and wanting to head to our next stop so we decided to do or die and see what they said at 3:00. They said it was clear enough, though, so we were able to jump! We went in groups of two and Bryan and I went second. It was soo crazy. My tandem master, Mark, had skydived over 11,000 times in his life, crazy! We flew up and jumped out at 12,000 feet. Free fall was one of the coolest things I've ever done. The Fox Glacier jump is supposed to be the second best place to skydive in the world, behind Mount Everest. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, you could look one way and see the tallest mountains in New Zealand and then look the other way and be able to see the ocean. After Mark me steer for a while, we costed in for a smooth landing. Awesome! Those were a few days full of amazing and breathtaking views. I really glad I decided to come down to the south island and experience all New Zealand has to offer.