caving update

I have a few more photos from Saturday's adventures (see below). Out of the group of 9, 5 of us were brave enough to jump into the ~12C water to explore the cave. It's really quite unique- the cave itself is 362m long and has about 4-5m clearance throughout. At the deepest, the water is waist deep on an adult (more like chest deep for me!). Inside the walls are limestone and the river bed is lined with rocks. The water is crystal clear and since there is no natural light, there is no algae or anything growing on the rocks (otherwise it would have been really slick!) There are three separate waterfalls that you climb up in the cave, two that are about 1m high and the third and last one leading out of the cave that's about 3m high. It took us about 45min to walk through, we kept a fairly fast pace mostly to keep warm! Although it was about 24C that day you could see your breath in the cave and my toes were numb after the first few minutes! The waterfall at the end has metal ladder rungs drilled into the rock to climb out- we ended up on the other side of the hill from where we entered the cave! Overall an awsome experience unlike anything I had done before...and best of all it was free!

Classes continue to go well- I'm still getting used to having several lecturers come in and out of classes; most profs lecture on certain subjects which means there are anywhere from 3-6 lecturers for the class. Today I walked into what I thought was the wrong class but it turned out to be our new psychology prof- a very enthusiastic Russian...it made for an interesting class.

I attended my first Rotary club meeting today over lunchtime. My host counsellor Valda brought me and introduced me to lots of the members...the lunch was awesome! The speaker today was Jesse, another scholar here for the year from Kelowna, British Columbia. He definitely gave me some good ideas for my presentations! It's a rather elderly club (with lots of retired members) and mostly men but overall they were very welcoming and friendly. In two weeks time the 5 scholars who are in Christchurch are going to Wellington for the weekend for a conference and then in April there is the district conference on the west coast of the South Island.


me, Daniel, Darragh and Anja in the middle of the cave!

Matthias with the remains of previous trampers...maybe just a cattle bone

me on a rock ledge overlooking the valley where the Great Battle of "Narnia" was filmed...or so I'm told, I have yet to see the movie. Awesome rock though- the picture doesn't really do it justice!

all for now- please feel free to post comments on here...I'm beginning to think that nobody ever reads this! You shouldn't have to sign up or make any sort of commitments!

cheers-

s.