Field Camp, Friendships, and Feeling Alright

I’ve been in New Zealand for a quarter of my total time in this country, and desperately uninterested in writing, but feel I need to get some thoughts down anyhow. The reason I haven't wanted to write is sort of a mystery to me, but I suspect it’s both that the pace at which I was writing last semester didn’t feel insanely sustainable and I’m interested in making my writing practice a more permanent part of my life even beyond this year, and that this experience thus far has led to less earth-shattering, I-must-write-this-down moments and conclusions. All in good time, for sure, but mostly I have felt like I am on a series of exciting outdoor adventures without the previous culture shock and with the addition of a general sense of fatigue of doing all of the new abroad experiences over again. But, last night I had a lovely phone conversation with my biggest fan Ben and knew I needed to write again. So, here I am. 

Today is my second day of classes of the new semester. I’m currently sitting outside of the Sciences building here with a friend, debating the merits of boba tea and planning a weekend adventure. It feels so good to be settling into a routine, one that includes lots of free time for reading, running, biking, and writing, and weekends full of setting off to mountain tops and beach towns, especially after the chaos of the last while. 

It would be hard to write about everything that’s happened since the Whanganui Journey and the start of my time in New Zealand, and for this post I’ll focus on field camp, which was a 2.5 week adventure full of new friends and new landscapes. I explored various ecosystems, learned to identify glacial landscape features and native trees, swam in alpine glacial lakes, including at the foot of the once-mighty Hooker Glacier spread beneath the stunning Aoraki/Mt. Cook, hiked up mountains, learned about troll bridges, explored glow worms and geothermal vents, sang lots of Pitch Perfect, and ate quite a bit of hummus. 

So far this experience has been nothing like my time in Tanzania, and yet I’ve found myself comparing nearly every moment to my first few weeks there, from the friendships I made and at what speed to the learning I did in the field. 

The most exciting personal update from my time so far is that one of my initial goals of this year, that being learning to love learning again, is really taking shape. Last semester, as is clear to anyone reading these blog posts, was not academically-motivated in any meaningful way, and instead was far more about deep cultural immersion, navigating new social dynamics, and seeing amazing sights. By contrast, my field learning here has been intense and intentional, with well-planned modules and built-in reflections about the learning taking place within the landscapes they focus on. 

Our first module took place at Living Springs, a sustainable camp only a few minutes outside of Christchurch on the Banks Peninsula, where we looked out at milky blue harbors and previously forested islands once favored by Shackleton for sled dog training, and explored the conservation practices of a non-profit, including their pest predator trapping and ecological restoration efforts. Two of our main professors hiked us around the insanely beautiful port hills before we settled in at the camp, where our main objectives were a general introduction to New Zealand and each other with an emphasis on stream ecology. Our first full day of field camp, a group of girls decided to scale a big hill above the valley where we were staying, and proceeded to scramble through brambles and sheep shit straight uphill until we reached a beautiful rock outcropping at the top of the ridge. It was one of my “yeah, this is going to be okay” moments, and I felt grateful to be surrounded by people who want to adventure the same way I do. Our time here also featured learning new tree identification skills and hiking through various stages of restored landscapes. We went spotlighting one night, where we found and caught cool creatures in the stream running through the valley.

New Zealand is an amazing case study for plenty of environmental issues and faults, something I’ll get into in my next post. As the last settled habitable place on the planet, history’s wounds are fresh here, and it is this fact that I believe has made it a place more responsive to its societal and environmental wrongdoings, and a truly fantastic place to study all of these facets. Field camp included a sizable dose of thinking through indigenous knowledge systems in addition to the classic rocks and tree identification, something I really appreciate about this program so far. For now, I’ll run through everything we did, and get into the ideas later. 

After our time on the Banks Peninsula, we spent one night back at our new apartments, which I spent blissfully alone, sleeping for eleven hours. The next morning we headed northwest to Cass, a field station in the mountains run by the University of Canterbury, where we spent three days and three nights being introduced to glacial geomorphology, which for us meant many hours of staring at alpine landscapes and trying to figure out what had happened there thousands of years ago based on current scars. On the way, we stopped at Castle Hill, a spot famous for being featured in the Narnia series, with incredible limestone formations from the period of time in which New Zealand was deep underwater.

In Cass, we also had an artist with us, who worked with us on blind-sketching mountain ridgelines and learning the landscape using our pencils. I surprisingly really enjoyed this practice, and my deeply childish watercolor paintings that came out of it. I loved having the half-and-half split, in which we simultaneously learned the terminology and the angles, the indicators and the colors. I was sad to see our artist friend Gabby leave, and to depart from the stunning river basins we’d been exploring. Cass was characterized by rapidly changing weather which allowed for cozy cabin mornings and big exploratory sunny afternoons, with lots of gazing at the mountains and tacos on the porch.

One big difference between this field camp and my time in the field in Tanzania is that we actually move here!!! Every day in the field has included at least a little bit of hiking, sometimes with big ventures, and usually a swim. I have loved getting to see these landscapes on foot, and even checked off my list some of the hikes I was most excited about on the South Island. It still sort of surprises me sometimes that we are expected to move through the landscapes so much because of how much this wasn’t part of my time in Tanzania, but I’m thrilled about it. 

After Cass, where I started to feel out the social dynamics of the group and read lots, we headed South, back towards the East coast and then down to Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park. Tiger and I didn’t make it here on our roadtrip, in part because I knew I’d be back, and in hindsight I’m sort of bummed that we skipped it. On our way, we went for our first of many glacial lake swims, in the inimitable Lake Pukaki, with far-off views of the Southern Alps in the background. The water was somehow both clear and sediment-filled, bright blue and soft to the touch, cold like a May swim at home.

We ate dinner in the town of Twizel that night (and had a delicious unauthorized IPA with dinner) then drove up to Glentanner, to an RV park perched at the head of Lake Pukaki with unparalleled views of the Alps on a clear day. Our first night, Mt. Cook itself was hidden behind clouds, as in its Maori namesake, Aoraki, meaning cloud piercer, and I passed out. We woke up to an intense, grit-flinging wind coming off the high peaks, which were swathed in snowy clouds for our first morning, and a double rainbow!

Into the field we went, hiking up to Tasman Glacier along one of its lateral moraines, left behind during the glacier’s retreat in the last hundred years. We hiked about three miles up and into this valley, and I was in the back of the pack, such that when I got to the lookout point, I was roped into a picture without realizing where I was standing. When I turned around, I realized I was about 3 feet away from a 250 meter drop, with a stunning, huge 50m tall glacier below me sloping sharply into a bright blue glacial lake. It was amazing, and very complex perspective-wise, such that we couldn’t figure out where we were in space and how big everything else was in relation to us.

Environmental scientists often speak about “rapid change” in the world’s ecosystems, whether from carbon emissions, loss of habitat for endangered species, warming oceans, or other anthropogenic changes, but perhaps nowhere on Earth are these changes quite so rapid as here in New Zealand, where massive washout events can change the shape of the mountains and valleys every couple of years, and the biggest glaciers have retreated many kilometers in the past century. Although I’ve seen glaciers before in Patagonia, seeing the glaciers here, which are debris-covered and very unstable, was sobering and magnificent all the same. To be surrounded by my TAs and professor, all of whom remember when the glaciers were in a completely different destination than they are now, was extremely shocking. What a special place to learn about these processes. 

The rest of our time in Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park was hot, punctuated by incredible glacial swims, and hike-filled. At one secret special spot our professor knew about, we slathered the fine silt mud at the bottom of the lake all over our arms and faces as an improvised mud mask, another absolutely awesome group moment. We worked on a glacial geomorphic map of the two valleys we walked through, and hiked the famous Hooker Valley Track, with truly indescribable views of Mt. Cook, the Hooker glacier, and many of the other peaks of the Southern Alps. At the end, we jumped into the glacial lake, tiny bergs floating by. It was magic.

In the evenings at Glentanner, we would sit on a small rise at the campsite and watch the light change on the many faces of Aoraki, usually water coloring or chatting quietly. One night everyone brought out their sleeping bags and laid looking up at the stars until far too late, giggling and pointing out the upside down constellations. A different night we did a compliment circle for each other, which lasted 2.5 hours full of kindness and love for new people. As a group, we really normed and formed here, and spent lots of our drives up and down the valley singing loudly and drinking in the views. 

After Aoraki/Mt. Cook, we drove back to Christchurch for an afternoon and a full day off in the city. I grocery shopped and made dinner, then met up with friends for a night out on the town. We wanted to go to Fat Eddies, the famous jazz club right downtown, but it was closed, it being a Sunday and all, so we went to a bar next door instead. After some dancing, G&Ts, and pool-playing, we headed back for a good night’s sleep. 

The next day I spent the morning in bed, then around midday headed to the mall for some necessities. With no plans on the docket and no responsibilities, I spontaneously decided to go to the movies and saw Wicked. It was sort of emotional to be alone and far from home, watching media that was meaningful to me when I was younger and tied to memories of seeing it with my mom and Mary, and bonding over the music with Sophie. It was nice to slip away for a bit and do something so different from the past few months. It was the first movie I’d seen since the summer! That evening I cooked dinner again and went to bed early.

Our last chunk of field camp took place on the North Island, and we flew out late that morning. After a quick flight to Rotorua we drove up to Waitomo, where we were staying at one of our professor’s marae, a Maori meeting house with deep spiritual and cultural significance for Maori families. Our time in the marae was incredible, and we all felt held and safe in the space. The building where we slept, called the wharenui, is a space where visitors aren’t allowed to take pictures, wear shoes, or eat or drink, and the walls are covered in photographs and drawings of deceased ancestors belonging to the marae. I slept on the porch of the building with a few friends, and we all universally reported the best sleep we had gotten so far on the trip. 

When we entered the marae, we went through a cultural exchange process called a powhiri, in which someone represented the visitors and someone represented the marae through a series of speeches (in the Maori language) and ceremonial entrance processes, and then the visitors sing a song of support for the visiting representative’s speech. It was beautiful and meaningful and very special to embark on for our first time at a marae, and the exit process was even more emotional, in which our professor spoke words of thanks in English to his parents, who had hung out with us for our days there, and we all felt a pang of homesickness and missing parents at the same moment.

While we were at the marae, we explored the Waitomo area, going on a short hike with more tree identification and explanation of local landmarks as well as a tour of the famous glow worm caves of the area. As someone who gets pretty claustrophobic in small spaces, I was nervous about the caves, but it ended up being an awesome experience and not at all a tight, scary space to crawl through as I expected. Instead, we were in high-ceilinged caverns with amazing stalactites and stalagmites dripping and growing around us, until we stepped into a dark space and were greeted with the sight of thousands of glow worms hanging from the ceiling. We couldn’t take any pictures within the cave, but the sight won’t soon leave my mind. The second half of the tour took place in boats, where we were pulled along cables through the darkened caverns. It was amazing, like seeing bioluminescence above us, stars inside of a cave. I loved it. We drove to the coast one day and spent the day exploring tide pools and swimming in a stunning river, eating lunch inside a sandblown cave and playing in the river, a great day of exploration. The next day we went on a night hike where we saw them hanging on rocks around a local stream, which was amazing despite there being far fewer of them. 

We left Waitomo to go back to Rotorua after a couple of days. On the way, we stopped at Blue Springs, an absolutely insanely clear and bright blue river and spring that feeds a ton of the North Island’s water supply. We couldn’t swim there, which was devastating, but as a consolation prize we did end up in an icy blue swim spot just down the road, where we jumped off a log over the river and floated over ripples.

We arrived in Rotorua with a free evening on our hands, and went for a walk to the hot springs before eating a DELICIOUS Vietnamese meal.Rotorua is famous for its volcanic activity leading to amazing rock formations and incredible natural hot springs, as well as a strong stench of sulfur over the entire town. However, it was pretty cute, and reminded me of Nelson, a town I loved.

After dinner, we took over our hostel’s lobby for an epic karaoke performance, then went back out on the town for a night of dancing. Although we technically weren’t supposed to be out and about on field camp, all 26 of us somehow made it to the same bar at the same time, which was a pretty beautiful coincidence. Once again the only people out, we took over the bar and danced for hours, returning to our windowless hostel room later than anticipated. 

The next day was a full one, with a work day’s worth of field work ahead. We split into five teams with different tasks to be completed at various sites throughout a forest reserve managed by a zip-lining tourism/conservation organization trying to determine the carbon sequestration potential of their plot of land. It was a long but fun day of traipsing through the bush and doing very little in the way of hard work (a theme?). That evening we ate the best Mexican food in New Zealand and ate ice cream by the volcanic lake, playing on a playground amidst actual children. By this point I felt supremely comfortable and happy with the friends I’d made, which made field camp even more fun than it already was. 

Our last half-day on the North Island was my friend Elodie’s birthday. We went for a vaguely aimless walk to find coffee in the morning, ate breakfast, and spent the morning looking at more hot springs and swimming in an absolutely stunning lake reminiscent of a spot you might find in Vermont, ringed by green hills. We played and jumped off of each other and dove down for what felt like hours, desperate to stay for longer. Elodie was surprised with the first cake(s) of the day, and we ate them with our hands, sticky and sandy and salty and happy. 

After flying back we were free once again, and had a lovely celebration of Elodie at the beach, with more compliments and birthday questions and a sprinting skinny dip in the cool night ocean. It was a fitting way to end the weeks of swimming and sharing, bonding and exploring, and I was happy to have a wonderful new person in my life to celebrate. 

Since field camp we’ve been stationed in Christchurch learning about our semester-long research projects and exploring closer afield. I bought a car with four friends which we used to go for a beach adventure this past weekend, and had a spectacular birthday full of singing, dancing, delicious food, good cocktails, swimming in the ocean, and feeling pretty okay about being far from home. My dear friend Lily made my mom’s classic birthday cake, an amazing kindness I appreciated immensely. We ate it at 3:30 in the morning outside of our flats after a night on the town, singing in hushed voices so our RAs didn’t yell at us. My heart was full of love and excitement for a semester with this group of people, and gratitude for what a year it has been. 

The sun is shining here in Christchurch, and I’m excited for an afternoon of reading and hanging out in the sunshine. Life is good, feeling normal, and only improving from here. It feels good to be writing again; more to come soon.