Some rain and colder weather

So this entry is going to be far shorter than the last few. Really not a whole lot to write about. I went on my 5 day and four night hike and it was nice. I only say nice because I finally ran into bad luck with the weather. The Routeburn hike is generally described as one of the most beautiful walks in New Zealand. It is a relatively easy hike so anyone can do it and it goes into the alpine areas of the mountains. I can imagine it was a beautiful place if one could actually see it. I ran into three straight days of rain, one day which was absolutely gorgeous, and then rain again on my last day. In some spots the clouds and the fog were so bad that you couldn't see much more than 50 feet off the ridge I was hiking on. Every once in a while the clouds would clear a bit and I would get a good view of what the area looked like. It would have been much better perfectly clear but it was still quite a spectacular view. I met some really nice people on the hike and we hung out and chatted each other up in the evenings. There were a couple Australian people, an Italian, and an Israeli. They were all good people and fun to be around.

They decided to do only the Routeburn and so we left each other on the third day of the hike while I continued on to the Greenstone hike to make a loop and head back to Queenstown. The day I did have good weather it was about the best day I have had since I've been in New Zealand. The temperature was perfect and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The two huts on the Greenstone were not crowded and I met and talked with a couple from the North Island and got a lot of reading done in the book I brought along. People thought I was a bit crazy carrying around in my backpack to book I did. I've been trying to finish War and Peace and the behemoth of a novel is 1301 pages long. Carrying around this book is a bit foolish because of the weight and shear size but I've been drawn into the book so that I had to make room for it in my pack. So I am now within 100 pages of the finish and will likely finish tonight. I'm hoping for a good ending on this one because it has been a long road reading this book as shown by the receipt I'm using as a bookmark. The receipt shows that I bought the book in July 2000!! It's almost been eight years. I've always wanted to read this book but not until I started reading it in the last few weeks of being on the ice could I give it the focus it needed. There were three occasions in which I've read the first 100 or so pages of the book over the last year and half but could never fully get into it because of the numbers of characters and the confusing events in those first chapters. I became hooked this most recent attempt and I'm almost there. It has been one of the best reads. Sometimes novels that are fiction are just pleasure reads and there are really no benefits to reading it. This book has quite a lot of character development and tries to explain why the characters think the way they do. In some of those descriptions I have certainly taken away some ideas to ponder about life in general and how to approach living it. I usually think I'm good at not worrying about small, frivolous things but after reading this book I believe to be even better at it. I'm already planning on reading some more Tolstoy right after finishing this one.

I got done with my hikes and I sort of got pulled into the life of a city again. So these last few days I've been back in Queenstown and have been enjoying going out at night and eating some good food. However, most of my days aren't spent productively. I spend most of my time recovering from the night before, relaxing, and getting some errands done around town. Because I'm not being productive and feel that there really is nothing more for me to see around Queenstown, I'm leaving today for a new place. I'm going to head down to Te Anau for a little while to do another hike or two and to also wait for the Milford trek starting April 11, which is the most popular of all the treks to do in New Zealand. So I'm pretty excited about getting out and seeing something different. That's all I've got this time.