Lins and Rich’s Travel Blog

Luckily, for Saturday, we had planned the perfect gloomy day activity; sitting in a warm workshop, surrounded by various electric tools, we both carved our own jade necklaces.  Yes, that’s Rich too.  I had spent some time on Friday night designing my own Mania - this is a Maori symbol that traditionally has the head of a bird, the body of a human and the tail of a fish to represent the importance of the connection between the sky, the earth, the sea and all the creatures living in/on them.  The symbol is beleived to be worn by one who has supernatural powers and protects the wearer from evil.  I’m not sure about the powers bit, but I liked the idea of the earthly connections - it appeals to my limited spiritual beliefs - so I took this idea and added in my own identity. 

I took the design with me into the workshop on Saturday morning and got to work quite quickly.  In the meantime, Rich selected a very manly fish hook design; this is said to represent strength and determination and is to protect the wearer from harm at sea.  We both then chose our slabs of jade - I went for quite a light piece whereas Rich asked for something as dark as possible so Steve, our tutor, pulled out a piece of virtually black jade from his own collection for Rich to use.  Rich managed to complete his work of art after about 6 hours after much grinding, cutting, drilling, smoothing and polishing.  Mine took a couple of hours longer due to the complexity of the design.  Though we do say so ourselves, the final articles are both pretty impressive, particularly as it’s the first time I’ve managed to complete anything like this - at school I used to give up in CDT and Textiles becuase I just couldn’t make anything that didn’t break or that looked anything like it was meant, so I’m particularly proud that I not only designed this but that I worked patiently (yes, that is me being patient) at it for over 8 hours and it looked like I’d meant it to!  Rich is much more practical but still, he’s wearing a very professional looking fish hook.

Now, the problem is, the rest of our planned activities require particular weather for us to be able to participate, and Mother Nature isn’t playing ball!  We were meant to do our heli-hike today; this invovled taking a helicopter flight up Fox Glacier to a point that can’t otherwise be reached, hiking on it armed with cramp-ons etc. for a couple of hours, then flying back down.  Unfortunately, this morning, we woke to cloud, rain, fog, greyness and any other potential hazard you could think of for a helicopter.  Things did start to clear a bit as midday and our scheduled flight time approached but, unfotunately, after getting geared up and driven to the helipad, the trip had to be cancelled due to too much cloud cover.  Apparently tomorrow is supposed to be fine weather-wise so we’ve rebooked for the morning - fingers crossed.

If things don’t work out tomorrow morning however, we can’t stay around becuase we have to drive down to Queenstown as we have booked 3 days skiing there.  I’ve just checked the snow report for the slopes around the area and there is none - skiing may also be off!  To top it all off, I’m fairly sure we decided we wouldn’t be skiing when buying our insurance as we didn’t plan to be anywhere near ski slopes during the ski season so I don’t think we can even get any money back if we can’t ski!

So, I just need to say Happy Father’s Day and Happy Birthday to my dad as my phone is being rather tempremental and I’m not sure I’ll get to speak to him - the weather’s probably knocked the line out or something!!!!