Castle Hill, St. Patricks day and my first horseback ride

Were coming up on Fall Break here at the University of Canterbury! I get THREE weeks off to go explore around and see what mischief I can get up to. Doing my very best to get caught up on blogging here, because a lot will be going on in a week!

So: last weekend I went to Castle hill with the climbing club for St. Patrick's day. They don't quite celebrate that as much as we do at home (at least like they do in college..), but it was a good day and there was lots of green silliness going on for clothing. Then we got down to climbing and it didn't matter anymore. I did the hardest climbs I've ever done before! It was great! My forearms were alll chewed up from the rock scraping, can't imagine what climbing on lava rock would be like.. maybe you don't have to drag your body over everything as much as you do here. Whenever someone had to mantle I'd tell them to "Castle hill" instead... pretty much the move you need in every climb here.

Descending is always harder than ascending. But my new shoes did the job!

My first V3! I don't remember the name, but it was right behind "Amazing Grace"  the big cavity above the climber is full of sharp litte things to strengthe your fingers and torment your skin with.. then you "Castle Hill" hard to finish. First shot I got past the crux and to the easy finish and just couldn't push myself up! Then I flowed through the next time.

 

Really cool pit in the limestone! 

And of course I had to work on my new hobby of making panoramas! So beautiful. This is looking at spittle hill I believe. 

After climbing we went over to cave stream and had a great walk through! It was pretty cool in there and every surface was COVERED with condensation. 100% humidity all the time. No algae in the water though since there was no light! Great way to cool off after a sweaty day of climbing. My Mammut headlamp served me well!

We stayed the night at the Environmental Learning Center past cave stream, which was beautiful! The stars were perfect.. and it was St. Patricks day so there was all sorts of shenanigans

I rode Fritz. You might say we were on the fritz together. 

Here we are halfway through! This is where we went jet boating with IES at the beginning of our time here in NZ, beautiful!

But I got into an okay trot by the end and we were good buddies.

Just have to do this weekend, and I'll be all set! Looking forward to going off on break. We'll start in Rarotonga (look it up, cool, very isolated place) with IES and then have 2 weeks of travel with friends, and my birthday!

Cheers,

Thomas