Kiwiiiii

Well, we finally made it to the shores of New Zealand (2 weeks ago) and have already racked up our first tramping (hiking) trip, bought a sweet ride (princess silver fern), and landed on our first farm (farm). So far things have gone amazingly smoothly, and we even had time for our first 'different day' in Auckland. Different days are days when Tenny and I do something different from each other. For example, on this different day Tenny went to the museum to learn all about Maori culture, the history of New Zealand's flora and fauna, and even watched a performance of the hauka dance. I went to go see Star Trek at the Imax.

I'm sure Tenny has a lot to say about history and stuff, but first of all I've got some things on my mind about Star Trek. Overall I would say I liked it more than I expected, but I feel uncomfortable with a Star Trek movie pursuing the notion that time travel could allow for changes in the space time continium and lead to 'alternate universes'. I don't profess to be a 'trekker', let alone a trekkie, but this kind of flies in the face of every other major star trek series/movie that has come before and I kind of think Gene Roddenberry is rolling around in his quasar grave. I mean, Picard pretty much relied on the fact that foolish aliens would try and alter the course of history but he knew they couldn't so he'd just sit back and chill and wait for things to go down the way he knew they would. It was all nice and clean and at the end of the day there was only one reality, even if a transporter accident had created two Rikers (You see the lengths they went to to make time linear!). In general the premise was okay, although If Kirk managed to hang from one other precipice I would have probably walked out, and I genuinely like the rendition of the characters. At least it wasn't pure crap like the 2nd go round at Star Wars, but at the end of the day it just doesn't quite sit right. I like to go to sleep at the end of a long day knowing whether or not Vulcan exists or doesn't, and that there aren't two different Spocks, one slightly more edgy than the other. Is that too much to ask in this crazy 21st Century madness?

Hey Britt, Where's Your Beckpeck?

After spending 8 days becoming professional snorkellers we have finally landed in Auckland.. primed and ready for battle. We spent the first two days setting up a bank account and buying a car, and now we can take care of the little things like setting up this award winning adventure blog.com. I actually just got a call from someone who wanted to give me an award for that last sentence I just wrote, apparently the internets is really fast in New Zealand.

We're going to have to get adjusted to the internet cafe lifestyle again. As I write this Tenny is sitting next to me cursing Flickr for making her create another unwanted email address, while some Korean guy playing some sort of video game explodes in delight. Check it out.. our first counterpostlink!!:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22304779@N00/sets/72157618228396350/

As you can see there are some beautiful images of Fiji and the 600 hundred times someone said Bula! to us (apparently that's Fijian for Aloha). Unfortunately we didn't get an image of the coolest thing we saw in Fiji, which was a 2 meter long Zebra Shark hanging out in the coral right off the beach of our first resort, Sunset Beach (big ups to Helene for the recommendation). It looked something like this:

You're probably wondering just like we were why the Zebra Shark looks a lot like a leopard, well apparently the Zebra Shark has stripes when it is a juvenile like this:..

which would explain the misnomer. Apparently taxidermists (ahh the good old days when people listened to taxidermists!) used to think that the two were a different species and when they were merged I guess the Zebra beat out the Leopard, which is highly unprobable in this day and age I might add.

Now check out a picture of this one, he looks so happy!:

Special thanks to the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research for the enlightening photos.