Where am I? What time is it? Who are you? What are you doing reading this? Shouldn’t you be sleeping? Somehow we left New Zealand today 14 hours ago, and the time now is before we left. I didn’t SEE a flux capacitor on board the aircraft, but I guess it had one. Customs sure couldn’t sniff it out.
Maybe “Customs” is just as tired as I am. Sheesh, I need a nap.
NO!
Must. Not. Nap. Must power through this to recalibrate.
Zzzzzzz.
Huh!? Waa!? Whoops, I must have fallen asleep there for a minute. But now that I’m awake again, let’s go wander downtown Santiago to explore a bit.
Wait, I DID go Back To The Future! Barney is still hip here!
I wanna go Forward To The Past! Get me outta here!
Ahh, I see a light at the end of the tunnel in Plaza de Armas
That tunnel lead farther into downtown where on every corner was a vendor cart selling “Copihue – Jugo de Huesillos”
What the heck IS it? I see everyone buying them. I’m getting one.
It’s sort of hard to describe. It’s kinda like a maple syrup flavored ice tea — with oatmeal in it!
And BRAINS!!
Or figs? Or something. Still not sure what it was. But this brain needs some sleep.
Sorry for the blog posting delays. We’re trying to recalibrate to the new time zone and catching up with some work that needs to be done. We’ve got a lot of ‘ketching’ up to do…
It wasn’t a tornado that brought us to this island, it was simply a ferry.
And it was another force of nature that created the island 600 years ago: volcanic.
I’m not sure how they do it, but somehow plants manage to prosper on this island, persevering and extending their roots through the mounds and mounds of solidified pahoehoe.
It’s a good thing too, since it was REALLY hot out there as the black lava rocks seems to absorb all the heat of the sun and radiate it back out in our direction. The trees provided a little bit of cover to cool us off on the hike up to the crater.
It was so hot out there that we even took a detour to cool off underground in the lava tube caves.
Emerging on the other side a tad bit cooler, and a tad bit closer to the summit.
As you can probably imagine, the 1.5 hour hike to the top revealed some fantastic views of the city and surrounding waters.
But we had limited time to enjoy it all as we had to quickly hike back down the long lonely road before we missed the last ferry of the day.
We really cut it a lot closer than we should have, and my feet are still reminding me of that fact today.
The biggest eyesore landmark of Auckland is quite obviously the Sky Tower.
It is 328 metees (1,076 ft) tall, making it the tallest free-standing structure in the Southern Hemisphere! And of course, seeing that it’s located in New Zealand, the Kiwi’s turned it into an adventure sport!
SkyJump is sort of like a 192-meter “fan descender” which is a cross between a bungy jump and a base jump. The jump is guide-cable-controlled to prevent jumpers from colliding with the tower in case of gusts. Nice feature, but if there’s no risk of a concussion, I’m not interested.
Instead we just took in the 360 degree panoramic views of the city, and then had a nice dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top.
