Tuesday was our last full day in Christchurch, the first thing we did was visit Castle Rock, the site for the final battle scene in Narnia. It was well worth it too, the hillside was amazing and we did a lot of hiking and climbing around and taking pictures, it was beautiful. I charged down the hill “for Narnia” and had Ramona take a picture for me, it was great. Most of us took a picnic lunch and we all ate around the rocks before heading off to the caves. That was honestly my very favorite thing that we did on our trip. It was incredible. Some people in the ward told us about them so we were the first group of BYU girls to go. We had to stop and buy flashlights at the dollar store on the way, we got the little keychain ones that looked pathetic, but they actually worked pretty well. We hiked down to the entrance and were met by some people coming up who corrected us, we were heading to the exit so we had to turn around and go the other way. They also told us to get more jackets to wear because it was freezing, I wish I hadn’t though, I took it off and hung it around my shoulders most of the way through. The cave was an underground river that took about an hour to hike through. It was amazing. We had to start at the other end so that we could walk against the current of the water. The water level got pretty high at some places, Tiari and Ramona got completely soaked. Most of the time it was only about knee deep on me but it got up to my chest a couple of times. The cave itself was pretty high, I never felt trapped in it. We had to climb up a few little waterfalls, and the rapids got pretty rough in a few spots. I absolutely loved it. The cave walls and ceiling were incredible, formed by the water into awesome shapes. In some spots there were minerals that we learned about at the museum that glow in fluorescent light, that was really sweet too. I kept hoping that it would never end because it was soo cool. The end was a little scary, we had to climb up and out of the hole. Someone had put up ladder rungs so that we could get up the sheer wall, but the scary part was the little ledge we had to crawl along to actually get out of the cave. Scarier than actually crawling along it was watching everyone else crawl across, knowing that if they fell I could do nothing about it. We went through the cave with Ramona and Chris while James took the other girls and dropped them off at the obstacle course and then he picked up the hobbits at the airport. There are three BYU students that created a project/social experiment to come over here and be extras in the Hobbit. They have been fundraising and emailing Peter Jackson and other people involved and they flew out here to drive around and find the set that they are filming now. We saw them again this past weekend when they left, but they wouldn’t give us any details, we have to wait for the documentary they made to come out.
Wednesday we spent a lot of time waiting around to come back here and then we slept a ton to recover from the craziness that was the South Island.
No comments:
Post a Comment