Not in the sense that my flight was late a couple of hours (which it was), but more that my passport was never sent back to me before the embassy closed for the holidays. Neither I nor the people who had my passport know why it wasn’t sent back to me, when I finally got hold of someone who could help me all they said was, “Huh, that’s weird…we’ll sent it back right away.” So one week after the program started and a rebooked international flight later I arrived in Auckland (pronounced Auckland). My group was no longer in Auckland so I had to catch a bus to meet them in Taupo (pronounced Taupo). It was about a five hour bus ride through the beautiful New Zealand country side. Taupo sits on Lake Taupo (a supervolcano) and across the water you can see Mt. Ruapehu, Mt. Ngauruhoe, and Mt. Tongariro. Mt. Ngauruhoe was the mountain used for Mt. Doom in LoTR.
I arrived in Taupo and had was planning on meeting my group at the bus stop, I knew that I had to wait a few hours, so I set up my hammock. I missed a lot of stuff in the first week, but when I met up with the group I hit the ground running. The first night we sorted invertebrates out of leaf litter and the next morning we drove out to the Orakei Korako geothermal area. The geothermal springs are full of color, and these colors relate to different critters doing their different things.
We moved a little farther south to Ohakune (pronounced Ohakune) where we spent four days going to different areas and learning about different plants or about the history of the land. The best part of the trip was climbing Mt. Ngauruhoe (pronounced Ngauruhoe), there is no path up or down so it is an adventure both ways. After our stay in Ohakune we travelled to Wellington (pronounced Wellington) where we started our actual book learning.
I may have been late, but the best is yet to come.