I had to take some leave from work before the end of the before it expires. After thinking about it for a little to long I finally decided to take a trip to go hiking and adventuring around the south island of New Zealand. Besides getting stuck in immigration at Auckland for an hour and a half, it was an awesome trip. The weather was great for most of the time, and the day it was raining we got to see waterfalls in their most impressive state. I got to see a lot of different national parks and area in the south island along with lots and lots of sheep. My tour guides and tour mates were great people and we had a really small group so we could really get to know each other pretty well. The highlight of the trip would have to be the two days we spent in the area called the Siberia Valley. We took a scenic plane ride up and along the mountain range to a valley up in between mountains where the plane landed and let us out. We then spent the entire day hiking up to Lake Crucible. The following day we spent hiking out of the valley and down to the river where a jet boat was waiting to pick us up and jet us back to the city. There were other great hikes, a nice mountain bike ride, as well as kayaking around Milford Sound (which is actually a fiord). We had a free day in Queenstown which I spent doing some canyoning. I realized that Queenstown may be the adventure capital of New Zealand, but everything is also very expensive. The food on the trip was nothing too out of the ordinary, but I did enjoy eating as much lamb and venison as I could. The venison pies are especially good. New Zealand is only place that I do hope to make it back to as there are lots of multi-day trails that seem very interesting, and I still have the entire north island to explore as well.

The full New Zealand Gallery

New Zealand Gallery

A whole bunch of people from my guest house got together to go on a tour of the Asahi beer factory. It was a pretty modern and mostly automated factory, and was quite interesting to see all the steps and processes required to make some beer. At the end, there was ,of course, a while bunch of free beer tasting, but there was also some juices as well. Afterwards we all went to an onsen nearby..

Some of my friends and I went to Tobitengu, which is in total a kilometer of zipline. It is not very accessible, but is in a very nice mountain area and relatively cheap. It was great fun, will do again.

There is a live house in Yokohama that I have been interested in going to for a while, then when I saw a show there that looked really interesting I decided to take Suzuna and go. We saw Chico & the Gypsies and I have to admit, it was a really good show.

These are non-alcoholic cocktails..