Although we had to get up at the crack of dawn to pull it off we finally got to fly our airplanes! The company that does it its called U-Fly-Extreme and they weren't kidding. Their plane is a little open cockpit bi-wing “special” as they called it. They get you all suited up in flight gear including a nice blue jumpsuit (call me Maverick!!!) and strap you in up front with the “real pilot” behind. He takes care of the takeoff and landing and the rest was up to me. What an incredible experience!! We did every aerobatic trick I’ve ever seen airplanes do like big loops, barrel rolls, and straight vertical flight until the airplane stalls and falls straight down. I think half of my flight was spent upside down! We even got to do a flyby of the area we kayaked and hiked the previous day and over our hostel to wave at everybody. Flying is surprisingly easier than I thought it would be; I think gina may be looking to buy one now ;)
After the flights we made our way down to Barrytown and stopped at a few cool lookouts along the way. The most notable was probably the pancake rocks which are basically just rock formations along the beach that are layered like pancakes. The sign says that scientists have no idea why they look like that. I think if they were in the states they would just make something up and pretend they were sure that is what happened ;).
The hostel in Barrytown was quite the setup. The entire town consisted of this bar/restaurant/hostel, a school, and a cemetery. This is “barrytown” in it entirety, the locals told us that the school, k-12th grade only has 13 TOTAL students and school district extended quite a ways north and south...how’s that for rural. For lack of other things to do, the major activity here was to drink in the pub. We had the great opportunity of being able to teach 20 people from around the world how to play beer pong and tippy cup. It was about as funny to watch as your imagining it might be. Good times though.
On Thursday we did one of the coolest thing yet...KNIFE MAKING! One of the crazy Barrytown locals brings you over to his house where he's got his entire yard setup as a big blacksmith shop with a hot coal furnace and anvils...the whole bit. He gave of this little heape of what looked like scrap metal and firewood and tells us this will turn into a beautiful knife, yeah...right. We did the whole gauntlet including forging the steel in the coal furnace and pounding into whatever form we wanted, which basically turned into whatever random mess our incoherent smashings resulted in. The rest of the process included lots of grinding, sanding, and carving until after about 8 hours of work our knives were completed. Afterwards we got to try some homemade moonshine champagne or “barrypagne” and throw tomahawks and throwing stars at a big wood target in his back yard...these guys know how to live eh? We later found out that the knives are actually VERY good quality. He sells the ones that he makes, basically the same thing with more sanding time for $200-$300, apparently the “forging” process makes it a really good and strong knife.. who knew?!?
Today we got to do the big “must do” bone carving! We had fun, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the knife making. Basically we just got a piece of bone from a cow shin and stenciled a Maori design onto it and with a MASSIVE amount of sanding and polishing made a pretty cool pendant. Apparently the bone carving thing is pretty big around New Zealand, every little shop you enter has them for sale and most of them are exactly the same design and quality as the one’s we made…so I guess we’re officially local craftsman now ;)
