A Big Visa Update, A Visit to Australia, Learning to Ski

It has been a long since my last blog, and though I have some big updates, not much has changed in my day to day life. I am still working at Rāpaki – it is planting season now, so every week we are putting as many trees as we can manage into the ground. We’ve also been doing more trapping, which I quite enjoy, since it means walking through the bush by yourself for two hours or so at a time. In general I really like my job – it is an immense privilege to be paid for something that I know is making the world a better place, and to be able to work in a place that is as pretty as Whakaraupō/Lyttelton Harbor is. It’s also exhausting though – being outside every day all day can be very draining, especially if the weather is wet or cold or windy.

It’s winter here and so although the weather has actually been beautiful in the last month or so, all of June was incredibly cold. It doesn’t help that New Zealand doesn’t like to insulate its houses properly, and that my house has only single pane windows and very little insulation. Electricity isn’t cheap either, so we don’t really bother to heat the house because any heat the heater makes is just gone as soon as you turn the heater off. We did, however, get a dryer – it is impossible to dry clothes in the winter without one. We have a power plan that gives us free power from 9pm-12am on weeknights, so as long as we only use the dryer in that time, it’s basically free. The saving grace of what keeps me warm at night is Travis – he’s the human equivalent of a hot water bottle and I don’t have to be scared of being cold if we’re sleeping together.

I’ve also had a little foray into mountaineering – aka climbing mountains with snow on them using tools like an ice axe and crampons. I did the “Intro to Snowcraft” course with the tramping club, and went on one other trip up a mountain. I had several conclusions from these experiences, the first one being using crampons is actually very cool, because it lets you walk on surfaces you would otherwise just go sliding down, the second one being that views of mountains in winter are quite pretty, and the third being that mountaineering mostly just consists of being freezing cold or trying not to sweat. Of course, going up mountains is quite cold, as you might expect, but once you start walking it’s very easy to start sweating like crazy, which then cools you down so fast the second you stop moving. If I had a sedentary indoor job, this might make me feel “alive”, but since I work outside, all I am is cold and pretty miserable. Hence, I have decided that maybe I should hold off on the mountaineering until I have an office job.

Last week I received my partner work visa, which gives me another year I can live and work in New Zealand. Getting this visa was an extensive and intensive process, for which I had to get police reports from both the US and Germany, which was a nasty surprise when filling out the application. The US one took about a month to get, and I had to be fingerprinted for it. For the German one, I had to fill out a paper application and have my signature witnessed by a Notary Public – to do this I drove to some guy’s house one evening, paid him $125 in cash, and had him watch me sign the paper, check my passport, and put his official signature and stamp on the paper; overall a very weird experience. Then I had to mail it to Germany, which takes over 2 weeks even at the fastest level, wait for them to process it, and then mail it back, which thankfully only took about 3 weeks, so 7 weeks total for the report.

In addition to police reports, I also had to get a medical exam done, get a passport photo taken, have Travis fill out a form, and submit proof of Travis and my relationship and that I have enough money to stay in New Zealand. Submitting proof of relationship is an interesting one – how do you prove that your relationship is real and genuine? I submitted pictures of us through time, downloaded our WhatsApp chat (which was 670 pages worth of text), and asked friends to write up a statement about our relationship. All of this is quite expensive – the visa itself will cost me 1630NZD to submit, and all up the whole process will be around 2500NZD. Incredibly, they gave me the visa in record time though – I was expecting to have to wait around 7 weeks, but I submitted it (sans German police report because I had no idea how long it would take to get it) on July 28^th, submitted the police report in the evening on August 6^th, and received the visa by noon on August 7^th. Hopefully next year I can apply for permanent residency – with a residency visa I would have all the same rights as a citizen and would be able to live here as long as I want to.

I’ve been on one exciting trip since my last blog – my Mom had a conference in Australia she was going to, and so I went and joined her for the last two days of the conference and then we travelled for 5 days. The conference was the International Congress for Conservation Biology – I attended the North American Congress for Conservation Biology in 2022 and presented a poster, so it was not completely new to me. This time I just watched talks though and met a couple people, although I think at my current stage of life conferences with a local focus would be much better for meeting people and seeing what kind of work is being done than an international conference. We did attend a birding field trip to a local park and saw quite a few cool birds (see pictures below).

After the conference we rented a car and drove 2 hours inland to Lamington National Park. Many trails in the park had been destroyed in a recent cyclone, but there were still a few that were open so that afternoon we did a loop on one of the shorter ones. We saw lots of cool birds – my favourite was a Green Catbird and hearing a Lyrebird, which has a very distinctive call. We also saw Kookaburras, Wallabies, Pademelons (kangaroo-type mammals even smaller than Wallabies), and a Koala! The next day it rained all day – we still went on a nice hike, but definitely didn’t get the views or see as many animals as we would have if it were sunny, but it was still nice. Our Airbnb had a fireplace, which made for a very cosy evening.

We then drove back to Brisbane and took the ferry to Moreton Island, about 1.5 hour ferry ride from the city. The entire island is made of sand, but is mostly forested with eucalypts and other interesting plants. We stayed at the resort there, which was an interesting experience. We went on a nice hike but turned around because the forest had been the same for 2 hours and wasn’t going to change, and we also realized that most of the interesting animals that exist on the mainland were not on the island. The really interesting part of the island is the ocean.

There is a series of wrecks of the coast of the island which were put there on purpose to give a little bit of shelter from the tides that rip past the island and provide some habitat for fish. That evening we took a tour in a glass-bottom boat at the wrecks – unfortunately, the bottom of the boat was covered in bubbles while moving, so you couldn’t actually see much unless stopped. We did see some schools of fish and a nice sunset, but not too much else.

The next day we rented some wetsuits and fins and went snorkelling at the wrecks. You swim to the wrecks and ride the current to the end of the wrecks before swimming back to shore. The fish life was incredible – so many different colors and shapes and sizes of fish! I don’t have an underwater camera so can’t share any photos, but it was a stunning collection of species. We rode the conveyor belt current twice past the wrecks before walking back to the resort, having lunch, and then taking the ferry back to Brisbane. I flew back to Christchurch that evening, Travis picked me up from the airport at 2am, and I went to work at 10 the next day.

The best part of the trip was really getting to spend some time with my mom – I don’t think we’ve ever spent so much time together just the two of us, and definitely not in recent years. It’s especially nice now that I live so far away.

The other thing that’s new is I have been learning how to ski – and by learning I mean I’ve been skiing twice this year and will hopefully go a few more times before the end of the season in New Zealand. Travis is a good skier and is teaching me – he is incredibly kind and patient, which is good because skiing is definitely not something that’s super easy for me.

The first time we went up, I started on the learners slope and learned how to turn and stop myself. By 11:30 we had done some runs down the easy runs and even a level up from easy, and everything was going well. We ate lunch, and after lunch we made the unfortunate decision to go all the way to the top and ski down. I say unfortunate because after lunch I completely forgot how to ski, and was now at the top of a very tall mountain. I couldn’t complete a turn without falling over, and the way down took us 1.5 hours and I fell probably well over 50 times. I also cried most of the way down, but we made it. The next day I was very bruised and sore.

The second time we went up, we went back to the learners slope and I relearned how to turn. We then went down the easy run, and I nearly had a panic attack even though I didn’t fall at all. I spent most of that day undoing to psychological damage the first time skiing had done to me, and was fairly comfortable on the easy run by the end, but unfortunately still terrified anytime the slope got slightly steep at all.

I haven’t really done anything in my life (besides driving) that involves hurtling down a hill at top speed, and so am terrified of losing control and hurting myself. It’s very important that I learn to ski though, since I will be doing a lot of it come December – I think I mentioned that Travis and I bought Ikon ski passes back in April. We have now also bought plane tickets to Rome in November (with a 2 day stopover in Singapore). Our plan is to work our way up through Italy, ski our way across the Alps, spend Christmas in Germany, New Years in Copenhagen, and then fly to California. From there we’ll do a counter-clockwise road trip through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, maybe a side trip to Texas, and then up through Wyoming and Montana, over to Washington, and then down through Oregon and back through California (or maybe we’ll go clockwise instead – we haven’t quite decided) . On the way we’ll visit friends and family, go skiing, and see a lot of the US that I actually have never seen. We’ll stop over in Hawaii on our way back to New Zealand in March, and then Travis will start his job in early April, and I will see what I do – find a job and maybe get a masters at some point.