James Bond.

Happy New Year everybody! What have you been up to? Here's how we spent Christmas and New Year's, I know you've been anxious to know, losing sleep over it and chewing on pine needles just to calm down. On the 23rd we camped near a river, and swam and tubed and waded in it the next day and Christina also tried to pan for gold, but had no luck. We also skipped stones quite a bit. Do you also like skipping stones? I think it's really fun, but we also started playing this game where you have to pick a rock that's close to the water and hit it with a smaller rock, so that the rock you threw will bounce into the water. It's super-exciting. Then we went further up the northern coast of the South Island and drove through Nelson and found a nice place to camp close to the Abel Tasman National Park in Marahau. The next day we pretty much spent at the beach and then went on to explore the Northwest of the South Island, including Harwood's Hole, some cave with Moa bones in it, and all kinds of other cool stuff like Farewell Spit and the seals there. It was amazing.

Then it was getting really crowded for New Year's Eve, and we decided we needed to find a lonelier spot, which we found in the Cobb Valley in Kahurangi National Park. Well, actually, we spent it up near Lake Sylvester (all you Germans know why we picked this one), which you can reach from the Cobb Valley. It's a 2-hour walk that climbs about 450 metres, and puts you right by the bushline. The day before that we went to a different glacial lake and saw heaps of cool flowers. We went from beach to subalpine in just one day. Of course I'm also talking about flowers, so you decide how cool it really was.

Anyway, now we're chilling a bit and hope to start our job soon. And Snag, the apples are thinned by an experimental method carried over from the Middle Ages, which has music being played to the apples. Recent research suggests that the waves created by the music make all the difference. Of course the music was played by ensembles back then, but they use speakers today. However, the presence of humans seems essential in this method, so we have to act like we're playing instruments, which is cheaper than hiring real musicians.