June Gloom/Exams Over!!

Hey guys, its been awhile since I have posted anything and I apologize but I have been super busy. The last few weeks of school were super tough and it seems like the professors saved all the work for the end of the year (they always do that). Couple that with rugby and you get NO LIFE. Anyways, after lectures finished here we were given about 4 weeks that just consists of exams. Some people have all the exams in the first week, which really sucks, i'm glad I wasn't them. I had one exam early on and then 3 towards the end of the month. I also unfortunately developed a strong drug addiction......coffee. My 4 week exam period all meshed into one long day as soon as I took one swig of that venti brewed coffee. Sleep was not an option, coffee was. Anyways I think I did very good on all of my exams at the expense of any sleep. However, I am now making up for that time period by sleeping in to ridiculous hours and purposely trying to do as little as possible. I am succeeding. The last few days I have actiually gotten to do some local travel to some of the islands around Auckland. There are so many places to see that are nearby and easily accessible. Adventures are never far off and the areas around Auckland are fairly uncongestid. At the beginning of the year I went to the volcanic island of rangitoto which is a 30 minute ferry ride out of auckland. I went back there to go for a run around the island and took a different route than last time. The trail I took was supposed to stay next to the water but 1 hour later I ended up in like some jungle and pretty much couldn't see anything around me. Eventually the trail lead to a bay that provided some great scenery. However, the scenery was interupted by a pair of skinny dippers. Thought it was some species of albino seal at first.....then quickly realized it was not. Anyways thats about the time I decided I should get back on the trail and head back to the ferry. 2 days later I went to the island of Waiheke. Waiheke, unlike Rangitoto, has a few little towns and some very nice beaches. I went with a friend I met on the ferry ride back from Rangitoto and we decided to pretty much improvise the whole trip. When we got there, we originally planned to rent some bikes and ride around the island in order to get a work out while we experienced what the island had to offer. This was quickly shot down by a scottish dude that pointed out we were probably not in good enough shape to ride the bikes. Wow, pretty demeaning. Before we could even refute, the guy flagged someone down to take us to the scooter rental. This actually ended up being awesome. We rented 2 yellow scooters that were perfect for getting around the island. Although they could only go so fast, there was often a line of cars behind us probably pretty pissed off. Especially when going uphill. Scooters don't have much horsepower. Anyways, we had no idea where we were going and everytime we picked a place on the map to go, we would pretty much end up getting lost. We would just settle for wherever the road took us. By the way driving on the other side of the road is not as hard as it sounds. Anyways, we ended up finding some cool beaches and stopped at some nice viewpoints to take some pictures, I hope you guys enjoy them. I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling in the next few weeks so I will make sure to put a blog up at the end of my semester break. Hope everyone back home is doing well, definitely miss everybody. Hakuna Matata.