I'm irreverant!

So, last Wednesday was ANZAC day. It's like a Kiwi/Aussie memorial day. What this means, effectively, is that the day before (Tuesday) everybody gets really, really drunk because they don't have to go to school the next day. I find that somewhat irreverent, so I don't feel too very bad that I spent the day losing another one of my rock-climbing virginities.

I went bouldering, on real boulders, outside, for the first time. I had learned about it the night before when I went and visited the climbing wall and everybody asked me if I was coming on a trip that I'd heard nothing about. Naturally, I used my silver tongue to talk them into letting me come. And I'm glad I did, because it was pretty awesome.

The area that we went bouldering was about an hour drive out of Palmerston North on privately owned farmland. Luckily, the first time that Matt Natti (the main climbing dude) attempted to go climbing there, he bribed the owner of the place with bottles of really nice wine, and was then invited to come climbing there any time he wanted to from there on out. They also told him to bring as many people climbing as he wanted to, hence our trip. Thus we struck out at 11:00 AM ( it was going to be an hour earlier, but everybody else was still too hungover to climb)

and arrived at our boulders at noon. The area was beautiful, some lone rocks atop a hill overlooking New Zealand's countryside:



There are a few things that differentiate bouldering from top-roping: first, the height, and thus length, of the climb tends to be a lot less. You would think that this would reduce the chance for injuries, but no, it doesn't, it only means that when you fall from any height, there's nothing but pads below to stop you from cracking your skull open. So the second difference is that you tend to get more, if less fatal, injuries while bouldering. Difference three, you have to clean the boulders that you want to climb, especially if you're climbing on private, non-regulated land. So before we climbed we had to scrub off the moss on the rock with scrub brushes. Not really hard or irritating, merely time consuming. Lastly, since the routes are naturally smaller, you tend to spend more time figuring out how to do a specific move than you ordinarily would. Of course, the routes are only smaller in a general fashion. This boulder, for example, is much, much larger than a bouldering route should be. The climb's not hard, really just a v-0 bordering on v-1 at the top, but there's a psychological barrier that has to get over. The oh-mi-god-this-is-really-really-high-off-of-the-ground-a-fall's-really-going-to-hurt barrier. I did do the climb, and let me tell you, by the time I got to the top, I was shaking, and not from physical exertion.


That was the most major climb that I did all day, and it was really just a fun day. We stopped climbing when the sun started to go down,

but I think some people would have brought torches and climbed all night too if we hadn't forced 'em off the walls. Monkeys. We had dinner at an awesome Turkish kebab joint, drove back to Palmy, and I just crashed. Really, sleep came when my head touched the pillow.