Based on the success of my facebook applications Photo Competition and Digital Art Competition, I’ve decided to make the most of my fresh unemployment and work on the next evolution of these projects. It will be a standalone website called inspi.re.

You can follow my progress and get more information about what the project consists in on http://inspi.re/blog. I didn’t want to write these articles here because I think that the new project should have its own blog, which is currently intended at informing the existing users of my facebook applications about what’s coming. On the other hand, I’ll probably post related posts here whenever I stumble upon interesting findings that wouldn’t be interesting to my general userbase.

So I’m opening a new blog, but I’m also “closing” one. For those of you who also read my other blog Tripology, it has now merged with the one you’re currently reading, under the tripology category. I might do more Tripology updates in the future, but I felt it was unnecessary to keep it separated. This blog isn’t really focused on any particular topic anyway.

New-Zealand is a country really focused on crafts and on the West coast of the South island there wouldn’t be a small city without at least one shop selling jade carvings or a workshop making some. We found out that someone would let us make our own carving and we liked the idea much better than buying a standard necklace from a shop.

Gordon welcomed us in his house/hostel/workshop and let us design the carving we were about to make. Once the design decided we headed to the workshop where we watched him to the heavy work of the carving (it’s not like we would operate these machines ourselves). It was very cool to watch him do his job and he wasn’t bad at it, which is quite understandable given that the started working jade in a factory when he was 16.

Then started the real work for us, polishing. Sand paper after sand paper I’m sure we spent well over an hour, if not two, working on the jade to make it smoother and smoother. Although my inner lazy self thought it was pretty smooth to start with, the difference at the end was tremendous. Well worth the effort of going through all these sheets of sandpaper.

A final touch, and voila! An all jewelled-up Antje ready to go.

So we decided to go to a well-known forest walk in the area, that’s something quite common on the West coast, there are signs all along the roads pointing out walks to do and their duration. This one was not quite on a main road, we had to drive for a while on a gravel road before we got there. Welcomed by empty shells and touristic information crippled by holes (hunters probably saw the drawing of some bird on the poster :)), we headed into the forest.

The first thing that made this walk tricky was that it had rained a lot the previous days, turning the paths into small streams (see above). It was extremely wet and the trees were dripping with water, despite the fact that it stopped raining several hours earlier.

The major attraction of that walk was that we had to go through tunnels. These very narrow passages were made during the gold rush era and they really didn’t look like a nice place to work. Especially if these poor guys had to work in there at that time of the year!

The bridge below looked very stable when I took the picture below, but as soon as we started walking on it we got a shock when the whole thing started to swing up and down heavily. You can probably tell by the cables, it was a suspended bridge. Needless to say, not the best place to set a tripod onto, so you’ll be missing out on the view we got from it.