Some photos from the West Coast

When we left Mapua and went down the west
coast, our first stop was Punakaiki, where we
saw the famous Pancake Rocks. Let's see if I
can get the photo of the rocks up here next to
the text, hmmm....The photo is low resolution
and you can't really see how strange and
wonderful the rocks are, but oh well.


Okay, that worked. The next photo is one everyone takes--if the weather is clear. Near the town of Fox Glacier is a lovely little lake, Lake Matheson, and it serves as a mirror for Mounts Tasman and Cook/Aoraki (highest mountain in the country, a bit over 12,000 feet). It was a lovely sunny morning and we went for breakfast to a cafe with clear mountain views that is near the lake, had the place to ourselves for a half hour or so eating our kiwi breakfast and drinking a flat white, then walked around the lake. Soon we were joined by a busload of Japanese tourists in dress-up clothes. They were in a rush, we meandered along the path and took a lot of photos of the lake--and a couple photos of them as well. It's about an hour's walk around the lake, but we stopped often. As we finally finished our circumambulation, we saw a tomtit for the first time, very small flycatcher with a black head like our phoebe, quite a bit smaller though. Birds seem to come much closer to us here, don't have the fear of predators that birds in our environment do. Trouble is that now there ARE predators here, introduced by people.


We went to see the Fox Glacier later in the morning. We had heard something about NZ glaciers advancing recently, but clearly they are overall receding. There were markers along the road showing where the terminal face of the glacier was in 1780, 1850, 1930, etc, and it was WAYY further downstream than now, miles. Lots of big seracs on this glacier, because of the shape of the underlying rock and the steep, curvy canyon it comes down. The Franz Josef, a bit north, is more smooth on top as a result of being in a wider canyon. If you've never seen a glacier, these are definitely interesting. I was more interested in the red lichen growing on the boulders and the waterfalls coming down through the rainforest in the approach to the ice face.



The lower photo has John really out of focus but it gives you and idea of the wealth of plants that exist in the
coastal rainforest. So many mosses, lichens,
liverworts, ferns, epiphytes, fungi and slime molds,
everywhere, covering all the rocks and all the tree
trunks. And that's it for now. Sorry all the photos are
on the same side of the page.

A few photos from our stay in Mapua, near Nelson, Nov. 12-14

These photos are from our stay in Mapua, at a lovely spot on an estuary, in an old apple pickers' cottage. The reflections are in the mud of the estuary at low tide. The birds are pukeko, the funny rail that you see everywhere along the roads in the North Island and in farming country in the South. They have red beaks and a silly gait, probably members of the Ministry of Silly Walks.

We loved the reflections in the mud of estuaries, and it's something we've seen many places in this country with hundreds of bays and estuaries that empty at low tide.


The truck below was the living space for one of the women living on the property. The inside was all panelled in wood and took us right back to the 60s. The woman Lisa had given up a job in the recording industry in Wellington to grow organic grapes and other produce, raise a few sheep and keep chickens. The other woman, Elspeth, is the daughter of the original owners. Only a few apple trees remained. It's a lovely spot for a relaxing stay, especially for birders!








The lower photo is of the road leading in to the property off the highway. It was just as idyllic as it looks. Lots of kayaking in the estuary when the tide is in. Otherwise, only birds ventured in.


We spent three nights at the cottage here, could have stayed much longer. I think we'll be back one day.

The biggest kauri tree we saw, Puketi Forest

Using Firefox to upload images seems to work. Very slow connection though, so probably won't have time to load many. I'll do more when we get home.

This was the biggest Kauri around where we were, truly a wonder. On this very misty day I shot straight up the trunk.
The tree was estimated to be 2500 years old. Trunk was at least 6 feet in diameter. Driving to this forest reserve not far from the Bay of Islands, the fog was so thick we couldn't see more than ten feet ahead. Narrow graded gravel road. It was spooky and romantic in the forest with the water dripping and the birds singing musically. Being in the presence of the trees made my heart beat hard. This was taken November 5th.

Kauris are in the araucaria family, ancient conifers that evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. For those who know the Bunya-Bunya and Monkey Puzzles, it's the same family. Kauris are very different in form from them. They grow straight and tall for about 300 years (!!) and then begin to branch, getting a rounded crown at the top. Kind of reminded me of our redwoods. There are almost no kauri forests left, just like the redwoods. Young ones were used for ship masts, and big ones like this could provide enough lumber to build several houses....And they used to gather the resin, the sap--it was called kauri gum. Used it in varnishes, etc. It's like amber.

I think kauris only grow on the North Island, could be wrong though!

Trouble with photos....

Well, I have been trying without success to upload photos to the blog. I think I'll create a photo album on one of the free photo sharing sites and then just put a link to it here. In the meantime imagine huge trees, beautiful coastline, glaciers, birds you've never seen, etc. And if anyone has experience uploading photos to blogger.com, feel free to chime in with advice....

A little more about Doubtful Sound and the Catlins

Our day trip to Doubtful Sound was like being in an altered state. Start to finish, beginning with a boat ride across Lake Manapouri, then a bus ride and a visit to an amazing underground hydroelectric station, then on to a great boat built specially for fiord sightseeing, and one waterfall after another, one incredible view after another, one glacial valley after another, for hours. Saw penguins, too. The skipper was so skilled, getting us very close to the islands at the mouth of the sound even though there were big swells and lots of wind, so we could see the penguins and seals—fur seals. It was blustery and rainy and misty and then on the way back across Lake Manapouri, the final stage of the trip, the sun broke through and we had about an hour on the top deck getting a sunburn and oohing and aahing over the mountains some more. The sun is sooo intense here. If I leave my sunglasses off for fifteen minutes when it’s sunny, I start to get a headache. Need a hat, too, or I can feel it boring into my forehead, frying my brains—even if the temperature is cool, 60s or so.

I still get disoriented all the time, have to re-teach myself the directions many times a day (“okay, sun coming from behind over my right shoulder, it’s 6pm, must be facing south”, etc.) In the absence of obvious landmarks (like the Southern Ocean, which we stared at for a while yesterday afternoon), I find I am often turned around, because some instinctual sense of the sun always being in the southern half of the sky is completely turned on its head! It was so strange to be facing south looking at the ocean and have the sun be behind my back.

Yesterday we drove from Te Anau to Invercargill (not a place you want to stop, except to buy groceries or gas) and then on to the Catlins, an area along the south coast that is so pastoral, rolling green with sheep and cattle, lots of little streams, remnants of native forest and some tree plantation, old houses, lots of corrugated metal and decomposing wood, and wide white beaches pounded by waves. Went to the almost southernmost point in the country, Waipapa Point, and
the wind must have been blowing 60mph. It was freezing. We spent the night at a motel in Papatowai, with a view of a gas pump—it was also a gas station and store. Today we are further east, on the Pacific side again, in a tiny town called Kaka Point with two big beaches separated by a rocky point.

There are many tidal estuaries that turn into mudflats at low tide, many many birds—herons and spoonbills and oystercatchers and stilts and gulls and terns and land birds too. We ate dinner last night (ham sandwiches and a bottle of Marlborough wine) in our car parked next to an estuary, watching two royal spoonbills and a white-faced heron among other birds poking about in the mud. The wind was so fierce we had to be careful with the car doors so they didn’t blow right off the hinges. Today it’s cool and breezy with big puffy clouds rolling by, and we took a long beach walk and later are going to visit a hide down the coast a few miles where you can spy on yellow-eyed penguins coming ashore a couple hours before sunset. That is, around 7:30….

It’s light until 10PM here, and still almost four weeks before the solstice. And the sun is up at 5:30 or so. I loooovvvve these long days, they feel so luxurious, as if there is plenty of time for everything you might want to do.

The Catlins, 11/25-11/28

The Catlins

We thought we weren’t going to have time to come to the Catlins, a relatively “undiscovered” part of NZ, on the south coast east from Invercargill and then up the east coast as far as Balclutha. I had read a lot about the area on the web and really wanted to come here, but it didn’t seem feasible as the trip progressed and we began to realize how short a time six weeks really is. But then on Sunday in Te Anau it was clear that it was going to be a very cold, rainy day, so instead of going back to Milford Sound as we’d planned we decided to head south and east, for the Catlins. It was blowing a gale, literally—gusts up to 100km/hr, enough to almost knock us off our feet. It rained intermittently, but the wind kept blowing the clouds away, and the sunlight on the wet pasture and forest was brilliant, hard to look at without shading our eyes.

The Catlins landscape is mostly rolling hills with small stands of native beech and podocarp forest interspersed with sheep pasture (of course). Lots of big tidal estuaries that penetrate a mile or two inland from the coast. Fierce surf at the ocean coast. We drove to Waipapa Point, almost the southernmost point in NZ, and the wind off the Southern Ocean (nothing between us and Antarctica) was frigid. The ocean color was still a friendly-looking blue-green, but the surf was big, pounding the beaches and headlands, and cold. Saw NZ sea lions, very similar to the Cal. variety as far as we could see.

Ended up staying in a motelin Papatowai that was part of a gas station and local general store, with a little studio unit facing the gas pump (motel units in NZ are about 80% “self-catering”, meaning they have full cooking facilities and fridges. Even if they don’t have cooking facilities, they almost always have a fridge, an electric kettle, and even a microwave.) The place closed soon after we arrived, but people kept arriving hoping for gas (not a lot of gas in small NZ towns, wise to buy a tank when you can, sort of like Baja) and it was partly funny, partly really annoying, having them right in our front yard, looking in our windows thinking we were the proprietors, hoping for some gas. So we made some ham sandwiches and drove about a mile to an estuary with a parking area with a great view, and ate them and drank a bottle of wine and watched birds in the estuary. Spent a long time tracking two royal spoonbills as they crisscrossed the mud flats (tide was out), as well as black oystercatchers, pied oystercatchers, NZ whitefaced heron, gulls, terns, etc. There are so many wonderful birds in NZ.

The next day we drove on to Kaka Point, where we are now. We’re staying in a motel with a wonderful view of the ocean at the top of a street that runs straight uphill from the beach. Kaka Point is a village on the Pacific coast with two beautiful beaches, no shops, and one bad bar/restaurant a few miles north of a place called Nugget Point where there are nesting yellow-eyed penguins. We went out to see the penguins last night. There is a hide where you can watch them without disturbing them. Of course we fell right in love. Probably it’s because they walk upright with their little wings akimbo that we identify with them so easily. The way they waddle with their toes turned out, that engaging “duckwalk” , and then when they come to an obstacle they hop, and you can see them making an effort, gathering themselves for the hop, exactly like the penguins in “Happy Feet”, if you’ve seen that. I didn’t realize they were as charming in real life as in a cartoon movie, but believe me, they are. They nest in thick brush, often in stands of flax, which is everywhere near the coast here. We could watch them hopping carefully uphill until they were lost in the bush.

Then we walked to the lighthouse at Nugget Point, on a narrow spit. There are large rocky islets beyond the point where fur seals and sea lions hang out, and where shearwaters nest. We saw many seabirds. Wonderful path to the lighthouse, along a ridgetop about five feet wide with cliffs and rocky bays on either side. I couldn’t look down without getting vertigo, had to stare ahead at the path. Got some good photos, hoping to upload some soon. I know I keep saying that—been having a tough time getting online with our own computer, so it has been next to impossible to upload anything to the blog for a couple of weeks.

Today we did some sightseeing, went to Curio Bay back on the Southern Ocean coast where there is a petrified forest embedded in the rocks, revealed at low tide. Took lots of photos, and as we were exploring the tidepools/petrified trees, we suddenly saw a pair of yellow-eyed penguins come ashore on the rocks. We watched them from afar for a long time, staying quite still, and they kept coming closer and closer to us, much closer than last night. Then other people noticed them and began to try to get close to photograph them. We got quite protective and kept signaling and finally shouting to people to stay back. The penguins are very shy of people. It’s hard to remember that their only mode of escape on land is to waddle, and if their preferred route to approach the sea is blocked, they might jump in where it is dangerous for them, just to get away from us. These yellow-eyed guys are about two feet tall standing up—they are the third-largest penguins. Emperors and fiordland crested are bigger. We heard later today that there are only about 500 nesting pairs of yellow-eyed in the wild. They are trying to create a reserve for them here at Kaka Point, but the local abalone (paua) fishermen are against it, unsurprisingly, and it looks like it won’t be successful. There are other reserves for them, and a captive breeding program.

This afternoon (Tuesday the 28th in NZ) John and I decided to institute a fine system for occurrences of “oh my god, this is so beautiful” and similar statements, which have become well over half of our daily conversation. Twenty cents for each infraction. It’s kind of unbelievable how gorgeous it is here. John keeps saying they have more than their share of beauty, and then we have an argument about comparing places and how anyone could determine what the proper “share” of beauty is for any one place, and what beauty is, anyway. We end up pretty philosophical usually, and mostly it comes round to the dharma.

It’s nine o’clock now, still plenty of light out, even though we’re facing east and can’t see the sun. Tomorrow on to Dunedin and I am hopeful we’ll have a place with an internet connection so I can upload all these blog posts (and photos) and also some emails and check in with some of the news from home. We only have two and a half more weeks here, can’t believe it has gone so fast. We will surely be back, god willing. There is so much to love here.

Dec 6, just added some photos to this entry--Nugget Point lighthouse, the view of the rocks from the lighthouse, a view of coastal rainforest at Curio Bay, where we saw the penguins, and a black oystercatcher--we see them at home, too, but they nest here, saw lots of nesting activity.

Southern Lakes and Fiordland, 11/17-11/25

Southern Lakes, Southern Alps

“Oh my god.” Must have said that about ten thousand times in the past week. We drove from Wanaka, where we had spent three beautiful days and taken a great day hike to the top of a little bump with views over the whole lake and quite a bit of Mt. Aspiring National Park, through Queenstown (which is like Mammoth Lakes Village on steroids) 45 km west to the tiny town of Glenorchy at the head of Lake Wakapitu, where the Routebourn, Caples, and Greenstone tracks all have their eastern ends. These “Southern Lakes” are all glacial lakes, some of them very deep (bottoms below sea level). They are surrounded by steep mountains in classic U-shaped glacial form, all crowned with snow and some with glaciers. Glenorchy is stunningly situated at the head of the lake, where two big rivers, the Dart and the Rees, flow into it. We stayed two nights there—wish we could have self-catered, as the one good eating place is closed for dinner except in high summer, January and February. There was a slightly strange vibe in Glenorchy, as though there was a skeleton in someone's closet that no one wanted revealed.

The beginning of those three famous hiking routes is on the west side of both the rivers I mentioned a bit north of Glenorchy. We took a long day hike near the start of the Routeburn, got our first taste of sandflies—or actually they got their first taste of us. We were in beech forest, mostly red beech. Beech trees in NZ are nothing like what we think of as beech in the No. hemisphere. Their leaves are very small mostly, the biggest about an inch long, most about ¼ -1/3 of an inch. Branches are horizontal, trunks very straight and tall. Red beech and mountain beech have huge trunks, up to 4 or 5 feet in diameter. They are not deciduous—there is only one deciduous tree native to NZ, and now I’ve forgotten its name….ribbon wood? There are five varieties of beeches, mostly growing in the west of the South Island. I have come to be very fond of them and will miss them when we leave here. I've tried to photograph innumerable ones, never feeling I've captured their grace and presence.

Our hike was on a very windy day and we saw several huge trees--100 feet tall or more, trunks four feet thick--that had fallen right smack over in the past few weeks (leaves on the fallen tree still green) so it felt a bit dicey hiking through them, hearing all this creaking and clacking as the upper branches would bang together with others. They have quite shallow root systems for such huge and heavy trees, so falling over is not an uncommon way for them to go. The oldest around seem to be around 4-500 years. Then they just get too big and fall over, if they haven’t been killed by disease or logged by then.

After Glenorchy we drove to Te Anau, the town on the lake of the same name, another huge glacial lake, which is where most people base themselves for trips into Fiordland. We were hoping to stay at Milford Lodge at Milford Sound, but it was all booked up til the end of the month. It’s the only place to stay at the Sound unless you’ve come off a guided walk on the Milford Track, in which case you spend the first night off the trail at a motel-type lodge right there at the end of the road. Only people on commercial tramps can stay there, not “freedom” walkers. Something I found interesting is that the quota for the trek is 48 commercially guided walkers and 40 independent walkers each day during the season. Commercial trips cost $1750 NZ (about $1275 US today). Seems a little out of balance to me, since most kiwis would not be able to afford the commercial trips. You have to reserve months in advance if you want to do it independently.

That night we did stay part-way to the Sound about 60K along on the Milford Road, at a place called Knob Flat in the Edlington River Valley. There’s a fellow (PC, his name is) who used to work for the DOC (Dept of Conservation—should be Conversation, these DOC people like to TALK--as a matter fact, it is a rare Kiwi we have met who isn't ready to talk your socks off), who got a concession to build some tourist units there, and they are almost new, with little kitchens and great views of the other side of the river valley, big waterfalls coming down off the mountains. The units are in a clearing, surrounded by beech forest. I love these beech forests more and more, keep taking photos but so far not succeeding in catching the elegance. (Kicking myself daily for not bringing my SLR camera, just have a little tiny Canon digital.) The red beech get very open, horizontal branch structure as they get older, look like trees in Chinese paintings, many horizontal planes with much space between, soft green lacy foliage, and those elephantine trunks. There’s an unmanned DOC info center at Knob Flat, and the only phone between Te Anau and Milford Sound. If the roads are too dangerous (icy), you can leave your car there and the bus will stop and pick you up to take you the rest of the way. That’s what the phone is for.

I saw a Morepork—NZ’s one owl, a fairly small one, about pigeon sized—just before dark that evening. It flew out from around the side of the little cabin and into a beech tree about forty yards away. Then in the night I got up to pee and I saw an owl fly up from a little wall about six feet from our window and then come back. I got the binoculars out and could sort of make out the face--it was almost full moon, a bright night. Probably the same bird I’d seen earlier. The next morning I saw my first NZ falcon—looks like a kestrel, pretty much—on a rock. It was the first time I had seen a hawk roosting anywhere. Up until then I had only seen the Australian harrier—twice as big as the NZ falcon. And it has always been in the air, often being chased by Australian magpies or gulls.

*******
Milford Sound, November 23

Okay, I cried. You know how the first time you drive through Zion you can’t stop saying “wow”? Well, it was a day like that. And it was raining and misty, visibility definitely poor! The last twenty miles of the Milford Road are astonishingly beautiful, awe-inspiring. The most perfect example of glacial valleys I’ve ever seen, perfectly U-shaped, thousands of feet deep, and soooo naked, rock rock rock, with water pouring off, a waterfall coming down a couple thousand feet of rock every 40 yards or so. Hanging valleys off the sides of the major cirques, huge themselves. Rivers the bluest-greenest you would ever want to see, tumbling around huge blocks of rock. Gneiss and schist mostly, I think. Then you arrive at the Sound and there is Mitre Peak in front of you, just like the photos. It was raining pretty hard but we hung around on the end of the jetty and just stared at the water and the beech forest—and the boats, boats going out constantly for tours of the Sound. We were going on a Doubtful Sound tour the next day so decided not to do a cruise on the Milford. There used to be a waterfall walk right from the end of the Sound but they’ve closed it because of landslide danger. Not much else to do at the Sound itself if you aren’t going out on a boat. They don’t have a DOC visitor center or any exhibits, just a big fancy building for the boat tour operators and a café and bar. (The interaction between government and commercial businesses seems very different—DOC offices are full of brochures for the various guiding and activity companies, motels, etc. No sense of “official” vs. “promotional”. It takes some getting used to. At first I had the sense the gov’t was endorsing these particular operations, but they don’t discriminate, everyone with a little tour bus can get their brochures in the slots.) We had coffee (two flat whites), hung around hoping for a break in the rain so we could see a bit more, and then drove back to Te Anau. The return drive was just as amazing, all those waterfalls again, all that rock. It is such a place.

From three on Thursday afternoon until 4pm Friday we were in Fiordland National Park and it was the first 24 hours since arriving in NZ in which I have not seen thousands of sheep. Really!

***
Doubtful Sound, November 24

More tears. Even just recalling the day, tears start to come. I am so grateful these places exist, so grateful to be able to see them. It makes me deeply happy to know they are here. I must have taken a hundred photos on the trip to Doubtful, but none of them captured the mysterious, primordial beauty of it. More perfect U-shaped glacial valleys, more exquisite beech forests clinging to the steep mountainsides, more snow hanging over the whole. The water of the sound looks black because there is so much fresh water flowing into the sound that it forms a layer 30 meters thick on top of the seawater, and it doesn’t reflect the light the way the seawater does, it is brown-tinted from all the organic material it flows through on the way to the sea. It rained almost the whole time we were out on the water—about three hours on the Sound. Really of course it’s a fiord, not a sound at all, created by glacial action, not by the flow of a river, though many watercourses flow into it. We must have seen a thousand waterfalls during the day, many of them 1000 feet or more in height, with several levels. If I had seen even one of them on any mountain wilderness trip I have ever been on, from the Sierras to the Alps to the Canadian Rockies to the North Cascades, I would have thought myself very very ucky. As it was, it was almost too much, like being forcefed! So many lacy white ones flowing over wide walls covered with mosses and ferns, so many in deep clefts in the steep rock walls, so many variations on different surfaces. Again and again I pointed up and John looked and nodded, all day long.

The soil on the sides of the fiords is very thin, only a few feet thick over the bedrock, and when the forest trees reach a certain size, there are tree avalanches, and all the vegetation plunges into the water. We saw many of these, the most recent only a few weeks old. Afterward, mosses and lichens and liverworts begin to colonize the rock, and then eventually small flowering plants and ferns and then trees as soil slowly forms, and then after the trees become too heavy for their shallow roots to anchor them on the steep slopes again there will be an avalanche of vegetation. The sea creatures have adapted, and some even eat the fallen trees in the water.

We saw Fiordland crested penguins—our first penguins in the wild. They were, of course, adorable—waddling up and down very steep glacier-polished rock on their little islands. They are endangered and only come to land on a couple of islands at the mouth of Doubtful Sound, and we were lucky to see as many as we did—probably 20. The boat that does the trips is very comfortable and the skipper got us up close to the islands and the fiord walls so that we could see many things, birds, plants, seals, waterfalls. At one point he turned off the engines and we drifted in silence for a few minutes, and we could hear the bellbirds and others in the forest. That was my favorite part of the trip.

We left Fiordland this morning, Sunday the 25th. It was very hard to leave, and I think it has been the place that has made us most sure we will make the effort to come back to NZ again. For me, it was like our raft trip in the Grand Canyon—I feel that to have been gifted with the experience of it has changed me, taught me something about reality, about interconnectedness, about beauty, that is hard to describe but deeply felt. I feel strengthened and humbled at the same time, and I honor these places in my heart.

The West Coast, Nov. 15-17

We left Mapua on Thursday the 15th for the west coast. Hard to leave Mapua, it was so peaceful and lovely. That's been a theme, hard to leave each area since then. It was a beautiful drive through farmland and small river valleys, past sheep and cattle and deer and over little mountain passes. Much of the land that is not agricultural is planted in evergreen plantations—and the most common tree is Monterey pine. It grows very well here, reaching maturity in 30 years or so. We saw massive tree plantations and massive clearcuts everywhere from Northland on the North Island to the west coast of the South Island. Big northern hemisphere conifers in straight rows, mile after mile, mountain after mountain, interspersed with clearcuts, piles of logging leftovers (what is the word for all those limbs they leave behind in big piles?). The tree plantations were kind of getting me down. I kept thinking of all the native forest that must have been cleared to make way for all the trees in rows. From across a valley it looks like the mountainsides have been wet-combed with a very wide toothed comb. After seeing this for ten days or so we finally asked a ranger what was up with all the timber, and she told us that it was mostly planted in the 70’s, when NZ went through a terrible financial depression as a result of its main export market, England, joining the European Common Market and thus no longer buying much from the kiwis. It was a terrible time in NZ. They thought lumber would be an answer. But now, the ranger told us, the timber market is not profitable—it costs more to harvest the trees than they are worth. So they are stuck with huge tracts of non-native forest, trees in rows all the same height and the same color. In places on the way to the coast there was National Park on one side of the road, with a huge variety of forms and colors and textures and sizes of plants, and then on the other these rows of Monterey pines and other northern hemisphere pines, with lots of broom and other opportunists in the understory.

When we got to the coast, though, native beech rainforest prevailed. Incredible forest, windblown and ragged in places, lush and impenetrable in others. So many ferns again, so many mosses. Huge trees with creepers growing on them with stems 8-10 inches thick, trees with no limbs at all below 30 or 40 feet from the ground, but with a coating of other plants growing all over them like a big sweater. Podocarps, beeches, many broadleaf trees—and none of them deciduous. Epiphytic orchids growing on them, liverworts and mosses and classes of plants I am completely unfamiliar with, so many shades of green, impossible! Suddenly everything looked like a scene from The Lord of the Rings.

The rock formation at Punakaiki, Pancake Rocks, is so much more dramatic and interesting than any of the photos I had seen of it. It’s limestone, and they aren’t quite sure what caused it to separate into very equal layers with a very thin layer of something different between (like syrup between pancake layers). The consensus is that the thinner layers precipitated out for some reason. But in any case, the effect is lovely, layers upon layers of limestone about three inches thick. I took a gazillion photos.

Backtracking to Wellington

Hmmm, here we are in Wellington (this was written Nov. 8, sorry it’s out of order here), enjoying it very much after only five hours or so in town, three of them at the national museum, Te Papa, learning a bit more about the Maori and the English. Everywhere we have been up til now there is a kind of lip service paid to the “dual” history of the country, but a cloudy vagueness about the details of the history has been part of that. Te Papa seems to address it more directly, and it’s been very interesting to us, quite moving, compelling. I hope to write more about all that as time goes on.

Wellington is reminiscent of San Francisco—built around a huge bay, lots of hills, lots of distinct neighborhoods, sophisticated feeling, cafes, restaurants, culture, boats, big shipping port, a kind of self-aware style. Many people wearing black—haven’t seen that anywhere else. There are many wooden Victorian houses with pretty little gardens—kiwis for the most part live in houses, not apartments, even in cities, though I understand that is changing somewhat. But the residential areas seem to still be mostly houses, except right down in the downtown-est part of the city, Of course this is the capitol, so there’s all the government stuff, too, lots of people in suits with briefcases, lots of public buildings.

Right on the waterfront near the national museum is a skateboard park with several concrete half-pipes and some artwork that looks like permanent graffiti. There’s a very cosmopolitan feeling. We’ve seen skateboard parks and skateboarders in most towns we’ve been through with more than a few thousand people.

Auckland had a very different feel from Wellington, many big buildings and several freeways right through town, some interesting neighborhoods but a lot of sprawl—suburbs for miles in all directions--and a lot of very ugly buildings. People have consistently steered us away from spending time there, even though about a quarter of the population of the whole country lives there. Most people, when we ask about Auckland, say, “It’s a city” as if that says it all.

Ugly commercial architecture is one theme of this trip so far. Commercial districts of most towns and of Auckland as well are a hodgepodge of colors and styles, reminiscent of the high streets of English “new towns”—lots of plastic signs and gaudy advertising, big signs in shop windows with plenty of exclamation points. That’s been surprising, don’t know why—I guess with all the natural beauty I thought people would insist on good city planning, have more interest in the aesthetic design of the towns. Wellie is prettier but has many streets with similar shopfronts, as if they are competing for your attention by trying to be the brightest, most colorful, with the biggest lettering on their signs.

(Addendum: We had two lovely dinners in Wellington, one sort of French bistro fare, the other very “California”—plenty of good food in Wellie. Stayed in a great little motel very near Oriental Bay—the Apollo Lodge. Had a full kitchen so were able to make our breakfasts and lunches and get a little more fruit and veggies than are on offer in most cafes. We had a lovely day at the Wellington Botanical garden, finally started to learn some of the trees and other plants. The roses there were in their very first flush, covered with buds, mostly not even blooming yet. Rhododendron in a riot—that’s true everywhere so far. It’s very pretty, Wellington. Took the Bluebridge ferry across the Cook Strait to the South Island on Saturday the 10th. It was cloudy and rainy all the way across, hope it will be clearer when we return to the North Island next month. Marlborough Sounds very beautiful, reminiscent of the San Juans and Canadian Channel Islands up there, except for the huge tree ferns everywhere!)

We are loving Mapua

Three days in a little "bach"--a vacation cottage, formerly housing for apple-pickers in the orchards on the property (now mostly replaced by vineyard). (It's called Miro cottage, google it.) We are right on the shore of the Waimea estuary, a little west of Nelson on the north coast of the south island. It's so beautiful, cloudscape as well as land- and water-scape. Tides on this coast are huge--three meters this week, more during full and dark moons--and where we are the estuary is only about three feet deep even at high tide, so it's empty at every low tide, and the mud glistens in the sun (yes, it is finally sunny). There are wading birds--New Zealand white-faced herons, which are smaller than great blues but majestic, pukeko which are also known as purple rails, a very humorous bird that never stops talking (all night long), godwits and others. And when the tide comes in there are terns that fly over and dive and catch little fish, and shags--cormorants. They have about 20 kinds of shags, many that are bicolored and more glamorous than the cormorants we're used to seeing.

And all around the cottage there are other birds, mostly natives that I have never seen before. Little birds with very long tails (fernbirds) and little birds with very big voices (bellbirds) and the tui, a lovely big blackish bird with a white fringe at the neck and the most beautiful song, a series of clear bell-like notes (not to be confused with the aforementioned bellbird). Little green silvereyes, NZ blackbirds, NZ song thrushes, several others. All these and more are just outside, in the bushes and on the grass. And more of those pukeko which are very common here. At one point today there were six different species of bird in the garden, and I was searching them online, trying to figure out which one was singing that beautiful song (it was the tui).

Yesterday we hiked a long way (about 11 miles) on the coastal path in Abel Tasman Nat. Park. Golden sand beaches, clear blue-green water, and rainforest--dozens of varieties of ferns, both tree ferns and smaller ones, some just one single little stem unfurling a little leaf at the end. Vines growing up the tree ferns with tiny little leaves like maidenhair ferns. Silver beech trees with horizontal limbs like in Chinese paintings, very soft looking. Many different podocarps, some 100 feet tall, most 10-20, with many leaf shapes. Araucarias (think monkey puzzle or bunya-bunya), some so soft they felt like ferns themselves. So much green stuff, so much dead stuff, too. I think it never occurred to me before that there would be so much dead vegetation in rainforest, what WAS I thinking? Mosses and fungi--even slime molds. Many of the plants in spots looked burned and it took a while to figure out that actually they are covered by a fungus--turns out to be sooty mildew, which might be familiar to us from the black sooty mold that was growing on the eucalyptus trees that were attacked by that lerp insect. Same kind of process going on here, but it's all part of the normal ecosystem in the bush. I kept noticing a sweetish, winey smell in the black areas of bush, and it was the honeydew from the insects, which is what the mildew grows on. During the summer apparently the silver beech, which are often covered with this black mildew, are also covered by wasps drinking it. They create a bit of a hazard for hikers. Towards the end of the hike (near the park boundary) we started to see many young Monterey pines. More about them later.

We saw lots of backpackers (trampers, that is) on the trail (track), and I was struck by how many of them were young women. "Big girls," John called them--he keeps commenting on how healthy the girls look. Strong and muscular and lovely to see out there on their own. Late teens to early twenties. Girls seem very independent and "equal" here. And probably it is not a coincidence that almost the entire national cabinet is women! This was the first country in the world where women won the vote. Also the first country to establish a state old-age pension, and the first country to develop a national health plan and what we think of as welfare--aid to poor people. We haven't seen a single homeless person, though there must be some. There is poverty, of course, especially among the Maori, but it doesn't look like there is squalor. We did hear that 3000 kiwis a month are moving to Australia because of the cost of food. And believe me, it is costly! Most food items seem to cost about 1.5-2 times what they do in the US, some other things much more than that. Chapstick? $6NZ. Shoes! Deb better take note--I saw some very simple casual leather shoes today (you would have loved them, French and stylish)--for $459. Just flat go-to-the-market shoes, nothing dressy. Paperback books for double the publisher's price listed on the back of the book. Haven't seen a paperback novel for less than $25. (I did pop for a couple slim field guides today, couldn't resist, the desire to KNOW, you know...) The minimum wage is around $10/hr.

Okay, time to take a shower and get ready for dinner--we're barbecuing NZ salmon and having local veggies and wine. Sun comes up at 6 and it doesn't get dark until almost 9, even though it's still five weeks until the solstice. The sky right now is blue and the wind is blowing fiercely, but it doesn't stop the birds singing. Tomorrow we leave this place, where we're also surrounded by lambs and chickens and apple trees and artichokes, for the west coast, where they say it "always" rains. We've had two days of sunshine so it's kind of hard to leave. So far, this area is our favorite by a long way. But there's so much more!

We'll get some photos up soon, the birds especially if I can get close enough to make one distinguishable from another.

When your chicken is completed...

Wow, third night in the country and it already feels like weeks, so many experiences, so many thoughts.

I was thinking the day we arrived of the way a dog's sense of smell is so much more sensitive than ours--I read somewhere that a dog can smell just a few molecules of a substance that happens to float by its nose--and feeling as though something similar was going on in my mind. There seemed to be a million different perceptions, and the awareness of them, all being known at once. I don't know if dogs go the next step and place all their olfactory sensations in a context of already-known smells, comparing and making assumptions and predicting. But I could feel myself trying to do that.

New Zealand! I stepped out of the door of the airport and saw big araucarias all over, their very straight trunks and distinctive symmetrical branches, looking like trees put together from some kind of children's tree construction set. And New Zealand flax (phormium), growing huge and wild by the roadside, the bloom stalks 8-10 feet tall. And then, by god, it's spring! The smell of privet, of orange blossom, of wisteria. Birds nesting! It's November, and the birds are nesting. I kept seeing yellowish foliage on trees and immediately my mind made it old yellowing autumn foliage until I remembered, no, this is tender new foliage that hasn't filled up with chlorophyll yet. It's by god spring here! Amazing.

Outside the door of our room at the B&B in Auckland were orange trees pruned into a hedge. Oranges and blossoms at the same time, fragrance of the blossoms wafting into the room. So many things looking English, the furnishings and the electric kettle with the tea set-up and the architecture, and then the incongruity of the orange trees and that smell, what I have known as a Southern California smell. It was disorienting in an interesting and pleasant way. That keeps happening.

Something I have been struck by is my level of ignorance about what this place is like, what places have meaning for the people who live here, what kind of meaning they have. Ignorance about how things are done--things as simple as getting the check in a restaurant (not like home, let me tell you), as ordering a cup of coffee--long black, flat white. I spent the past few months doing research in preparation for the trip, and the way I look at that now is as a process of trying to gather up preconceptions. That may sound like a judgment but I don't mean it as one. When I travel I like to know what to expect in the way of customs, what is going on socially and politically in the place, what historically has gone on, what the current attractions are (for my tastes). I like to have a known context that I can fit my experiences into. But I know less about this country than any place I've ever been, and am noticing the tendency to take each new experience and compare it to others, to create a context. i can see that is cutting me off from the full experience of whatever is occurring, but it happens automatically. It feels so natural that it makes me think dogs are probably doing something similar with smells.

About the chicken being completed, though...It's the kiwi accent (ex-sent). Vowels quite unfamiliar to me are used here. "Please move to the depairture lounge when you hev complayted your chicken" I kept hearing. When you have completed your chicken, your chick-in, your CHECK IN! I get it. Vowels are mostly quite short and very very different. Not like Australian vowels, very different. Coffee? Keffee.... Auckland? Oakland...

Last minute repairs

I noticed yesterday that the new plumbing to a hose tap in back of the house had a little leak. John worked on it a little this morning, and five hours later we are hoping when we turn the water back on there won't be a fountain back there. Always going to be something. Leaving in 20 minutes, car's all packed, garden watered, sheets and towels clean for M, twiddling our thumbs, a little on edge here. What have we forgotten?

But the fact is that whatever we've forgotten, and there's bound to be something, we'll be able to take care of it almost as easily as if we were here. Twenty years ago that would not have been the case.