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.