We arrived home yesterday evening, very tired and seriously disoriented.
We'll write more, and post pictures, once everything stops spinning.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Earth and Wind
We decided to spend our last full weekend in New Zealand in Wellington, in part because there are things around here we wanted to see, and in part because we're getting sick of traveling. Last weekend's adventures around Dunedin and the Otago Peninsula (including the best beach walk ever) left us exhausted and cranky.
Yesterday, we took the Dominon Post Ferry from Wellington out to Matiu/Somes Island in the middle of the Harbour. It's a predator-free wildlife sanctuary managed by the Department of Conservation, home to feathered green rockets known as kakariki (dubbed red-crowned parakeets by pakeha naturalists). It was sunny and a bit windy when we started out, but quickly turned cloudy and drizzly. It was a fine adventure in spite of that, though Corwyn refused to wear her rain jacket.
As we rode the last ferry back to Wellington, the wind was starting to pick up.
By last night, Wellington was once again being treated to a howling gale, which is supposed to continue until mid-afternoon today. (Despite the time-stamp on this post, I'm writing this at 10:30am on Saturday.)
I woke up around 2 o'clock this morning and was unable to get back to sleep, in part because of the roaring and whistling of the wind, in part because of the random slamming noises from outside. (There's a shed for rubbish bins down below our rooms here, and the doors had not been secured. I went out this morning to deal with them.)
After tossing and turning for a while, I went into the living room to read. I sat down on the couch . . . and felt the couch jump. I looked around: nothing else in the room seems to have moved; the clothes hanging on the hook were not swaying. I shrugged it off, read for a bit, and went to bed. I was able to get back to sleep, in spite of the howling, whistling, and slamming.
I checked online this morning and, sure enough, there was a magnitude 5.0 earthquake at 2:41am, centered about 40km from here, near Paraparaumu.
It was just another night in Wellington.
Yesterday, we took the Dominon Post Ferry from Wellington out to Matiu/Somes Island in the middle of the Harbour. It's a predator-free wildlife sanctuary managed by the Department of Conservation, home to feathered green rockets known as kakariki (dubbed red-crowned parakeets by pakeha naturalists). It was sunny and a bit windy when we started out, but quickly turned cloudy and drizzly. It was a fine adventure in spite of that, though Corwyn refused to wear her rain jacket.
As we rode the last ferry back to Wellington, the wind was starting to pick up.
By last night, Wellington was once again being treated to a howling gale, which is supposed to continue until mid-afternoon today. (Despite the time-stamp on this post, I'm writing this at 10:30am on Saturday.)
I woke up around 2 o'clock this morning and was unable to get back to sleep, in part because of the roaring and whistling of the wind, in part because of the random slamming noises from outside. (There's a shed for rubbish bins down below our rooms here, and the doors had not been secured. I went out this morning to deal with them.)
After tossing and turning for a while, I went into the living room to read. I sat down on the couch . . . and felt the couch jump. I looked around: nothing else in the room seems to have moved; the clothes hanging on the hook were not swaying. I shrugged it off, read for a bit, and went to bed. I was able to get back to sleep, in spite of the howling, whistling, and slamming.
I checked online this morning and, sure enough, there was a magnitude 5.0 earthquake at 2:41am, centered about 40km from here, near Paraparaumu.
It was just another night in Wellington.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Short Version
Here's a quick overview of our weekend adventures in New Zealand, starting with the missing pieces of our weekend in the Northland. Sorry to be so perfunctory about this, but it will have to do until we have time to post more detailed stories and pictures.
14-17 January was our weekend in the Northland, starting on the Kauri Coast, then moving over to the Bay of Islands.
After our morning of exploring the kauri forests and (for one of us, at least) getting very, very wet, we made our way down to the Tasman Sea for a first look. The beaches on that side of the Northland are not very good for swimming, with holes, rips, and rough surf, but excellent for beach walking, shell collecting, and bird watching.
That night, we took a guided night walk in the kauri forest, which was eerily quiet. Among all of us in the group, we saw two small brown kiwis! We also saw wetas (large insects endemic to New Zealand), glow worms (in the roots of fallen kauris), and even a brush-tailed possum (an introduced species that wreaks havoc on native vegetation). We discovered that the stream pool into which I had fallen is home to a meter-long eel. We saw more stars than any of us could remember seeing in years, including the Southern Cross.
21-24 January we traveled down to Christchurch on the South Island, where were stayed in the home of Bill and Liz Baritompa. Bill is the organizer and caller for the local contra dance in Christchurch and, when I contacted him to ask whether there would be a dance in January or February, he invited us to spend a weekend with them. They invited other friends over - some from the west coast of the island, some from down in Dunedin - and we had a dance on Saturday night.
Bill and Liz have a number of acres on a hillside overlooking Lyttleton Harbour, with a wild profusion of flowers, fruit trees, and other plants. Corwyn and Dorothea enjoyed picking cherry plums and helping to feed the llamas. (Yes, llamas.)
On Friday, we drove up to Arthur's pass in the Southern Alps, and walked through southern beech forest to Devil's Punchbowl Falls, where we were joined by a busload of Japanese tourists who spent a delightful 15 minutes taking pictures of one another. We saw keas up in the mountains, large alpine parrots renowned for their curiosity and playfulness. The ones we saw around Arthur's Pass struck me as kind of sad: too much contact with tourists has turned them into beggar birds, who pose for pictures, then follow people around waiting for handouts.
On the way back to Christchurch, we stopped to explore the limestone outcrops at Castle Hill, which are great for climbing . . . though Dorothea was angry and disappointed that we wouldn't let her climb the really tall ones.
Saturday, we relaxed a bit in the morning, then spent the afternoon in Christchurch. The Buskers' Festival had just begun there, and we stopped for an hour at the Cathedral Square to watch a very funny performance by a British busker named - if memory serves - Harvey Treehead.
Sunday, we made our way out to Akaroa on the Banks Penninsula - another great drive with steep, twisting roads without guard rails - just in time for the wind to switch around to the south, bringing low clouds and driving, misty rain into the harbor there.
(This has been an odd summer for New Zealand. The wind is too often out of the south or southeast . . . and the only thing to the south of here is Antarctica. So, it's tended to be wet and cool. We've had some very fine days, but a number of rotten ones as well.)
We retreated to Birdlings Flat, which is on a spit that connects the south end of Banks Penninsula to the rest of the mainland, enclosing Lake Ellesmere. We strolled on the shingle beach, collecting a few extrarordinary stones, and drove a little along the spit on a gravel road through a sheep station. From there, we made our way to the airport for an unproblematic flight home.
28-31 January was unusual. A centerpiece of the study abroad program that brought me here is a group field trip to the area around Lake Taupo to study the geology and biology of the area. So, on Thursday morning, all of us - students, faculty, families of faculty - boarded a bus at 8am for the drive up. In the mid-afternoon, we stopped in Whakapapa Village, an odd little ski town perched on the flanks of Mt. Ruapehu, the largest active volcano in New Zealand. We rode two ski lifts up to a spot with especially interesting geological features. The girls were delighted with the ski lifts. I enjoyed the lifts because, after a day spent on a bus with thirty-or-so college students, they were quiet.
From the slopes of Ruapehu, we could see Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe . . . the latter of which served as Mt. Doom in The Return of the King. When we arrived, they were shrouded by thunderstorms, but those moved off by the time we rode the lifts back down again.
We all stayed in Taupo itself, a tourist town that seems to be on the edge of a tranquil lake, but which is in fact in the very mouth of what may well be the largest and most destructive supervolcano ever . . . now classified as dormant. We learned from the geologist traveling with us that the Oronui eruption of Taupo, 26,000 years ago, ejected 1000 cubic kilometers of material. (Think about that for a minute.)
Friday was the day of the big hike. The bus took us to the Mangetepopo trailhead of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Some of the group - those students not taking the biogeography course for which the field trip was a required activity - set off right away to do the entire crossing, which goes up the Mangetepopo Valley, up onto the Mangetepopo Saddle between Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe, across the South Crater, up onto the Red Crater of Mt. Tongariro, then down the other side. The rest of us would just go up to the Saddle, with stops along the way so the students could learn about and sometimes sketch what they were seeing.
That makes it sound easy, but it's a 12 km round trip and, while the hike up the valley was mostly a gentle slope up with occasional scrambling over more recent lava flows, the last 2 km involved a climb of several hundred meters, on a steep trail with countless stairs ascending the flanks of Mt. Doom . . . er . . . Ngauruhoe, then across the face of the Saddle to it's lowest point on the other side.
The girls - especially Corwyn - needed some cajoling, but we all made it to the top of the Saddle and safely back. (There's more to that particular story, but it won't be told here.)
Saturday morning, we joined the biogeography class for a field trip to sites around Taupo, including Craters of the Moon (a geothermal steam field, complete with fumeroles, bubbling mud pots and, of course, craters), the collection field of a geothermal electric power station, and the surprisingly impressive Huka Falls (it's not the height of the falls, it's the volume of very blue water that impresses.)
In the afternoon, many of the students went off to jump out of airplanes. Taupo bills itself as the skydiving capital of the world, which seems to impose almost a moral obligation on college students to try skydiving, even if they had no prior interest in doing so. Oddly, though, on Thursday we passed through a town that bills itself as the gumboot capital of the world, and another that bills itself as the carrot capital of the world (with lots of rich volcanic ash in which the carrots can grow), but I didn't see any of the students pitching gumboots (a local sport in Taihape) or munching carrots.
The four of us went instead to a thermal spa, where we could soak in pools fed by a hot spring or ride the water slide to our hearts content. Then, after dinner in Taupo, we walked the 2 km back to the hotel along the lake front while the sun set.
The next day, everyone boarded the bus for the trip home, with only a few stops along the way. One notable stop was the site of the Tongawai train disaster. On Christmas Even 1953, a volcanic mudflow (called a lahar) from the crater lake of Mt. Ruapehu rushed down that particular valley, weakening the structure of the train trestle just half an hour before the express train from Wellington to Auckland passed through. 151 people were killed when the trestle collapsed into the still-raging lahar.
The most recent lahar to come down through that valley was just two years ago, a few weeks after the Georgia Tech study abroad program had visited the site.
Anyway, we got home safely, and are now preparing for our next venture out. This time, we're going down to Dunedin, where there are rumors of contra dance . . .
14-17 January was our weekend in the Northland, starting on the Kauri Coast, then moving over to the Bay of Islands.
After our morning of exploring the kauri forests and (for one of us, at least) getting very, very wet, we made our way down to the Tasman Sea for a first look. The beaches on that side of the Northland are not very good for swimming, with holes, rips, and rough surf, but excellent for beach walking, shell collecting, and bird watching.
That night, we took a guided night walk in the kauri forest, which was eerily quiet. Among all of us in the group, we saw two small brown kiwis! We also saw wetas (large insects endemic to New Zealand), glow worms (in the roots of fallen kauris), and even a brush-tailed possum (an introduced species that wreaks havoc on native vegetation). We discovered that the stream pool into which I had fallen is home to a meter-long eel. We saw more stars than any of us could remember seeing in years, including the Southern Cross.
21-24 January we traveled down to Christchurch on the South Island, where were stayed in the home of Bill and Liz Baritompa. Bill is the organizer and caller for the local contra dance in Christchurch and, when I contacted him to ask whether there would be a dance in January or February, he invited us to spend a weekend with them. They invited other friends over - some from the west coast of the island, some from down in Dunedin - and we had a dance on Saturday night.
Bill and Liz have a number of acres on a hillside overlooking Lyttleton Harbour, with a wild profusion of flowers, fruit trees, and other plants. Corwyn and Dorothea enjoyed picking cherry plums and helping to feed the llamas. (Yes, llamas.)
On Friday, we drove up to Arthur's pass in the Southern Alps, and walked through southern beech forest to Devil's Punchbowl Falls, where we were joined by a busload of Japanese tourists who spent a delightful 15 minutes taking pictures of one another. We saw keas up in the mountains, large alpine parrots renowned for their curiosity and playfulness. The ones we saw around Arthur's Pass struck me as kind of sad: too much contact with tourists has turned them into beggar birds, who pose for pictures, then follow people around waiting for handouts.
On the way back to Christchurch, we stopped to explore the limestone outcrops at Castle Hill, which are great for climbing . . . though Dorothea was angry and disappointed that we wouldn't let her climb the really tall ones.
Saturday, we relaxed a bit in the morning, then spent the afternoon in Christchurch. The Buskers' Festival had just begun there, and we stopped for an hour at the Cathedral Square to watch a very funny performance by a British busker named - if memory serves - Harvey Treehead.
Sunday, we made our way out to Akaroa on the Banks Penninsula - another great drive with steep, twisting roads without guard rails - just in time for the wind to switch around to the south, bringing low clouds and driving, misty rain into the harbor there.
(This has been an odd summer for New Zealand. The wind is too often out of the south or southeast . . . and the only thing to the south of here is Antarctica. So, it's tended to be wet and cool. We've had some very fine days, but a number of rotten ones as well.)
We retreated to Birdlings Flat, which is on a spit that connects the south end of Banks Penninsula to the rest of the mainland, enclosing Lake Ellesmere. We strolled on the shingle beach, collecting a few extrarordinary stones, and drove a little along the spit on a gravel road through a sheep station. From there, we made our way to the airport for an unproblematic flight home.
28-31 January was unusual. A centerpiece of the study abroad program that brought me here is a group field trip to the area around Lake Taupo to study the geology and biology of the area. So, on Thursday morning, all of us - students, faculty, families of faculty - boarded a bus at 8am for the drive up. In the mid-afternoon, we stopped in Whakapapa Village, an odd little ski town perched on the flanks of Mt. Ruapehu, the largest active volcano in New Zealand. We rode two ski lifts up to a spot with especially interesting geological features. The girls were delighted with the ski lifts. I enjoyed the lifts because, after a day spent on a bus with thirty-or-so college students, they were quiet.
From the slopes of Ruapehu, we could see Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe . . . the latter of which served as Mt. Doom in The Return of the King. When we arrived, they were shrouded by thunderstorms, but those moved off by the time we rode the lifts back down again.
We all stayed in Taupo itself, a tourist town that seems to be on the edge of a tranquil lake, but which is in fact in the very mouth of what may well be the largest and most destructive supervolcano ever . . . now classified as dormant. We learned from the geologist traveling with us that the Oronui eruption of Taupo, 26,000 years ago, ejected 1000 cubic kilometers of material. (Think about that for a minute.)
Friday was the day of the big hike. The bus took us to the Mangetepopo trailhead of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Some of the group - those students not taking the biogeography course for which the field trip was a required activity - set off right away to do the entire crossing, which goes up the Mangetepopo Valley, up onto the Mangetepopo Saddle between Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe, across the South Crater, up onto the Red Crater of Mt. Tongariro, then down the other side. The rest of us would just go up to the Saddle, with stops along the way so the students could learn about and sometimes sketch what they were seeing.
That makes it sound easy, but it's a 12 km round trip and, while the hike up the valley was mostly a gentle slope up with occasional scrambling over more recent lava flows, the last 2 km involved a climb of several hundred meters, on a steep trail with countless stairs ascending the flanks of Mt. Doom . . . er . . . Ngauruhoe, then across the face of the Saddle to it's lowest point on the other side.
The girls - especially Corwyn - needed some cajoling, but we all made it to the top of the Saddle and safely back. (There's more to that particular story, but it won't be told here.)
Saturday morning, we joined the biogeography class for a field trip to sites around Taupo, including Craters of the Moon (a geothermal steam field, complete with fumeroles, bubbling mud pots and, of course, craters), the collection field of a geothermal electric power station, and the surprisingly impressive Huka Falls (it's not the height of the falls, it's the volume of very blue water that impresses.)
In the afternoon, many of the students went off to jump out of airplanes. Taupo bills itself as the skydiving capital of the world, which seems to impose almost a moral obligation on college students to try skydiving, even if they had no prior interest in doing so. Oddly, though, on Thursday we passed through a town that bills itself as the gumboot capital of the world, and another that bills itself as the carrot capital of the world (with lots of rich volcanic ash in which the carrots can grow), but I didn't see any of the students pitching gumboots (a local sport in Taihape) or munching carrots.
The four of us went instead to a thermal spa, where we could soak in pools fed by a hot spring or ride the water slide to our hearts content. Then, after dinner in Taupo, we walked the 2 km back to the hotel along the lake front while the sun set.
The next day, everyone boarded the bus for the trip home, with only a few stops along the way. One notable stop was the site of the Tongawai train disaster. On Christmas Even 1953, a volcanic mudflow (called a lahar) from the crater lake of Mt. Ruapehu rushed down that particular valley, weakening the structure of the train trestle just half an hour before the express train from Wellington to Auckland passed through. 151 people were killed when the trestle collapsed into the still-raging lahar.
The most recent lahar to come down through that valley was just two years ago, a few weeks after the Georgia Tech study abroad program had visited the site.
Anyway, we got home safely, and are now preparing for our next venture out. This time, we're going down to Dunedin, where there are rumors of contra dance . . .
Out of Time
I have three reasons for the title of this post.
First, we keep meaning to post stories and pictures to the blog, but we keep running out of time. After we've gone through our daily routine here in Wellington, which often enough includes an after-dinner walk up to the Botanic Garden so the kids can play on the playground, we suddenly find it's 10 or 11 and time to go to sleep. Then, we keep running off on our long weekends, on which we seldom even look at our computers.
There are additional obstacles to posting, especially the odd arrangement we have for internet access. We're working through the Victoria University system, with fairly restricted accounts that include proxy settings that don't work with email clients or convenient tools like Picasa. So, it's difficult to upload the many pictures we've taken. And who has time to sort through the pictures? We may be posting them for weeks after our return.
The second reason for the title is that we have now passed the half-way point of our sojourn in New Zealand, and have the growing sense that our time is running out. Coming up is our last full weekend away from Wellington. The following weekend we plan to stay around Wellington, though we may take the ferry across Cook Strait for an overnight in the city of Nelson. The weekend after that we fly back to Atlanta, and we know we'll feel a tug of regret for all the things we didn't get to do and see.
The third reason - speaking for myself here - is that I have the sense of having stepped outside of ordinary time. We've been here for nearly four weeks now, but it seems much, much longer than that. There's an intensity and fullness of our experience here - traveling so much, seeing and doing so many different things - that time seems to dilate. A three-day weekend feels more like three weeks . . . though there still isn't enough time to do everything. Ordinary life in Atlanta seems like a dream we once had.
What's all this we hear about winter? In January? Ridiculous! Here, it's always been high summer.
First, we keep meaning to post stories and pictures to the blog, but we keep running out of time. After we've gone through our daily routine here in Wellington, which often enough includes an after-dinner walk up to the Botanic Garden so the kids can play on the playground, we suddenly find it's 10 or 11 and time to go to sleep. Then, we keep running off on our long weekends, on which we seldom even look at our computers.
There are additional obstacles to posting, especially the odd arrangement we have for internet access. We're working through the Victoria University system, with fairly restricted accounts that include proxy settings that don't work with email clients or convenient tools like Picasa. So, it's difficult to upload the many pictures we've taken. And who has time to sort through the pictures? We may be posting them for weeks after our return.
The second reason for the title is that we have now passed the half-way point of our sojourn in New Zealand, and have the growing sense that our time is running out. Coming up is our last full weekend away from Wellington. The following weekend we plan to stay around Wellington, though we may take the ferry across Cook Strait for an overnight in the city of Nelson. The weekend after that we fly back to Atlanta, and we know we'll feel a tug of regret for all the things we didn't get to do and see.
The third reason - speaking for myself here - is that I have the sense of having stepped outside of ordinary time. We've been here for nearly four weeks now, but it seems much, much longer than that. There's an intensity and fullness of our experience here - traveling so much, seeing and doing so many different things - that time seems to dilate. A three-day weekend feels more like three weeks . . . though there still isn't enough time to do everything. Ordinary life in Atlanta seems like a dream we once had.
What's all this we hear about winter? In January? Ridiculous! Here, it's always been high summer.
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