Australia, Part 0

So we know that you probably want to hear about our trip to Australia and our adventures on Mt. Koskiuszko. Instead, this post is about a day trip Jen and I took to the Tahuna Torea Nature Reserve.

The plan was to bus hop over to the east side of Auckland, where the park is located, and spend the day poking around seeing what was to be seen. Being seasoned users of Auckland public transit, we dutifully found a set of buses we could use that would take about an hour to get to the park.

Of course, since this is us, things rarely go as planned: through a combination of missing buses, walking between bus stops, buses being canceled, and tertiary plans being enacted, we managed to make it to the park in 2.5 hours (a mere 1.5 hours longer than planned).

We grabbed a bite at a cafe near the end of the bus line and then headed over to the reserve on foot. It was a lovely little park, nearly devoid of annoying humans but full of interesting birds.


We walked along the beach and waded out into the warm and very shallow water. While sitting in the water, we got nibbled on by some tiny crabs and observed a fierce territory dispute between two of them played out over the course of several minutes.

This trip was also another excuse to bring out the KFK and his new friend the Kiwi Fruit Echidna.

Weta!

We found this on the driveway outside our house:

New Zealand Wildlife Part 3

We got a rare treat today. We had the opportunity to see two specimens of the rare New Zealand Domestic Tiger:


OK, they aren't actually from New Zealand, which is why they have to spend 30 days in quarantine.

But they are tigers, at least that's what the big one said. Very fierce, with their purring and rubbing up against our legs. I was afraid for my life for most of the time we were in the enclosure with them.

OK, they aren't actually tigers either, but our very own orange tabbies, Crunch and Yeti, imported from the States.

Jen went and saw them right after they arrived from the airport and the kitties were, apparently, quite pleased to be in this fine country. And by "quite pleased", I of course mean really, really, unhappy.

They seemed in pretty good spirits today, though, and were very happy when we brought some cat toys to entertain them. They have a decent sized enclosure, approximately 10' x 20', but it is open to the elements (the top half of the walls are wire mesh), which we found very odd, and has a bare concrete floor. Apparently they don't have a lot of cats here that are indoor-only pets. Last night was very cold, it got down to about 40 degrees here, so we are concerned about the cats staying warm.

The plan was to purchase some cat bedding today and take it to them so that they would have some help in staying warm at night, but it is Good Friday, so nearly everything is closed. We managed to find a souvenir store that was open and bought a couple of sheep-skin rug type things for them.

We have approximately 28 days to get the house cat proofed, which is going to be interesting.

Wildlife Addendum

I was outside putting stuff into our shiny new shed so that it did not get more wet in the next batch of rain, when I found this on the wall of our house:


Kinda small as weta go: according to Wikipedia, the get up to 90 mm long (3.5 inches for you Yanks), but still pretty cool.

A bit of New Zealand Wildlife

Hey Everyone,

Sorry about the long pause in posts and the lack of cool pictures. Have been totally swamped by assignments and distracted by the awesome Spartan run in the NCAA Tournament! Go State!
Kiwi Fruit Kiwi also enjoyed watching the Spartans win against UConn.

I have finally seen my first real live weta in our yard, but did not get a chance to take any pictures due to the running and screaming. Here are some pictures of other NZ wildlife that has graced us with its presence around our house.
This is a Kotare or Kingfisher.These are Tiger Slugs.
And these are thousands of ants pouring out of our wall when the carpenter was replacing a window. Ick!!! One good thing did come out of this horrific event though. The carpenter, Ian, found a New Zealand penny stuck in the old window frame. They do not make pennies here anymore so it is cool and somewhat valuable.

The cats should be arriving into quarantine today, so we will soon be very busy cat-proofing the house. Especially since we now have a new set of french doors out onto our deck. Well technically the doors are used (purchased from a junk yard by our landlord actually), but they are new to this house anyway. You can also she our lovely new shed in this picture.
Well, just wanted to catch up a bit and fulfill a request to post more pictures of us. We miss you!!
Love,
Jen and Scott

Fox Glacier

Yesterday we headed out of Queenstown for Fox Glacier, where we were scheduled to go on a half-day hike up onto the glacier (the Kiwis pronounce glacier "glace-ier" rather than "glaysher").

On our way out of Queenstown, we spotted a hitchhiker holding a sign for Wanaka, which was the first major stop on our projected five hours of driving for the day. On a spur of the moment, we decided to pull over and give her a lift. After shifting the debris in the back seat a bit, we made room for her and were off to Wanaka.

Jane, as she is called, is a sound engineer from London that has been spending the last couple of months travelling around NZ as she felt the whim. We had a fascinating discussion with her during the hour long trip to Wanaka and dropped her off before we looked for parking and lunch.

Just outside of Wanaka, as we entered the city, was an establishment that we could not help but visit: Puzzling World. Inside there were several rooms devoted to really impressive optical illusions and a room of cool holographic photos. Outside was a rather impressive two floor maze (the second floor consisted of a series of bridges connecting distant parts of the maze).

The maze had four color coded towers and the challenge for the maze was to find all four towers (in any order for the easy challenge or in a specific order for the hard challenge) and then find the way out. We chose to do the easy challenge, as we still had four hours of driving to go, which was listed as taking 30 to 60 minutes. After some frustration with the dastardly green tower, we made it out in a quite respectible 45 minutes.

The next four hours were pretty much straight driving, with Jen and I trading off driving duties. We stopped briefly to walk up to the Thunder Falls and again to catch the sun setting over the Tasman Sea. There was a near miss with a Pukeko and an incident with an opposum and our right front wheel (that one was for the kiwis and other endangered flightless birds of NZ) after night fell. Our current accommidation is the Misty Mountains Lodge, a lovely little B&B just on the edge of the Fox Glacier township. We have not seen any hobbits or dwarves yet, but I am still optimistic.

On the recommendation of the proprietress, we went to a little restaurant called The Platau. The food was great: I had chorzo sausage, feta cheese, and mushrooms on penne and Jen had NZ green lipped muscles in a chili-ginger-lime sauce. We both tried a new (for us) brand of beer: Moa. Jen had the Moa Blanc (a spicey wheat beer) and I had the Moa Noir (a very chocolately dark ale). Both were excellent, bottle-fermented brews.

We were up early this morning for breakfast (standard fare: fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes - the Kiwis know how to do breakfast) and then were off to the guide station to begin our hike.

Our tour gide was a former Mt. Everest sherpa from Nepal named Passang who was quite entertaining and hopped about the steep, narrow, rocky, wet, slippery trails like some sort of spry mountain alpaca. Or possibly a sherpa. The glacier itself was spectacular; we got to hike out onto it with crampons strapped onto our boots and specially made walking sticks (they had a metal bit at the end to stab into the ice) to assist us.

The trail (parts of it barely qualify for the word, but I'm feeling generous today) was quite difficult in places and the company that ran the tours had people out rebuilding parts of the trail that had recently been destroyed by landslides or flash floods. Jen and I will both be quite sore tomorrow. Fortunately, we only have a relaxing three and a half hour drive to Greymouth and then an alpine train back to Christchurch scheduled for tomorrow.

We'll post some pictures of the glacier when we get internet access from the laptop, we're using the computer in the B&B front room right now.

Been there, done that, got the (free!) t-shirt

Yesterday we went bungy jumping. Both of us survived intact, and we did, actually get a free t-shirt. We got a DVD with both of our jumps on it, but I do not know how to get video off of a DVD for uploading somewhere like YouTube so that you can all see it. You will all have to wait until we get back to see us screaming in abject terror during the several seconds of free fall. It was great.

After the jump we went to the local endangered wild bird sanctuary and got to see a bunch of local species that have not been doing so well since the stupid Europeans brought their rats, ferrets, and stoats to NZ. We got to see a couple of frisky kiwis, some cheeky keas (a large parrot, about the size of a duck) and the enormous native pigeon, which looks like a Thanksgiving turkey with a wee pigeon head.

After dinner at an Italian place with a cat obsession, we went to the mini golf place up the road, which had a whole bunch of really complicated and elaborate models to play around. It was one of the harder putt-putt courses I have played: final score was Scott 91, Jen 94 (92 if we had enforced the 10 stroke limit per hole).

We have to pack up now and head to Fox Glacier, which will be a 4-5 hour drive. Perhaps when we get there I'll have time to upload some pictures of the birds and the mini golf place.

Dunedin to Queenstown

You will have to excuse our lack of blogging ... the last several days have been quite full of adventure, excitement, and driving. Also I forgot to pack an Ethernet cable and the B&B at which we were staying at Te Anau only has wired internet access.

On Friday, we did the Otago peninsula, just to the East of Dunedin. The driving was moderately terrifying, as the Kiwis apparently do not believe in guard rails. Our first stop was Larnach Castle. We were as surprised as you to learn that there is a castle in New Zealand.

The castle and its ground were gorgeous, but the sordid tale of the Larnach family was like a train wreck: you really want to look away, but have to keep finding out more. To sum up: Larnach had five children by his first wife. His first wife died suddenly, so Larnach married her sister with some sort of fancy prenuptial agreement to protect him from his creditors. His second wife died in surgery and there was some shenanigans with him forcing his children to sign an agreement without knowing what it contained to get all of his holdings back. He married a third wife: a sweet, young thing about 30 years his junior. Everything was super until one of his sons started having an affair with her. That ended with Larnach shooting himself in the Parliament building (he was a politician) and later the son killing himself as well. Soap opera writers could not make that sort if thing up.

After a perilous drive back down the mountain, we continued up the coast towards the wharf from which we were to depart for our albatross and seal viewing cruise. The cruise was pretty cool: we happened upon a port bound fishing boat which was trailed by a couple hundred sea birds, amongst which were Royal Northern, Royal Southern, and two other species of albatross. The guy driving the ship said that this was a very rare occurrence, as albatrosses do not normally follow shipping vessels that close to shore. In addition to the albatrosses, we also saw myriad other species of sea bird and New Zealand Fur Seals.



To cap off the afternoon, we went further up the coast to the Royal Albatross Centre, where we got to see four of the twenty-three chicks currently nesting on the Otago peninsula. A Royal Albatross chick will, at its heaviest, weigh in at 12-14 kilograms! That is 26-31 pounds for those of you, like me, who can't convert metric to American units in your head.

The drive back to Dunedin was not quite as nerve wracking as the drive out, as the west-bound lane was against the cliff face, instead of on the water side (with no guard rail and a shoulder whose width is best measured in millimeters), but it was still arduous. We had dinner at a hip little place called Craft, where I had lamb shank and Jen had a bowl of kumara pumpkin soup as big as her head (kumara is what they call a sweet potato here). We were greeted by a lovely little NZ$10 parking ticket when we got back to the car.

On Saturday, we had to drive up to Te Anau. Since it was not that far of a drive and we had all day, we decided to take the scenic southern route, rather than the more direct (and apparently not as scenic) route. Things were fairly slow going, due to all of the sharp, steep turns that driving through the mountains entails.

And then we saw the sign: Cannibal Bay, 400 m Turn Left. Jen and I experienced one of those moments of near-telepathic nonverbal communication that can only exist between two people who have been married as long as we have been (5 days, at that point), and we immediately turned off and drove 14 km over an unsealed (unpaved to you Yanks) road to a little beach with all sorts of cool rocks, cliffs, sea lions, and tourists attempting to be eaten by the sea lions. I'll let the pictures speak for them selves:





After scampering over rocks and around sea lions for longer than we should have we headed back to the car and realized that we might or might not be able to make it to Te Anau for the glow worm cruise that was scheduled for that evening. Contributing to the delay was the dinner we had in Invercargill at a place called Hell, which serves gourmet pizzas and had old Tom and Jerry cartoons playing on the plasma a screen. We managed to make it with minutes to spare, but only by leaving local speed ordinances crying and bleeding in the corner. Despite the name, the glow worm cruise was really cool. We took a boat across Lake Te Anau to the cave entrance, where they have built a wee lodge with refreshments and such for people taking the glow worm tour.

In the lodge at the entrance to the cave, they showed us a couple of time-lapse, infrared videos of glow worms in action. One of them was of a territorial fight between two glow worms that started with one glow worm knocking the other off the ceiling of the cave and ended with the knocked off glow worm getting eaten by the other one after a valiant, but ultimately futile counter attack. Several of the senior citizens who made up the rest of the tour group where quite shocked to see the brutality of the life of a glow worm.

Once the videos were done, we walked a couple hundred meters into the cave. There, we hopped onto a small, 10 person boat, the guide turned off all of the lights and we went deeper into the cave on the water to view the glow worms. Now, when I say "we went deeper into the cave on the water", what I mean is that in the pitch black darkness (the glow worms did not emit enough light to actually see anything) the guide stood at the bow of the boat and pulled us through the cave along chains that had been set into the cave wall. Alas, we could not take pictures of the glow worms, so you'll just have to take our word for it that they were cool.

The whole thing took about 2.5 hours and, once again, had us checking into our B&B after 10:30. This place was decorated in a fashion that I can only describe as ultramodern. Jen and I both felt like we were not cool enough to stay there. But, we had already booked it and they didn't have any other guests, so we stayed.



On Sunday, we had a free day in Te Anau. Having slept past all of the interesting cruises and tours departing from places near Te Anau, we decided to drive up to Milford Sound and do some short hikes and see a fiord. That is not a typo, apparently only the Scandinavians spell it fjord. We did six little side hikes, each 20-40 minutes in length: Lake Mistletoe, Walker Creek, Lake Gunn, Lake Marian Falls, and The Chasm. All of these were incredible in their own way. The best, however, were The Chasm (where a river has carved the rock into huge, intricate, swirling shapes that go down about 15 meters) and Lake Gunn (which was a walk through a beech tree forest that predated European knowledge of the Americas).



After the last side hike, we hoofed it up to Milford, where we hoped to catch a quick dinner and then try to head back to Te Anau before the sun went down. We missed the cafe closing by mere minutes and the bar did not start serving food for another half hour, so Jen had great fun taking pictures of the fiord until the batteries in the camera died. For dinner, Jen had a steak sandwich that was served with an enormous pile of beer-battered fries and I had pork sirloin garnished with fried apple and a beer-honey sauce that I am going to try to make once I get access to a kitchen again (I even went and asked the chef how it was made).



The drive back was uneventful once we got out of the clouds, except that the traffic signal at the kilometer long tunnel turns off at 6, so we had an interesting time navigating around oncoming traffic in the 1.5 lane tunnel. We also pulled off the road and killed the car to look at the stars in the clear, moonless sky without any light pollution.

That sums it up for the last couple of days. We are in Queenstown now, getting ready to head out for the evening. I'll tell you about our adventures this morning with a bloke named Fraser and Jen's first experience with left-side driving tomorrow.