Crossing the Cook Strait to South Island

Wednesday 27 January 2010     Blenheim, New Zealand

Today was a beautiful day for crossing the Cook Strait on the Bluebridge Ferry.

Farewell, Wellington!

Approaching the Tory Channel, a shortcut into Queen Charlotte Sound.

This little girl was really enjoying "flying" into the 25-knot wind.

This is a mussel farm.  Sort of like Gold's Gym, only aquatic.

Tyler in the motel room planning where to go for dinner.

Featherston and beyond

Tuesday, 26 January 2010     Wellington, New Zealand

PERCY RESERVE

This morning we explored a nature preserve in the hills right in the vicinity of the B&B where we are staying, in the suburb of Korokoro at the north end of Wellington Harbor.  The Percy Reserve was part of the estate of Sir James Hector, surgeon, geologist, explorer, director of the New Zealand Institute, Chancellor of New Zealand University, and builder of the estate, house, and gardens known as Ratanui.  The grounds include several tracks (paths) through various stands of native bush and large, old imported plants & trees.  Here is Paula in a view of the upper end of Wellington Harbor.

Paula is such a fun gal, and she found this fungi:

Here is Paula in front of one of the largest Monterrey Pines (Pinus radiata) we have ever seen.

In another nearby park there was this beautiful Pohutukawa tree.  Actually, we just looked it up in Paula's new "Trees of New Zealand" book, and just from the picture and our memory we can't tell whether this is really Pohutukawa ( Metrosideros excelsa) or the closely related and visually similar Northern Rata (Metrosideros robusta) or Southern Rata (Metrosideros umbellata).  All are members of the same family, Myrtaceae.

FEATHERSTON

This afternoon we drove northeast from Wellington over the Rimutaka mountain range to the small town of Featherston.  It is the market town in the Wairarapa agricultural valley, but it is best known as the terminus of a steep railroad route over the mountains providing one of the principal land freight routes to Wellington until  1955.  The rail grade is so steep over part of the route that it required special "Fell" engines.  These were coal-fired steam engines with special opposed horizontal driver wheels that gripped a center rail to provide extra traction in addition to the regular driver wheels.  The last one in existence, fully restored, is in a museum in Featherston.  But, of course, the town's best product is still its famous son and our good friend David.

LAKE FERRY

Purely on a last-minute whim we drove through the wine town of Martinborough and out a country road to the seaside village of Lake Ferry.  It is on the Palliser Bay, which is the next major bay about 20 km around the coast to the southeast of Wellington Harbor.  It boasts a spectacular beach with rugged cliffs and hills that display some gorgeous geology.

Tyler likes rocks, and here are some with his favorite rock star.

Tyler also likes dead trees.  To get one photo with beach, ocean, mountains, clouds, and a dead tree is like winning the pentathlon.

Whakapapa: on ancestor veneration and racism

25 January 2010     Wellington, NZ

Tyler speaking.

At the risk of stirring up a hornet's nest, I'm going to record some thoughts about tribal cultures, ancestor veneration, anthropologists, and racism.

The Maori people seem to be thoroughly integrated into New Zealand contemporary culture, and yet there is a strong and growing emphasis on Maori traditions, language, and heritage.  This emphasis is supported widely throughout the country, in politics, and in the public mind.  In general I think this is good for all New Zealanders.  For one thing, it gives NZ a distinctive, marketable image in the world.  But lest we get all dewey eyed about the indigenous traditional culture and values, let's think about some of the features of this tribal culture - features that it shares with most other tribal cultures, including (as one exhibit at Te Papa museum pointed out) the clan system of Scotland.

The Maori put great stock in their "whakapapa", their lineage or genealogy.  The chiefs and other leaders can recite a line back 19 generations.  Now, remembering and appreciating our ancestors is a very natural sentiment among most people.  But at some point doesn't it come to resemble racist thinking?  If I am proud because I'm a son of Jacob and Isaac and Abraham, how is that different from being proud because I'm white and not black?  If I think that I would be doing the world a favor by having my sperm stored cryogenically so that my superior genetics can be passed on more widely, is that not a type of racist thinking?  How about the concept of royal blood, nobility, inherited right to rule?  There's a failed experiment we humans have repeated over and over in many societies.

Racism has at least two angles that I can think of.  A traditional definition of racism is the belief that all members of a race share certain characteristics, either favorable or unfavorable.  But another way of putting it is to estimate an individual person according to one's beliefs about the group to which he belongs.  If I accord greater respect to one man because his whakapapa includes many famous chiefs and great warriors from past generations, rather than because of his own achievements, refinement, education, and personality, is that not racist thinking?  In recent western society the ideal has been personal merit - - that opportunities should be open for all, but greater rewards will accrue to those who work harder, who are smarter, who are more capable, who make better choices, and (regrettably) who are lucky.

I suspect that anthropologists have a blind spot regarding a lot of this.  Being academics, they are, of course, liberals and "progressives".  (How's that for an example of racist generalization?)  And yet tribal cultures are profoundly conservative and resistant to progress.  Indigenous tribal neolithic peoples and cultures are the darlings of anthropologists, and they may not recognize how profoundly racist such cultures are.  In a previous post I related the history of the 1835 genocidal massacre of the Moriori people of Chatham Island by a gang of New Zealand Maori.  Both their behaviour and recorded comments after the event indicate that the Maori had no difficulty dehumanizing the Moriori in order to exterminate them like rats.  I know that we English-speaking Europeans and Americans have our own atrocities to answer for.  I bring up these issues with regard to the Maori simply to counter a tendency to idealize their past culture and traditional values.

Comments, rebuttals, and expansions are welcome.

Big Trees, Sunny Beaches, Mythical Mountain

Saturday, 23 January 2010     Wellington, New Zealand

Last night and for the next four nights (leaving Wednesday morning, 27 Jan.) we are staying at a B&B high on a hillside overlooking Wellington Harbor.  A storm has been blowing in for a couple of days now, and Wellington has been cold and rainy all day.  We just stayed indoors until we finally had to go out to get dinner.  The weather is supposed to clear up tomorrow and be reasonable the rest of next week.  Foremost on our agenda for the next three days: the Te Papa museum, the Wellington Botanical Garden, and several gardens out in the surrounding countryside.  We also intend to make an excursion to the village of Featherston, hometown of our special friend David, still remembered there as the mathematician lad who went off to the US and became a famous professor.

BIG TREES

Back on last Saturday, 16 January, we were staying at a B&B in the Northland town of Whangerei, and drove out to a couple of stands of the last remaining giant kauri trees.  These trees grow tall, straight, and without branches on their lower trunks.  They are unique to New Zealand, and were the source of an enormous timber industry during the nineteenth century.  Originally they were a prized resource for the masts and cross-spars of the ships of the British Royal Navy.  Later they provided durable timber for buildings, and were a principal export sustaining the developing economy.  But, predictably, they were overharvested nearly to extinction, and now there are only a few thousand hectares of remaining natural kauri forest.  Here is a picture of the tallest, Tane Mahuta ("God of the Forest") posing cooperatively behind Paula ("Goddess of the Thompson Garden").

SUNNY BEACHES

On our drive through the Coromandel and then down the West Coast through the Taranaki region, then Wanganui, and on to Wellington, we stopped at several beaches.  Paula walked through the sand studying seashells, while Tyler studied astronomy (you know: gazing at the heavenly bodies!)  Here are three of the beaches.

MYTHICAL MOUNTAIN SHROUDED IN CLOUD

If you look at a map of New Zealand, you will see a distinctive bulge on the lower west coast of the North Island.  A closer look at the map will show clear evidence that this bulge, called the Taranaki region, is a classic conical volcano known (and shown on maps) by both its Mauri name, Taranaki, and it's English name, Mount Egmont.

They sell postcards purporting to show the mountain.

It is touted in all of the local tourist establishments, the New Plymouth i-Site (government-run tourist information center), and enshrined in one way or another in many regional placenames.  But I am here to tell you that it is a myth.  There is no mountain.  We drove up two of the three major access roads and visited the Taranaki National Park visitor center at 1100 meters elevation, and we never saw any mountain.  It was raining, cloudy, and foggy the entire day, so the visitor center attendant tried to assure us that the mountain was really there but just shrouded in clouds.  I don't think so.  I think these clever New Zealanders just invented the Taranaki mythical mountain and got it put on the maps to boost the tourist trade.  So, since I wasn't able to take any pictures myself, I'll just have to post this picture post card for you to admire.

How to lose your passport

Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Relax.  This story has a happy ending, thanks to the honesty and helpfulness of New Zealanders.
Tyler Speaking.
I have been in the practice of keeping my passport and a significant amount of reserve cash in a cloth moneybelt worn under the clothing when we are relocating from place to place.  When we layover for two or more nights in the same lodging, I have been taking the moneybelt off and stashing it someplace in the room.  You already know where this is headed!  Sunday morning we left Whangerei in the Northlands after a very pleasant three-day stay, about a three-hour drive north of Auckland.  Sunday night we stayed in Whitianga on the east side of the Coromandel peninsula.  Monday night we stayed in Thames on the west side of the peninsula, about two hours southeast of Auckland.  Monday evening I realized that I hadn't seen or even thought about my moneybelt for several days.  The sickening feeling got worse and worse as Paula and tore through everything we had brought with us.  Eventually it came down to the supposition that I must have left it at the B&B in Whangerei - most likely in the little drawer in the nightstand next to my side of the bed.  So I phoned the people we had stayed with, and she checked right away while I was on the phone.  Eureka!  It was, indeed, in the nightstand drawer.  So now we were faced with 5 hours of driving back to Whangerei, and  another several hours back toward the south of the North Island where we intended to make our next stop.  But, praise God!  The B&B family had a family member who just happened to be going to Auckland anyway, so we set up a rendezvous at the Auckland Airport terminal, 5:30 pm Tuesday.  We were there early, and so was the gracious courier.  I got my moneybelt (with all the stuff undisturbed, of course), and I thanked him warmly for saving us at least six hours of driving that day.

I suppose this had to happen at least once on this trip, so I would learn the lesson!  And so Paula will have a good story to tell the grandchildren some day.

Tea with an engineer

Saturday, January 16, 2010     Whangerei, New Zealand

Thursday, Jan 14, we drove from Piha back through Auckland and then north into what is called The Northland.  On the way to a B&B in Whangerei we stopped at a beach on Bream Bay adjacent to the Marsden Point Petroleum Refinery.  This is the only oil refinery in New Zealand, and includes a deep-water port and ocean tanker unloading facilities.  While we were sitting there admiring the view and wondering what the facility out on the point was, we met Tony and Shiela.  We talked with them for a while, and they told us the background of the area, and then invited us over to their home 200 meters away for tea.  Tony is a British electrical engineer who was recruited to come to New Zealand 35 years ago to work in a fuel-oil fired power plant adjacent to the refinery.  He was the chief engineer in the power plant until it closed a few years ago - - it no longer made economic sense to burn the oil for electricity when they could make more by converting it to gasoline.  In his younger days Tony built a 50-foot sailing yacht in his back yard!

On Drugs and Groceries

Saturday, January 16, 2010     Whangerei, New Zealand

New Zealand definitely has a drug problem that they won't admit!  We can't find anything we're used to here.  Before we left Michigan we worked carefully with our physicians and insurance company to obtain a full 6- or 12-month supply of our prescription medicines.  But to save luggage space we did not fully stock up on over-the-counter drugstore stuff - - stuff like aspirin, ibuprofen, laxatives, acid reflux pills, and other stuff that we older folks need.  For all of our hand-wringing about the so-called Big Box retailers like Walmart, KMart, Meijers, Costco, and such, they really have been a boon to consumers, both on price and variety.  As to drug stores, we're always amused in the US to see an intersection with Walgreen on one corner, RiteAid on another, and CVS on the third corner of the same intersection.  But I'll tell you:  between them and the pharmacy sections of the Big Boxes we can get anything we want, in large bottles, and cheap!  There is no such thing here in New Zealand.  The grocery stores and KMarts either carry no drugs at all or only a very small selection.  The pharmacy stores are what we would call boutiques, selling mostly cosmetics, with their very limited supply of other non-prescription drugs clustered within about 10 feet of the pharmacist counter.  Aspirin is practically unknown here.  We usually buy the orange enteric coated 325 mg tablet (standard dose is 2 of these every 4 hours), and we buy them in bottles of 500 for a few dollars.  The other day we bought one package of 90 100 mg tablets (about the same as baby aspirin, marketed for "heart health") that cost NZ$20.00.  You can't even buy milk of magnesia or Citrucel here.  So BE WARNED all ye drug-dependent international travelers: stock up in the US before you leave.

While we're on the subject of stores, we've made some interesting observations in the grocery store produce section.  The oranges and grapes and apples are from the US.  Paula was appalled to find that the kiwifruit was all imported from Italy.  Kiwifruit was basically invented here in New Zealand, and they are the second-largest grower and exporter in the world (Italy is first), shipping more than 100 million kiwi fruits per year.  Then someone explained why all the kiwifruit in the stores this time of year is from Italy.  It's too early for the NZ fruit, so the only alternative would be very expensive cold-stored fruit from last year's crop.  Importing fresh fruit from the northern hemisphere when it is early summer in the southern hemisphere makes sense after all.

Piha Beach hangout

Thursday, January 14, 2010     Piha, New Zealand

For the past 7 days we have been staying at a lodge in the remote beachside village of Piha, about 30 km west of Auckland.  The beach is well-known in New Zealand for several reasons.  It is on the northwest coast, where the ocean is known as the Tasman Sea.  The shelf and coastline are such that it gets great surf, and is a favorite among the international surfing set.  In fact, from Jan 20-26 this tiny community is hosting the International Junior Surfboarding Competition, and they are expecting 20,000 visitors.  I don't have a clue where they think all those cars are going to park!  Anyway, the beach sand is black because of the predominance of some iron mineral eroded from the volcanic rocks in the hills above.  And, it is the story location of a popular New Zealand TV show, sort of the equivalent of Babewatch in the US.

There is only a single road out to Piha, and the last 14 km are a series of switchbacks.  As we have found to be characteristic of many NZ roads, it is a single lane road painted to look like a two lane road.  There are no shoulders.  And the locals who know the roads drive like maniacs on them, and grow demonstratively impatient following a retired yank on holiday.  So Tyler was pulling over at every sufficiently wide spot in the road to let the honkers fly by.

The village of Piha has one small store - a few groceries, a few prepared foods (wrapped sandwiches, etc), some souvenirs, and little else.  It has one cafe which serves breakfast and lunch, and closes at 4:00 pm.  It was very good - the cook prepared some very imaginative, tasty, and nicely presented dishes.  Supper was available at the Surf Club, more fully known as the Piha Surf Lifesaving Club, a venerable institution right on the beach.  Its menu was pretty basic, and pretty much the same every night, but they seem to do a healthy business.  

Here is a lovely rainbow that graced us one evening, looking inland from the beach.

There actually are two other clubs in town, either of which will serve tourists if they're serving at all.  The Piha Bowling Club refers to outdoor lawn bowling, not the bowling-alley-cum-pizza type known in the US.   The other club is the RSA, Returned Soldiers Association, kind of a VFW from the first world war.

Just a few hundred meters from our lodge was a trailhead to Keri Keri falls.

We spent Monday and Tuesday, Jan 11-12, back in Auckland.  We were able to get tickets to the first NZ concert of Rodrigo and Gabrielle, a guitar duet whose music our son Paul first introduced us to.  Their style is hard to categorize, but they might go along with Flamenco With Heavy Metal Influence.  Rodrigo is the notes man and Gabrielle is the percussion section.  Rodrigo plays all the notes on his guitar, and he plays them very fast and very well.  Gabrielle has developed a unique repertoire of percussive sounds on her guitar - both play acoustic guitars with electronic pickups - all the way from big thumpy bass drum to little galloping finger embellishments.  If you just hear them on one of their two CDs you would swear that there must be a drummer in there somewhere, but no, I assure you it was just Gabrielle and her guitar.

We stayed in Auckland Monday night and then went out to Waiheke Island on Tuesday.  Here is a picture of a cove on the island.

We had a great dinner at the Mud Brick Winery restaurant, and then followed a marked track through the bush back to the ferry.  We finally got back to Piha around midnight.

Tyler got up at 4:30 am Thursday morning, went down to the beach with his camera, and sat there for two hours taking a series of still photos to string together as a time-lapse movie of the sunrise over the landmark Lion Rock.  Here is one nice shot from that sequence.

Taupo, the Tyre, and the Treck

Wednesday, January 6, 2010     Taupo, New Zealand

If you want an example of an inauspicious start to a day, here it is.  Fortunately the spare tyre and jack were in the trunk and in fine condition, and we had no trouble finding a tyre repair shop, who fixed it while we had breakfast.

We then drove south along the east shore of Lake Taupo, and then 16 km off the highway on a forest road to the Kaimanawa Forest Park, a very extensive preserved wild area in the midst of vast commercial forest lands.  The loop trail that we hiked was almost 4 km long, and we were worn out by the end.

I also discovered a serious limitation of our GPS.  We bought a Garmin Nuvi 1370, a model that is primarily designed for driving, and it has been very useful and comforting on our travels.  We had loaded it with all of Great Britain, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand before we left the states.  I carried it with me during our hike, since the loop trail we meant to hike was part of a more extensive system of forest trails, and I wanted to be sure we wound up back where we started.  Well, we did, but no thanks to the GPS.  The  battery was exhausted about two thirds of the way around.  It was obviously designed to be kept plugged in to the car's electrical system, not carried around out in the wild for hours on end.

There were some really big trees.  According to Tyler (without consulting his favorite botanist), the proper name of this one is "Treeus enormous" in the family Reallybigae.

Volcanoes From The Sky

Tuesday, January 5, 2010     Taupo, New Zealand

Today Paula and Tyler got high!

Taupo lies on the northeast corner of Lake Taupo, a beautiful scenic lake in the caldera of a volcano that last erupted in 180 AD with an explosion that was 50 times bigger than Mt Saint Helens.  South of Lake Taupo is the Tongariro National Park, home of three volcanoes that are still active, one of which erupted in 1996.  North of Lake Taupo is the city of Rotorua with its geothermal features, and Mt Tarawera which erupted in 1886 wiping out two Mauri villages and killing about 120 people.  This we had to see from the air.  So we drove to the Taupo airport, pulled in at the little building advertising Taupo Air Charter, and asked if he would take us up.  We flew around the area for two hours, taking photos and video almost continuously.

Here are a couple of shots of the three volcanoes, looking roughly south.  In the foreground is the complex, flat-topped Mt Tongariro.  In the mid-distance is the classic conical-shaped volcano Mt Ngauruhoe, which was featured prominently throughout the recent Lord of the Rings trilogy as Mount Doom in the land of Mordor.  In the background is the most recently active Mt Ruapehu, the only one of the three that is covered with snow.  Mt Ruapehu is the one that blew in 1996.

Here are several shots of the menacing Mt Doom (Mt Ngauruhoe).

Mt Ngauruhoe first appears as we fly over Mt Tongariro.  Mt Ruapehu in background left.

The desolate cone of the volcano.

Here is Mt Ruapehu at its best.

The crater lake of Mt Ruapehu.

Mt Tarawera is the volcano that blew in 1886 in a series of eruptions that opened a rift along the ridge.

Taupo also has a very nice waterfall, Huka Falls, which is actually more of a rapids than a real waterfall, but it's pretty anyway.