Abseiling, Climbing, Canyoning - BEST day yet!

Today was SO MUCH FUN!

First off, we had a really small group - just myself, a guy from Seattle of all places (we had a good chat about things to do there, decent neighbourhoods, nearby mountains, etc), and our fantastic guide, which was awesome because it meant virtually no standing around waiting!. A few short abseils followed by a few longer (abseiling is fun. Funfun. :D ) It was super windy though, so to avoided twisted ropes and tangling in trees we ended up doing some rock climbing instead of some of the originally intended abseils. Which is fine by me, I like climbing. ;)

From our perch on the side of one of the Blue Mountains (tangent: why are the Blue Mountains called "blue"? The trees are green, the rocks are orange... BUT when it gets really hot, the oil in the leaves of the eucalyptus trees evaporates creating a blue haze over the mountains. That's kind of cool :p ) we could see the smoke coming off the remainder of the big fire which we could smell last night. It was a controlled burn (like our forests, fire helps these ones regenerate), but it got really windy and ended up being rather larger than intended...

We then headed off to the Empress Canyon for my very first canyoning adventure. Verdict? funfunfunfun. VERY much enjoyed it! And finished off with abseiling 30 metres straight down through Empress Falls (slippery! :p ). The cool water was delightful (in a wet suit... far to chilly without haha). All in all, this was hands down one of the funnest activities I have ever done! Ridiculously good fun. :)

Went for a walk to the Three Sisters while
waiting for the film to be developed

The only sad bit is that I haven't got a lot of photos - my camera isn't waterproof and the disposable one we split resulted in very few discenable photos - pity, but it was super super fun so its barely raining on my parade :p ... though it DID rain this evening. Real rain, too, not just drizzle! Which means its actually relatively cool out, which is delightful.

When I got back, I bumped into a guy from Wales we played board games with back in Kaikoura - neither of us knew the other was coming to Oz haha. Also, if anybody missed this back in January, it is rather fantastic and worth watching the full 30 seconds... seafoam storm in Queensland (google it if you have no idea what I'm talking about...)

Alright, back to my book and milo :)

To find mountains, look down!

Katoomba.

Pretty cool name for a pretty cool town in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales near Sydney, Australia.

Except, well, where are the mountains? As I think I commented in my last post (or maybe I didn't, I don't remember and I'm not going back to check :p ), you can't see any mountains from here. Now, I'll admit that I've been a bit snobby in the past in my definition of a mountain, but there isn't even a sturdy hill to be seen! The landscape stretches into the distance in a mostly flat, slightly rolling tangle of forest. So, mountains? Yes actually. We're on top of them! Well, kind of yes. They're not pointy mountains, and they are sort of short, but depending where you stand there are some pretty massive elevation changes.

Witches Leap
(apparently "leap" is a Scottish
term for a kind of waterfall)

Katoomba sits on the edge of the Blue Mountains National Park. This whole area is built on a 1000m high limestone plateau (hence the flatness). Towards the East (and the ocean), the limestone has been eroded over thousands of years to create huge canyons and valleys - most with near-vertical (or actually vertical, or even overhanging) cliff walls, exposing the vastly varying shades of orange/white/brown in the sedimentary layers of the plateau.

This also makes for some... different... hiking. You start at the top, go down to the bottom, then have to hike back up again! I've got to admit, I think I like the start-at-the-bottom way better, since going down is usually easier. :p

Katoomba Falls

Today I followed a trail down to see Katoomba Falls, where the Katoomba river goes tumbling hundreds of feet off the side of a cliff to the valley below. The trail starts off down a steep-sided valley, passing some smaller falls, before turning into a bunch of stairs cut into the limestone cliff (this isn't one of the straight up and down cliffs, don't worry. Also, they had railings :p ).

Lizard!

At the bottom I saw a lizard! Well, some little kids saw the lizard and pointed it out to me. :p

Large flocks of the bright white cockatoos were swooping around the cliff faces and the waterfalls, settling in the big leafy branches sticking out from trees which either found purchase in cracks in the rock or grew out of scattered ledges. The cliffs also support a number of "hanging swamps."

Three Sisters

The opposite side of the cleft formed by the Katoomba river is a vertical cliff - a very, very high one. At the end, there is a point where the smaller valley hits a bigger one, where three limestone spires have evaded erosion - their name? The Three Sisters. How many mountains carry that name? A fair handful...

There was a pair of rock climbers barely visible about a quarter of the way down from the top. On my way back up the endless staircase, I passed a group of about 60 school kids coming down... who made full use of the echo potential of the valley to shout at the climbers. :p However, passing a huge, strung out group of people as high as my hip meant a mix of running up stairs and stopping for prolonged periods of time - at least half of them were exclaiming that "this is SO scary!!!!" as they went down.

A nearby fire has filled the air with smoke but caused a pretty spectacularly orange sunset.

While wandering around the shops along the main street here, I came across an old sign saying "Drink coffee. Do stupid things faster." Also they have cowbelle cheese! That makes me happy.

I noticed this in New Zealand, too (and also around UBC, for that matter, but that isn't kids) - razor scooters are making a big comeback. Also yo-yos.

OOO funny thing I heard on the radio in NZ before I left - something about the "marmageddon" ... a massive marmite shortage!

Pictures to follow, I'm having trouble with the internet.

Cheers,

Marysa

Fancy going climbing?

They did.

If Pluto had landed somewhere else, it might have still been considered a planet.

A Hostel to Rival Hogwartz...

(Meaning to rival the hostel in Dunedin, not Hogwarts itself. My trip would probably indefinitely prolonged if that were the case.)

Built in the early 1900s with big, wide staircases and lots of windows, the hostel here has a big stone terrace with (I kid you not) a fountain, a huge, airy kitchen with windows on three sides, a 100 ft long ballroom (turned common-room, with comfy couches clustered throughout and tables on the raised sides) and a dedicated reading room just off it. Which is awesome - this hostel seems pretty quiet (the one out in Bondi was really loud. Surfers are stay-up-late and sleep in type people, it seems. Normally you could go back to your room for some quiet, but I was sharing with three *exceptionally* loud Irish night owls, making this all the more lovely.)

Also.

There's parrots! Well, maybe. I have not yet tried to identify them (any birders out there? :p ) They are white with curved yellow crests sitting out of the back of their head, and they make parrot noises and hang around in the trees by the terrace.

I took the train from Sydney (well, bused from Bondi to Sydney, train from Sydney to here) to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains (well, I haven't seen any mountains...) Again, props to the Sydney transit system... I'm a few hours from Sydney but its still part of the city's rail system... it would be like Translink running hourly trains to Hope!

There's a lady here from Edmonton, and one of the not-Irish people in the dorm last night was from Moyette! That was a new one. (If you're wondering where that is, its a tiny little island northwest of Madagascar administered by the French overseas department).

Bondi Beach was lovely,

Saltwater pool at Bondi Beach

as far as beaches go, but super hot and humid! Also they had some cool rocks. It is a much more pleasant temperature, here. :p

And a banana and a container of nutella waiting to be eaten :) (okay, I'm not going to eat the whole container of nutella in one go haha)!

By the way, sloths inhabit the jungles of Central and South America.

Edit: its not a parrot. Its a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo!

Phew, what a day!

Well, well, well... today has been a delightfully interesting! :p
But you don't get to find out why. Yet. Lower down. Ha. ;)

...

First, more on Fahrenheit... After multiplying his buddy's system by 4 so that there wouldn't be any fractions and each step wouldn't be so big, water's freezing point should have been 30 and body temp should have been 90, but he bumped them to 32 and 96 so there were power of two differences (2^5 between 0 and freezing, 2^6 between freezing and body) so when he made his thermometers he just had to repeatedly bisect the intervals. Ah. Sneaky.

...

As usual, my paranoia about being late for a flight and/or something going horribly wrong in the whole check-in/security process made me very early for my flight, haha. After bringing Tuck back to his owners (good thing I had insurance... summer here means perpetual road maintenance, just like home... which means a considerable length of road in the process of being re-sealed... which means flying rocks... which means a crack in Tuck's "windscreen" ... which I don't have to pay for. ;) Also, the "implies" symbol is wonderful... I'll keep the many repeated "which means" for the non-mathy people, but "⇒" is so much shorter...), the Apex people dropped me off at the airport. The driver had been to Canada - they took a scenic bus tour from Calgary to Kamloops. It snowed the whole time and all he saw was low cloud and snowy forest. :p

Chilled at the airport for a while, at a delightful cheese scone (which came with a packet of butter... I mention this for a reason), listened to a surprising number of people being summoned in that too-patient "we are very annoyed with you" voice to go to their gate, as they'd checked in but didn't get on the plane (and everyone on the plane was waiting for them to show up to leave). Eventually, my flight rolled around (flew around? Technically the plane would have rolled to the gate...). A lovely three-and-a-bit hour flight (filled with National Geographic on wolves and the ocean... not the same episode, that would be an odd mix :p) brought me to a new continent! (Unless you're of the camp that Australia and NZ are both part of the continent of Oceania, but I would consider nz to be an isolated island.)

I'm sure you've all seen this by now, but it makes me smile. :)


Unrelated to anything really - something I wanted to mention weeks ago but never got around to it (or maybe I did and I just forgot :p - if so, well... we all know I'm a bit scatter brained...) One of the real-estate companies down here is called "Hoamz" ... which to me anyhow, sounds like they're trying to be super "cool" or "gangsta" or "hipster" (I obviously to not have a very good grasp of those definitions :p) but mostly makes me think of phloem. Z.
ALSO. Veggies. Veggie singular, or occasionally veg. Not here. Its vege. Which I'd pronounce "veeg"... not so.
And "brekkie" is a widely used and socially acceptable form for breakfast, which makes me very happy. :D

Okay. Australia. IS HOT! Yeeeeesh! No wonder everybody spends all their time at the beach! Arriving and getting customs/baggage/phone/internet/transportation all went ridiculously smoothly (when we got to Auckland, it did not :p )! I had kept the little butter pack that came with my scone... thus I declared that I had "fruit/nuts/dairy" on my form. The lady at customs didn't even make me pull out my hiking boots or anything, just sent me on my merry way, butter or not. Awesome. Before long, I had stashed the bag with my sleeping bag and warm clothes at a storage place in the airport and was following the "Train" signs through the airport.

If you thought Vancouver had good transit (I have no idea if you do. I did. But it is true that I haven't got much to compare it to. Until now.), its got nothing on Sydney! They've got trains going pretty much everywhere - skytrain type trains (half underground, half not). Except they're WAY longer and DOUBLE DECKER! (as in, the train has two floors... not two trains driving on top of one another. Just in case anyone was confused :p ). Also, the underground skytrain stations are usually pretty cold. These ones are rather warm (but cooler than outside, I guess... not saying much :p ) Screens and l.e.d. signs everywhere saying when the next train is coming, where its going, what the next stop is, etc. Scan you ticket to get in - don't loose it - scan it to get out again. Sweet. (Not honour-system transit like Vancouver haha). A few minutes brought me from the airport to Sydney Central Station, which, by the way, is huge.

This is where the fun beings.

I had booked a few nights at the Sydney Central YHA, which is right across the street from the train station (okay, the train station is huge, but it is technically across the street :p )... so I crossed the street, and walked into the Lobby.

I'm greeted by a cheerful man swinging his feet as he sits on the counter. "Hello! Welcome to Sydney! Do you have a booking? As you can see, its not a normal day here at the yha. We've experienced a massive electrical fire and the whole building has been evacuated!" Except apparently the lobby. :p Nobody was hurt, they just don't have any power or fire system in place any more, so people can't stay there. Now, all the hostels, even the big ones, in New Zealand were pretty small. This is not how the Sydney hostels work. There are two YHAs within a five minute walk of each other, and numerous other (equally large) hostels also along the same two streets. Since nobody can stay at the Central YHA, they poor people there have found themselves with the logistic nightmare of relocating over 500 (yes, five hundred) individuals to other accommodation in the area. So the lovely people at Sydney Central sent my around the corner and down the street to the other YHA in the area, who get to sort everyone out (lucky them ;) )!.

I've got to hand it to their people and whoever is in charge - they're doing a fantastic job. Sydney is a pretty popular place, so it isn't as if there is a large amount of space (if any) at any given hostel in the area. Some people are being sent off to other YHAs - "The Rocks" (near the Opera house), or down to the Bondi Beach YHA, while others are being depositted in the non-yha hostels closer by. So the two people here who were expecting a quiet night at work this evening have instead been relocating several hundred rather confused individuals. (Not just the two of them haha - pretty much everyone who works here is here right now.)


Currently awaiting the bus they've arranged to take those of us bound for Bondi on our merry way. :)

Cheers from the land of Oz!

(my camera is buried somewhere in my backpack and I haven't taken very many pictures anyhow :p )

Mystery Melon, and the Last Day in the Land of the Long White Cloud

On the way out of the beautiful, laid back town of Raglan, I stopped off at my last waterfall of the trip - Bridal Veil Falls. Appropriately named if the bride were 50 metres tall. The water in the stream leading up to it is super murky due to runoff from all the farms in the area, not that you'd know looking at the white of the falls themselves. The stream, which is quite small and calm, gets an upsetting surprise when it goes shooting off a 55 metre high cliff into an almost circular pool below. The pool at the bottom sits in a steep-sided bowl in the hills (this country is really good at hiding its waterfalls! Good thing there are signs...). No swimming in the pool - gross water, etc. Also if you jumped in you probably wouldn't come out unscathed, since you would have to jump off a cliff into a pool that is mostly 5 metres deep... except for the huge boulder sitting in the middle that you can't see. (Okay, I'm taking their word for it that the boulder is there, since you can't see through the water when its a few inches deep, let alone when you're standing 50 metres above it looking down...)

As usual, the waterfall and stream were hidden away in a fantastically green and very un-Canadian forest full of moss and trees and ferns (and those fern trees!) dense enough that the full noon sun was dimmed to a green twilight.

Speaking of green... I had a piece of the BEST melon I have ever tasted today!!!! It was SO GOOD!!! I'd never had it before and didn't recognize it (it was already chopped up, so I don't know what the rind looks like or anything) - its bright green, quite soft, and very juicy... sort of sweet and slightly lemony-tart at the same time. I asked what it was and the lady told me "rock melon" - except when I got back and googled rock melon, it came up with canteloupe! It was definitley not a canteloupe. So if anyone knows, from my rather poor description, what this ridiculously tasty melon is called (and if you can get it in Canada :p )... please tell me... please... I'll buy them one :D (if they sell them back home - countries seem to dislike you bringing fruit across borders :p ).

A few weeks back I was talking with an Australian and we got on the topic of the different brands in different countries. This ended up rolling around to pharmaceuticals; she had never heard of acetaminophen. I thought Tylenol was everywhere, so I was surprised. Similarly, she thought it odd that we didn't have paracetamol. Turns out its the same thing. N-acetyl-p-aminophenol. I guess nobody calls it that and different continents condensed it to different things. Fun fact. :p
This is my last night in New Zealand, which is really quite sad. No offence to Australia, or anything. It has been a spectacular trip... and may require another visit. (Takers? I don't think my dad needs much convincing to visit to Mt Cook... ;) )

In the interest of not having to deal with morning traffic on the way to the airport tomorrow morning (and the lack of parking around hostels in Auckland), I booked a cheap motel near the airport off expedia. Except somebody somewhere slipped up, because the hotel got overbooked... shoot... however, the perk of this mistake happening through a big booking agency like Expedia means that instead of my original cheap motel, I am now staying in a 4 star hotel right by the airport for the same price plus a refund of $25 for the "inconvenience." Fine by me! :p

(erm... I turned on the tv in the room to Discovery, and Adam from Myth Busters is getting really excited about something that sounds uncomfortably like the Cyber-men from Doctor Who...)

Tomorrow, I fly (on a plane, still no wings of my own) across the Tasman Sea to Sydney, Australia!

- Marysa

(hmm, googling "green rock melon" gives some that miiiiight look right...) :|

Surfers Located...

I love when you pick a place at random and it turns out to be fantastic! Except that in this case I don't have enough time to enjoy the all fantasticness it has to offer...

I'm in the little town of Raglan, on the west coast about 1.5 hours south of Auckland, as I didn't want to stay in Hamilton (bigger city) or Auckland (giant city) for longer than necessary.

This hostel is great! its sort of built like a giant doughnut around a central courtyard/garden. They've got an enormous stash of surfboards and sea kayaks, and all sorts of free things to borrow, like bikes and lake kayaks for the inlet that is literally right outside the door and fishing gear (if you're into that :p ) and more! It is right on the water on a sheltered little inlet, which is great for the paddle boarders and kayakers. They have a small fleet of cars and make multiple trips each day out to the open beaches for people to go surfing. Super cheery, laid back, friendly place full of surfers and soon-to-be-surfers (except most of the people here, being surfers, think the North Island is the only part of NZ worth seeing. I disagree. :p ) I had a good chat about the excessive windiness of the roads up in the Coromandel with four Americans (three of whom were from Boulder, Colorado! But I'm not going there after all... :p ) I realized as we were talking, though, that I'm going to have to learn to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head pretty quickly. I knew I'd have to do it with miles, but that's a much easier conversion... C = (F - 32)*5/9 ... roughly -30 then divide by 2? geh... I'm pretty sure most of the school stuff will be in Celsius, but I may very well be wrong...

This begs the question, what on Earth is the Fahrenheit system based off of? There must have been better justification than "I like the number 32. Lets make that the temperature water freezes, and go from there!" In a nutshell, this seems to be how the system came about: German-Polish physicist named Daniel Gabriel (I think my mom was going to name me Gabriel...) Fahrenheit invents the mercury thermometer! Cool. Good on him. But in 1724 he proposed the whole F temperature scale. Apparently its worth noting that the freezing and boiling point of water are exactly 180 degrees apart, so one degree is equal to 1/180 the difference between freezing and boiling water? (So Wikipedia is telling me...) The part I'm more interested in: zero F is the freezing point of brine (I take it brine has a specific salinity, otherwise you'd think that would vary a significant amount...)

Ooooh k, I found the paragraph I care about. He used three reference points. Zero point is the result of putting a thermometer in a 1:1:1 mix of ice, water, and ammonium chloride (salt). (This mixture stabilizes temperature automatically, so its not just picking any old mixture on a whim. :p Chemistry is cool. Its been too long since I've done any chemistry...). 32 (I don't know why he chose the number 32, though) is a 1:1 mix of water and ice (freezing temp of water), and the third point is body temperature, about 96, called "blood-heat" at the time. Ah. The reason for 32 and 96: he met some guy earlier who had made his own scale with 0 as freezing bring, 7.5 as freezing water, and 22.5 as body temp. Then he multiplied everything by 4 to get rid of fractions and re-calibrated it. This seems all very arbitrary, to me... Its even got its own version of Kelvin (sort of), called the Rankine Scale, with 0=absolute zero.

ANYHOW, most of the above has absolutely NOTHING to do with my trip, so sorry about that little tangent! :p

Super-cool hostel, awesome people, saw some very cool clouds on the drive up, saw a very cool "gremlin forest" back at Taranaki, and tomorrow is my last full day in New Zealand. :(

EEEK! Okay, I have a relatively large stack of postcards that have been riding around in my backpack for about a week waiting to get deposited in a mailbox. I really need to do that before I leave since I doubt the Aussies want Kiwi stamps :p

Pros & Cons of Tobogganing Taranaki (not to be confused with teriaki)

Taranaki, or Mount Egmont, is a 2518 metre tall composite cone volcano located on the west coast of the North Island, near New Plymouth. The fourth such volcano to rise up over this "hot spot" in the last 2 million or so years, its snow filled crater drops at a sharp 45 degree angle to around 1500 metres, gradually evening out normal-curve style until it meets the surrounding plain below.

The mountain sits in the middle of a rather funny looking National Park. The ground surrounding Taranaki was originally dense jungle (super-awesome jungle! So many shades of green, countless kinds of trees and shrubs and ferns and vines twining around the trees and smaller trees twining around the bigger trees and moss and lichen cascading off every surface!), but since the soil and climate are excellent for growing things, European settlers kind of went on a free-for-all with saws and matches to clear vast swatches of land for farming purposes. So a few slightly more farsighted individuals arranged for a park to protect the rise on which the mountain stands. The result: Egmont National Park, a nearly perfect circle of jungle ringing a volcano in the middle of a bunch of cow fields. (see google map... not your average park-shape :p )
https://maps.google.co.nz/maps?q=mount+taranaki&hl=en&ll=-39.29658,174.059143&spn=0.233277,0.396881&sll=-39.294454,174.199905&sspn=0.233284,0.396881&t=h&gl=nz&hnear=Mt+Taranaki&z=11

Anyhow... Whilst wandering around up there yesterday, it came to me that volcanoes are the perfect shape for tobogganing - start off steep, get up some speed, and a nice long run-out to slow down and come to a perfect stop on the nice flat ground. Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this idea.

Pros:

• Its a volcano. How cool is that?
• Aforementioned ideal shape
• Taranaki bends the winds around it to produce a bizarre "cold spot" on the North Island, and gets large quantities of snow on the top of the cone.
• top 1/2 to 2/3 is free of anything to run in to

Cons:

• Its a volcano. A not entirely dormant volcano. Most toboggans are not built for both snow and lava, let alone pyroclastic flows or falling ash and pumice...
• The bottom 1100 metres is a dense tangle of jungle foliage
• It hardly ever snows near the bottom. Just rains. A lot. As much as Milford. But rarely any snow.
• There also isn't any snow outside of the crater, right now. Yay, scree-lichen-tussok-jungle tobogganing?
• There are giant vertical cliffs and fissures all over the side of the mountain. Bring a parachute with your toboggan.
• Also bring a snow maker, and a fast-acting clear-cut machine.
• The bottom, which was my hypothetical "slow down" zone, is cross-fenced every few hundred metres. Watch out for barbed wire. Also cows. 
• You have to carry your toboggan two and a half thousand metres into the sky. Also your parachute, chainsaw (terrible idea... maybe something that produces giant sound waves which pulverize whatever is in your path, but they you'd go deaf...), snow maker, and cow bell. I'm lazy.

Okay, so I'm thinking that this is not such a great idea, and I believe I will refrain from any such attempts.

Laundry's dry, time to go!

-Marysa

Hey, look! A volcano!

Today I saw a bird that runs like a T-rex. Though I haven't seen a tyrannosaurus rex run (surprising, I know!), so maybe it just ran how I imagine it would look. That was in a big park in Whanganoi (back to the wh-f's :p); they also had swans... and a great many ducks. Also some very cool trees, the first cedar trees I've noticed, and a big greenhouse appropriately called "the winter gardens" - that had a ficus. It didn't appear to be dropping any of its leaves... my ficus got quite upset in late January and was losing a massive number of leaves, so hopefully its doing okay now...

A sea-tractor? I assume it is dragging in
traps of some sort.
Paraparaumu

The North Island is noticeably more densely populated than the South - over three quarters of the population of the country live here. It seemed like every 10 to 20 k there would be a little town. Some of these were larger than others - I saw the cheapest gas I have yet seen in the town of Levin - 212.9!!! Usually its around 220 (feeding Tuck is not cheap haha - but he's pretty good on gas, about 6.7 l/100km.)

The sand along most of the west
coast beaches on the north island is
black (and sparkly)
since its all eroded lava flows :p
So there has been bright white sand,
light yellow, dark yellow/orange, and
black sand

Also on the drive up, I passed through a small town with not one but two house moving companies. We're not talking moving trucks with people to carry your furniture, here. We're talking about people who move houses. Each had a large lot next to their offices with several older houses sitting on blocks awaiting a new location. :p

When I arrived at the hostel, the lovely smell of baking cake greeted me. Mmmmm... Now, the best part of this is, we get to eat the cake! This hostel is super cute - they make volcano shaped chocolate cakes with white icing on top for snow whenever someone climbs Mount Egmont (Taranaki)... or just in case someone climbs it... nobody did today, in fact, I think everyone sitting here eating cake just got here today. So now everyone here gets to eat chocolate cake, which is awesome! They've got a cone-shaped cake pan for it... hmm, custom shaped cake pans... I wonder... A slight oversight on my part meant that I didn't even realize there was a huge mountain here (its really flat) until I came round the corner of a hill and BAM, there was a great big cone-shaped volcano sticking out of the ground. So tomorrow I'm going to go take a look around there (don't worry, mom, I'm not going to climb it by myself. I am grossly uninformed and know nothing about it :p ). Though if I ever come back it'll be on the list of things to do :p ).

Taranaki rising out of the flat fields
(Mt Egmont)

I don't know what kind of flowers these are,
but they grow EVERYWHERE, especially on
the North Island! White, pink, blue, purple...

I have now eaten my delightful slice of cake. Tomorrow I'll head over to Mount Egmont (again, don't worry mom, I'm going to the top) and follow some of the short little trails around the base. Apparently there is a "goblin forest" with twisted, mossy trees haha.

There is also a rather interesting museum down near the waterfront - I just popped in shortly when I got here today, but tomorrow afternoon I'll probably go through it properly, at which point I can give a rather more informed ramble on the area. Right now all I can say is something along the lines of pseudo-active volcano, giant shark fossils, moa kiwi more volcanoes erosion Gondwanaland plate lifting no more moa mini-t-rex-relative and snow is only for the mountain.

New Plymouth's equivalent to the sea wall

Yum, cake :)
Double yum because I may have stopped at the grocery store and procured a small container of ice-cream, so I got double dessert. :D

Cheers,



Marysa

What is the going-rate of a bucket of road paint?

Paraparaumu
clouds above the beach, with Kapiti
Island across the water

Alas, the lovely days of the South Island are a thing of the past... but I still have a few days on the North Island before I have to leave this lovely little country (by plane, thank goodness - I've never felt ill in a plane before... mildly concerned that it was going to fall out of the sky on a flight home a few years ago, but not nauseous... Not that I've got anything against boats... just boats in big waves right now... I just need to get on a nice boat that doesn't make me feel ill, like most of the ones I've been on excepting the last two :p ).

It was still raining this morning (Tuck is actually starting to look clean! If it keeps on like this all the way to Auckland I might not have to wash him...) when I got up to catch the ferry across the Cook Straight, back to the North Island.

people learning to sail
in Picton this morning

The "gloomy" weather wasn't a deterrent for some budding sailors in Picton's harbour, though! From Picton, the ferry passes through the sheltered waters of Queen Charlotte Sound (if you're wondering why there are all these places named after Queen Charlotte, but you can't remember her featuring much in history, its because she was the wife of King George III;

Paraparaumu

unlike male consorts of female monarchs, the consort of a British king is apparently a queen... or was, anyhow... maybe that's all changed... I wouldn't know...) before heading out into the considerably rougher Cook Straight proper. The boat was about an hour late leaving (something about lifeboats?), but after an only mildly-queasy three and a half hour trip, we arrived in the windy city of Wellington! Woohoo!

In a most typically Marysa-like move, I left the city almost right away; a short drive brought me to the seaside village of Paraparaumu (I think this is the most easily-pronounced location on all the signs between Wellington and here...) The town lies directly opposite Kapiti Island.

Part of the drive was along a section where they road-people are testing line paint - I've thought about the road paint down here way more than I've thought about the stuff at home. This is how the paint-system works: you've got the road, with (usually) solid white lines between the road and the grass on the side.

The beach at Paraparaumu

Then down the centre, there is a dotted white line. Even around blind corners, etc - that's just the sort of "default" centre line. Now, occasionally the line is a solid yellow with white dots on one side (or more rarely, a double yellow) if it's a high crash area or something and they really don't want you trying to pass. But for the most part, dotted white. Now, this is slightly confusing in cities such as Wellington and Dunedin where multi-lane one way streets were in abundance. The one-way signs aren't very big or obvious, and you can't tell that the street only goes one way by looking at the road paint. Luckily there were always cars ahead of me on streets like these. :p Mostly I find myself wondering how much the save on paint every year. Maybe white paint costs less than yellow, but more than that, lets say the dotted line covers 1/3 of what a solid single line would cover (let along a solid double line). That's a LOT of paint not on the road! On the topic of roads, they have very well maintained roads down here. Sure, most of the North Island and parts of the South probably don't get cold enough for frost heaves or anything, but I've seen maaaaaybe one pothole, and it was filled in. The scant "rough" patches of road which would be relatively normal at home have a lot of "caution uneven surface" signage and pylons, etc. (Also, they have a LOT of pylons. Think of the density of blue fencing at UBC, then turn all the fences into pylons.

Looking south down towards Wellington

Anyhoo, here in Paraparaumu, I'm staying at a cute little old hotel/hostel combo thingy called "Barnacles Inn." Its right by the beach (granted, everything here is right by the beach :p ), and so far I appear to have the room to myself :) (its only about a 40 minute drive to Wellington, so most backpackers stay there). For some odd reason, the I have a feeling the lady at the office thought I didn't understand English, because when she was telling me where to park it went pretty much like "Parking is on the grass. The GRASS. Big green. G-R-A-S. Grass." (Yes, just the one s in grass... :p ). So, with Tuck tucked away on the g.r.a.s., I went for a quick walk before it cooled down too much. Fortunately for me, the rain had already cleared out of here by the time I arrived, allowing for a delightful walk along the beach (without getting sand in my shoes because the sand was still wet, YES! ... I'm still shaking sand out of my pack from the Abel Tasman...) and some *spectacular* clouds to which my pictures do not begin to do justice. It has cooled down though since I was last on the North Island, whether from rain or seasonal change or a bit of both, I don't know. The South Island was pretty cool from Arthur's Pass onwards, so I finally got to use the warmer clothing I brought (I was starting to worry I'd packed it for nothing :p ).

DUCK!
Exotic fauna, eh? :D

Ducks! Speaking of ducks (not that anyone was, but now I am!), the little pond near the beach here has a LOT of ducks! Also, way back in Oamaru, where I went to try and find some penguins with the Aussie and the Torontonian, the other Canadian and I spent a rather long time practising (trying to re-teach ourselves, more like :p ) our Loon calls. I remain very bad at it, but at least I can make the noise, sometimes. Not the fluttery-part, much, but its a step in the right direction... Interestingly, the Australian had never heard of anyone making a noise like that - even though they might not have loons I thought they might make the noise anyhow and call it something else.

I continue making my way north tomorrow, as I need to be in Auckland by the 23rd.

Barnacles Inn

The vast majority of the older people I meet are British, while the people my age are mostly from, in this order: Germany, Holland/Netherlands, England, Australia, Wales, Ireland (segregating the British because that's how they say where they're from :p ), France, then a smattering from other places - more Canadians so far than Americans. Actually, hardly any Americans at all. Maybe two that I can bring to mind? One was an adventure racer and the other told me of the US's lack of Cadbury...

Random side thought (like the rest of this post wasn't full of those...): the gps has some truly hilarious pronunciations. Listening to it try to say YHA is pretty entertaining, but I think the best was back in Te Anau, when it tried to pronounce "Lakeside Drive" ... not to difficult, right? You'd think? Its not an acronym, its not a Maori word... nice and straightforward, yes? Yeah. No. Le-hack-ee sye-duh Drive was more like it...

Okay,  this is actually from yesterday,
but I had filled up a memory card and only
put the pictures from the first one
on my computer...

Things it may be a good idea for me to buy before heading home: hokey pokey chocolate and milo. :)

Okay! I will toss some pictures into this post then unleash it upon the web!

Pip pip, cheerio!

Marysa

p.s. - On a COMPLETELY unrelated note, I was talking to Nicole on facebook, and you know how it shows ads down the side of the message page? Well, I got a safety advertisement saying "Kids are safest in a booster seat until 4'9" or 80 lbs. Click to learn more." By that standard, I'm pretty sure I was still supposed to be in a booster seat at the start of tenth grade... (depends if that or is an and/or vs and either/or). Thank you, mother, for not putting me through that.

(edit: I apologize for any appalling grammar and/or spelling errors... I don't proofread these things, but after posting saw three mistakes in the first few lines that I went back and fixed, so there are very likely more. I can write properly! I just don't, necessarily, here :p ... also I like spell-check ;) )

SEAL PUPS!

Happy St. Patrick's day to everybody back home! I spent my St. Patty's night playing games at the hostel back in Kaikoura - one of which was battleship. A really old version - with an absurdly sexist box (see left)... Note the women folk doing the dishes in the background.

Ooooh k - these are the street banners in
Kaikoura - Christmas banners!

I am considerably less groggy than I was while writing my last post (that boat did NOT agree with me... and I have to get on another one tomorrow... fingers crossed for good weather. Weather! Funny story. I checked the forecast for Picton and it said "Gloomy with showers." Gloomy! That's a weather term here! I wonder if they say "cheery" when its supposed to be sunny...) Anyhow, last night/today it finally RAINED! Properly! As I think I've mentioned, NZ's been going through a huge drought and definitely needed the rain. Also Tuck looks much cleaner than he did yesterday. :p

King of the rock! Possibly Queen...

Today I made the short drive from Kaikoura up to Picton... or rather, it would have been short if I hadn't kept stopping to see the SEALS! Fur seals. And... fur seal pups! Which are really really ridiculously cute. There were hundreds of seals at Oahu point - both adults and pups - sleeping on the beach, playing in the waves and tidal pools, rolling in the kelp, frolicking on the rocks and fighting each other for the highest point on a given rock pile. They were also very vocal with their little bark-cries. ("Little" ... they were actually pretty loud, and most of the seals probably weighed more than I do).

Who has a cute face?
Its tongue is sticking out :p
(the shot before this has
it yawning haha)

A little further along the beach is the Oahu stream and waterfall. Seal pups come here by the hundreds in the winter months; though its just the start of autumn, there were a few early birds already present. Pups will spend about two to three days at a time just playing in this stream, which runs a few hundred meters inland to a 20m or so waterfall with a big pool at the bottom. They'll head back to the beach to get a snack from mom before returning to the stream. Its a safe place for them, and since seals are very social animals, it provides the pups with a place to "hang out" while their mothers are out hunting.

Since its only the start of the season for pups to be here, there weren't hundreds - but there were quite a few! They're born around November/December but don't usually head over to this area until April-ish. Clambering up onto rocks and sliding back into the stream, doing flips, chasing each other round and round in circles, and slip-climbing upstream all the way to the big pool under the waterfall. They're about the size of a small golden retriever - the adults are about the size of me if I wrapped myself in a lot of bubble wrap. :p But the pups have huge, round eyes... okay, the point I'm trying to get across is that they were really, really, reeeeeeaaaaally really cute!

Not many pictures of the pups since I didn't want to scare them with a flash and they were moving quite quickly. I did take some videos - both of the seals out at Oahu point and the pups in the stream, but my poor little computer can't handle playing them back haha - maybe I'll try and upload one anyhow and see if the browser can handle it... otherwise, I'll get them up when I go home. ;) (update - no go on the video haha).

A spider bit the top of my foot a few days ago and now it is very itchy. >:(


The Marlborough region smells like flowers! I noticed that on the way down, too. Its weird. I don't know where the smell comes from - its not springtime... but its definitely there.

So green :)
Forest around the Oahu stream (full of pups!)

And whats more, it doesn't bother me! I can't even keep cut flowers my room back home because of the pollen, and I remember stuffing straw mattresses at the fort a few years back and I didn't have any anti-allergy stuff with me, and every minute or two I'd be running into the barn with streaming eyes to blow my nose... not a very productive mattress-stuffing session... But my point is, this area has a distinctive floral scent and I do not know where it is coming from. :p

Seal pup on the stream bank

Helicopter Whale!!!

There was no helicopter whale. More on this later.

Yesterday morning, I left the charming village of Arthur's Pass (popln: 62). Dodging Christchurch, I headed for the coastal town of Kaikoura - known for its abundance of dolphins, whales, and seals. Apart from the fur seals, the waters off Kaikoura host both some of the smallest and largest members of the whale family. The Hector's dolphin averages about 1.4m long and is only found in New Zealand, while the sperm whale is the world's largest living toothed predator.


Today I went on a whale watching tour... which was cool because we saw many albatrosses and fur seals and a little humpback whale! And a 19 metre long sperm whale! Less cool because it turns out I do get seasick. Not as bad as a lot of people on the boat today - no throwing up or anything, but definitely not as enjoyable as the other boats I've been on down here. Of course, the weather was less than spectacular and this time the boat was actually out about 15 km in Pacific, above the Hikurangi Trench. This trench is cool because sperm whales only swim in deep water - at least 500m deep. Usually you have to go pretty far off shore to get to water this deep (I shudder at the thought), but this trench (3750 m deep at its deepest) is still deep enough 10 km from shore for sperm whales to come and feed. Its also one of the most productive areas of the ocean, meaning there are almost always a large number of whales down here feeding. So I got to see whales - that was cool!

Side thoughts which I may or may not have rambled on before: I was talking to an Aussie a little while back about cookies. Which they call biscuits. Not cookies. So I asked what they used to cut out things like gingerbread men. Answer? Cookie cutters. Not biscuit cutters. Ha. Don't use the word "garbage" - the proper term is "rubbish", and a "trash can" is a "bin." Also boxes of beer are referred to as crates. Its St. Paddy's day today down here, and when someone said they had a few "crates" of beer I definitely raised an eyebrow haha.

Non-travel related note - Doctor Who starts again, soon, and so does the (filming) of Sherlock! :)

Its been cloudy for a few days, so no stars, but back at Tekapo you could really see them - and there were even a few bats! Arthur's Pass is the natural habitat of a large number of Kiwis (the bird kind, this time :p ). They're shy and nocturnal, but also quite noisy - you could hear them if you sat outside (when the train wasn't drowning them out haha). :)

Tomorrow, off to Picton! (To get on a boat... :s )

Oh right, Helicopter Whale! So, naturally the crew of the boat suggested that we keep an eye out for whales, but to make sure that it wasn't a seal, or a log, or kelp, or a boat, or even (apparently this has happened) a helicopter before shouting "whale!!!"

Arthur's Pass, Parrots, and NO CADBURY CHOCOLATE?

The top of Avalanche Peak, Arthur's Pass
(Crow Glacier, Mt Rolleston/Kaimatau in behind)

 It was SUPER windy early this morning! Lots of trains go through Arthur's Pass (its pretty narrow, so the tracks, village, and road are all smushed together), and part of the time you couldn't tell if you were hearing a train or wind! Except the train-noises were pretty short-lived, and the wind kept going. :p 

One of the last beech trees
before the tree line

Even right around dawn it was still pretty gusty, but it had settled down by the time we'd finished breakfast. Destination: Avalanche Peak.

Now, the DOC (Department of Conservation) is pretty conservative in its estimates of hiking time - usually I'll do a hike a bit quicker than they tell you it takes - half an hour or an hour less than their lower estimate, say. But not today. And it wasn't just me - there was a guy from Perth and three other girls from the hostel headed up as well, and it barely took two hours up, and another two down, on a "6-8 hour trip." Hmm. But it was nice!

PARROT! Haha. No, really, it is!
Its a Kea :)

On the was up I saw a few Kea - the world's only mountain parrots! They sound like parrots... which makes sense, its just not the noise I'm used to coming from a bird in the mountains. They're top feathers are relatively subdued dark blues and greens and yellows, but they've got really vivid red and yellow feathers under their wings.

View of the mountains from Avalanche Peak

There was lots of high cloud, so it wasn't too hot, but we still got the lovely view of the mountains from the summit. No sunshine, but some pretty cool clouds, at times. The track can be done as a loop; we started off on the Avalanche Creek trail, which is steep and rocky (yay, hands!) and pretty much goes straight up the side of the mountain. When it comes out of the waterfall-dotted forest, it follows up a tussock-covered ridge which eventually slopes down into the side of a higher, rocky ridge. This ridge runs up to the top of the mountain, with steep drops to either side, and lovely views of the surrounding mountains. Big, scree-filled bowls scoop out of the sides of the mountain below the peak (during the snowy season, these house the namesake avalanches).

Low clouds in Arthur's Pass proper

A lengthy (also rather chilly) stop at the top for some pictures and a snack, then back along the rocky ridge to where the Scotts Trail splits off. This trail runs down the next ridge up the valley from the one we came up. The trail isn't quite as steep, but I was nonetheless very grateful for my poles. Seriously. They are the best things ever - for going up and down. So thank-you, whichever of my parents wanted them in the first place and introduced me to their extreme awesomeness.

Can you spot Tuck? :D

The trail down gave a great view of some of the big waterfalls on the other side of the valley, including the Devil's Punchbowl falls (yesterday). All in all, a lovely hike.

Also a lovely hostel - in fact, its time for another round of spot-the-Tuck! I'll give you a hint. He's parked in front of the hostel. Which has a bright red roof. :)

Trail following a ridge through some tussock
 above the tree line but below all the
rocks.

The radio here ("here" NZ, not "here" Arthur's Pass... no radio here here) has some pretty hilarious advertisements and commentators (or whatever you call the people who do the talking between songs). Most of the time I just chuckle to myself and keep driving, forgetting what was so funny 20k down the road, but a few things stuck out. At one point they talked about an "old boy band, which is really now a middle-aged man band," while I heard an ad several times for "New Zealand's only pub with a well in the middle!"

While chatting with some people who did the same hike we did today yesterday (if that makes sense...), it came up that one of the guys pretty much crawled the last leg because he was afraid of heights... which prompted someone's comment of "afraid of heights? He's 6.1!" I wonder if anyone is that afraid of heights. Probably not.

Also, appalling discovery! THEY DON'T HAVE CADBURY IN THE STATES! No Cadbury chocolate! (No Tetley tea, either... do I sense some anti-British tendencies?) Hershey is their big chocolate producer. I knew they didn't have smarties, but no Cadbury? No dairy milk? No MINI EGGS???? Mini eggs are the BEST Easter chocolate. And the Hershey's "candy coated eggs" really don't come close to matching it. Nor do Hershey chocolate bars come close to Dairy Milk bars in tastiness. And I'm moving there! I'm definitely going to have to go cross-border chocolate shopping... Also, I must remember not to bring in any Kinder eggs...

I do have some probably pretty nice panorama shots, from here and elsewhere on the trip, but this poor little computer can't handle photo editing so they'll have to wait until I come home.

I'm currently nice and warm, sitting curled up on a couch by the fire in New Zealand's "oldest purpose-built hostel." I like this one, lots! It is bizarrely chilly today though, after how hot it was yesterday. Making use of some Lambi house fire-building skills. :p