The Parents Were Here, Too!

Ben writes:
Here we are standing with Joanna's parents... on a glacier!! Yes, a GLACIER! Taking a helicopter ride onto a glacier was just one of the incredibly awesome things we did during the 10-day period when we were generously included in Jon and Polly's vacation. Now we are back in Christchurch, city of selling a car in, and in 36 hours we'll be on a plane to Australia. We did so much that a full recap might be too much, but here are some highlights at least:

-Sea kayaking in Abel Tasman National Park. We had a great morning of kayaking with a tour guide in Abel Tasman, a park near Golden Bay, where you will find the golden sands for which the area is named. We managed to get quite close to a bunch of seal colonies, and our tour guide, Banksey, was a pretty cool dude. At the end, we bundled our kayaks together and used a tarp as a sail. Pretty rad.

-Helicopter ride onto Fox Glacier. Fox is one of the two easily accessed glaciers in NZ (yes, there are glaciers here!). We took an awesome zoomy helicopter ride to the top, and then a young goofy tour guide slowly took us around, using a pick axe to cut steps into the ice, and showing us little ice caves and formations. We got to crawl through some small caves, and walk amongst tiny blue ice pools. This glacier is incredibly fast, moving between one and five meters a day, which means that it looks very different from week to week, and that our tramping around up there does not really have any ill effects. This was one of the coolest things we will ever possibly do. I would be remiss not to thank my Mom and Dad, as this particular adventure was a birthday present from them. Thank you, Mom and Dad.

-We had some non-nature adventure driving time. We visited Stuart Landsborough's Puzzing World (Ben and Jo's second time), a great tourist trap with optical illusion rooms, and a giant two story outdoor maze. We did not reattempt the maze, which had to be abandoned last time due to time constraints, but the tilted room, the giant faces of celebrities that follow you around the room, the giant/midget effect used in the Lord of the Rings... it was all grand, and then we all sat there getting frustrated with little puzzles in the lobby.
In Queenstown, we took a gondola up one of the big hills for a great view of the region, and rode little go-karts down the top part of the hill. We also watched bungee jumpers, including this one late-middle-aged dude, probably Spanish maybe, who was SO excited by the whole thing. We talked to him afterwards, and he was just elated.

-Big day at Milford Sound. First, a longish bus ride from the edge of Fiordland National Park into Milford Sound, on a specially designed bus with overhead windows, which allowed us to better appreciate the towering peaks through which we wove. The "sound" is actually a fiord, which means that it was carved by glaciers and thus has very steep walls. So, we got to take a nature cruise through this sound, to the Tasman Sea, where the waves became noticeably stronger before we turned back in. On the way out, we took in the towering hills and sheer rock walls, covered in growth, and watched sea planes fly over us. The best part, however, was when the pod of dolphins came and played alongside the boat for a while. This is as awesome as it sounds.

-After a beautiful day on the water, we had a quiet dinner, and then got on another boat (!) on Te Anau lake, just as the sun was going down, and went to a glow worm cave. The cave is very young, only twelve thousand years, and carved by a river. The inside, with its metal walkway and well-placed lights, is so perfect as to almost look artificial. We got a tour through the cave, and then onto a boat where the river was deeper. Here, our guide killed the lights, and took us further by pulling along some chains or ropes on the ceiling (I never saw them). On the walls and ceilings, sometimes quiet close, were thousands of blue glowing points, looking very much like the stars on a clear night with no light pollution. The only thing more incredible than how beautiful this is, is the life cycle of the glow worm.
Briefly: they live in caves, where they create a "hammock" out of materials much like a spider web. From this hammock, they hang little "fishing lines" which are punctuated by dewy balls -- these show us each time the worm threw up another section of the fishing line material. The glowing dot is basically excrement, but it fools the young insects whose eggs were laid in the river and flowed into the cave into thinking that they are flying up to the sky, their first instinct as they are born. Instead, they get eaten and die young. Harsh. Speaking of harsh, the glow worm is actually a larva of a fly that spends 6-9 months as larva, 2 weeks in a cocoon, and 2-3 as as a fly trying to mate. Then it dies. Of old age. Unless it is eaten by other larva.

-On the way to Dunedin, we happened upon an antique car and plane show. There were rides in open-top, 2 passenger planes, old tractors that looked like locomotives, and a bunch of motor pump things just sitting there running. A small child could easily run up to and and stick a hand in, because in NZ, they are not such babies about safety.

-The city of Dunedin is nice, and we caught some fireworks for Chinese New Year. Happy Year of the Pig, everyone. On the Otago Peninsula, we had another great day of nature tourism, beginning with a cruise of the bay in which we saw some birds, including little blue penguins, who swim like ducks (kind of), shags (ha ha), and spoon bills. Back on land, we went to the only mainland albatross colony in the world (the rest are on remote islands of difficult climate), and watched the mighty birds tend to their young and soar about. We saw one spread its wings and take off into the wind. They actually don't have very strong flapping muscles, as they mostly glide. Finally, we went to Penguin Place, a private reserve where they have constructed a bunch of covered trenches so that the guides can hilariously radio to each other about the current location of the birds as they leave or come home, and then rush us from one bunker to another. The opportunity to see yellow-eyed penguins so close up, however, was not hilarious. Well, it kind of was because penguins are as ridiculous as you'd hope, but seeing them so close was an incredible thing.

-On Jon and Polly's last night, we took in a Maori cultural show which was much better than the one we'd seen in Rotorua, and then toured one more nature preserve where we saw, among others, the kiwi itself, sticking its pointy nose into the ground of the nocturnal house in its never-ending search for worms.

-Also, we were fed very well the whole time, and got to enjoy the company of two people who we already know and like a lot, a rare thing on this trip.

So that was fun.
Thank you so much, Jon and Polly.
Everyone else: we miss you more and more.
Next: Australia.

Christchurch is not just a church

Joanna writes:

Well, it's been a bit of a while, hasn't it? And it's a bit late here right now, so this will have to be an abridged version of the past 2.5 weeks. I believe when we last left you, we were staying waaaay down south in Riverton at Granma's Growers, the small but productive farm of semi-retired couple Lindsay and Debbie. It was an interesting week we spent with them. They are not the type of people you'd expect to have an organic farm, and in fact only began farming organically after Lindsay had a cancer scare and his doctor told him he needed to stop working in agriculture. At the same time that it was really encouraging to see a different sort of folks getting into organics, it was not so fun to have the television on every waking moment of the day and eat devastatingly lifeless, limp, soggy, boiled (but organic!) vegetables every single night for supper. We did learn a good bit from them about the cancer-related reasons to go organic, though, and it was cool to be on a farm that was producing a regular harvest.
During our time there, we took some lovely walks along the southern coast (including part of the Hump Ridge--yes, snicker--track in Fiordland National Park). Ben also turned a whopping 25 years old (wow!), and we went to a local open mic for his birthday. This open mic was not your standard Cambridge event of 50 folk singers with their accoustic guitars and deep original feelings, but rather a whole rock band set-up that various folks took turns with and played almost exclusively covers of blues and alternative rock. Ben's prowess with the accordion, the guitar, the rock and roll, and the song writing (and even, briefly, the drums--watch out Abester!) was much appreciated, and it was a fun night overall.

After Riverton, we headed east along the south coast into an area called the Catlins. We visted the southernmost point of the South Island, saw a gorgeous waterfall, and did various other little hikes, before we finally finally finally saw PENGUINS! YES, REAL LIVE PENGUINS! IN THE WILD! COMING HOME TO FEED THEIR REAL LIVE BABIES! Well, we didn't see the babies, but watching the adults come surfing onto the beach and waddle-hop up a path to their nests was really fantastic, a dream come true for me. And, despite the fact that I've just spent the last year teaching children that penguins do not only live where there's ice and snow all year round, it was still very surreal to see them on a sandy beach. (For all of you bionerds, these were yellow-eyed penguins, a very rare and endangered species.)

After the Catlins, it was back inland and a long way north to see Mt. Cook, NZ's tallest mountain, as well as the other mountains of the Southern Alps. Wow. These were the most platonic mountains we have ever seen. Gorgeous. We also saw real live glaciers, which, according to some American geologists we met at the campground, are the only glaciers in the world that are actually growing. Try that on for size.

Now we've just completed our ten-day holy-cow-we-must-sell-the-car stay in Christchurch, which is NZ's second-largest city and second-best place to sell your car. And, yes, the car is sold! We weren't sure it was going to happen, but at the last practical moment, someone bit. Whew!

Christchurch itself is okay. We thought that we'd have tons of time here to catch up on our reading, journals, and, of course, this weblog, but in fact we've been incredily busy. We've been staying at a gigantic hostel on a work-for-accommodation scheme, so we work every morning from 9:30-1:00 in exchange for a bed in a dorm room (WWOOFing is a much better deal!). We have made so many beds and cleaned so many things and probably inhaled enough chemical cleansers to destroy all the good we did ourselves on the farms. We have also met some cool people, though unfortunately our roommates are the types to stay in the room all the time watching television. Like all the time. It's amazing. In the city, we've walked around a lot, seen the lovely botanic gardens and a cheesy but entertaining free play in them, gone to a fun karaoke bar, and visited the COCA--Center of Contemporary Art. It turns out that modern art actually does make us want to rock out, so we did! Ben, in his ever-diligent quest to play music as much as possible, managed to get us not one, but two gigs at a nice little venue called Al's Bar. Last night we opened for a cool little band from New Mexico and an awesome local group of youngsters. Righteous.

Tomorrow we get up wicked early, hop a train and then a bus, and meet my parents in Nelson for another circuit of the South Island. Woo-Hoo! Happy Birthday, Dad!

PS--photos coming soon, hopefully!