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.