the kea, an alpine parrot

On the way home from Milford Sound, we stopped to look at a waterfall. In the parking lot there were four keas, which are cheeky, smart, and friendly birds. They are the only alpine parrots in the world. When they fly, you can see the underside of their wings, which are red. We kept trying to get a photo of a kea in flight, but couldn't do it.

Dave had read that you want to keep them away from your car, because they will destroy the plastic around the rear view mirrors and windows. In the first photo below, you can see one of them picking at the plastic on top of a piece of metal on the pickup truck.

They kept flying/hopping from one truck to the other, but we never did get a picture of them in flight. When we got back to our car after walking around for a bit, one of them came right up to me obviously trying to get a handout.

a day trip to Milford Sound

On Boxing Day we drove to Milford Sound from Te Anau where we were staying. It's a two hour drive, and in the first hour, the road runs in the Eglington River valley. We were only a little way out of Te Anau when we got a hint of what would be a huge pleasure of the day. In the first photo you can see some purple in the middle of the field. That's a patch of lupin flowers growing alongside the river.

All along the Eglington River there were swaths of lupins. We kept stopping to take photos because each place seemed prettier than the last. Here are some of the views we saw.

Somewhere near the end of the Eglington River valley, we came across the sign in the next photo. In case you're wondering, some of the places in the Northern Hemisphere at 45 degrees north are Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis; Montreal; Bordeaux, France; Torino, Italy; the Crimea in the Ukraine; and the northern tip of Japan. In the Southen Hemisphere, the only other place where there's land at 45 degrees south besides New Zealand is South America. 45 degrees south in Argentina would be in the middle of Patagonia. Since Dunedin is close to 45 degrees south, these facts have great interest to us.

After we left the Eglington valley, we climbed over several ridges into other river systems. Below is another river.

As we passed the halfway mark to Milford Sound, it started to rain. This was actually a blessing because it activated so many waterfalls. As I've written in earlier posts, the mountains are so young and have so little soil, having been scraped clean in the ice age, vegetation grows on them very lightly. When it rains, there is almost nothing to absorb the water, so it cascades down the rocky hillsides. In the first photo, you can see the entrance to a tunnel on the road, which gives a sense of the scale of the hills.

When we got to Milford Sound, we didn't take a boat out into it. Dave had already done that last year, and after being on a boat in Doubtful Sound last month, I had had enough boats for a while. I think we made a good decision, because it was really windy and rainy when we were there.

If you'd like to see more pictures of Milford Sound, go back to our posts from December 2007. Dave's pictures of Milford Sound are in the post "Queenstown and Milford Sound" and more photos of Milford Sound in the post "Mike's trip around the South Island."

more on Christmas in the summer

A couple people have asked me what it's like to have Christmas in the summer. One notable difference is the food -- strawberries, watermelon, nice red and green peppers and lettuce and tomato salads highlighting the Christmas colors. It's hard to want to eat anything heavy because the weather is warm and the fresh fruit and vegetables are so lovely.

Apart from the food, the biggest difference is that Christmas begins the vacation season and ends the school year.

December for kiwis with kids is frantic. Not only do they need to buy Christmas presents and attend their office Christmas party, the kids' schools have their end of year awards assemblies, plays, and so forth. Universities and high schools have graduation and graduation parties. Most kiwis take a month off beginning either at Christmas or around New Years, so all those vacation preparations are happening as well. Lots of kiwis have said to me that they think Christmas would be so much more peaceful in the Northern Hemisphere, when there wouldn't be all those end-of-school-year events. Little do they know that we have done a great job creating miserably busy Decembers.

Dunedin is so quiet in early January. No meetings of any clubs or organizations, very small church attendance, no organized activities of any kind. Last year I loved it because I got so much writing done. Dave found it boring. It's somewhat like Europe where everyone takes vacation in July or August. Here the most popular vacation time is late December and the first three weeks of January. So it's true that Christmas is eclipsed to some extent by the rush to have a vacation and get prepared for it.

fishing and biking around Te Anau

Around Te Anau are a number of famous fishing rivers. Dave fished almost every day we were there, and the fish were more elusive than the last time he fished there. Here are some pictures of the rivers where he fished.

The people from whom we rented the house left us bicycles, so we biked around town and had several nice bike rides along the shores of Lake Te Anau. You can't tell from the photos, but it's a huge lake, the largest lake on the South Island and the second largest lake in New Zealand.

roadside humor

The main north-south highway in New Zealand is highway 1, which goes right through Dunedin (and which I ride my bike on to get to the university). If you go south from Dunedin on highway 1 for an hour and a half, you'll come to the town of Clinton. A half hour further is the town of Gore. Sometime in the 1990s, that stretch of highway got christened the "Presidential Highway," complete with signs at both Clinton and Gore announcing the name.

tussock

In New Zealand you hear a lot about tussock, the native grasses that covered much of the eastern half of the South Island when Europeans arrived. On our way to and from Te Anau, we went through a red tussock conservation area. In the first photo, you can see some clumps of tussock in the foreground. The wind was blowing strongly, so the tussock is being blown to the right. The blades of grass are about 18 inches long and tussock always grows in clumps. In the background, the hillside has a lot of tussock growing on it.

In the next photo, that hillside in the upper left side of the photo is covered with tussock and you can see it in the right middle part of the photo also.

In the next photo, the tussock goes on and on, blurring into a brown color.

Much of the tussock grassland was lost to farming, so there's a move on now to preserve the grasslands that remain.

A summer Christmas Day

What do New Zealanders do at Christmas in the summer time? We've been here 18 months, but we didn't experience a normal NZ Christmas last year. Last Christmas our son, Mike, was here visiting, and we went to Queenstown, a glitzy tourist town, for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. We stayed in an inner city motel, and spent Christmas day driving up Lake Wakatipu. It's a beautiful memory, but not a typical kiwi Christmas.

This year we rented a house for a week in Te Anau, a town four hours west and a little south of Dunedin. Te Anau is also a tourist town, the town closest to Milford Sound, but our house was in an ordinary quiet neighborhood. You can see just how ordinary the house is. The best part was the upstairs room, the living room, which had a deck with a view. Te Anau is a much more beautiful town than the house would indicate, and I'll do another blog post soon showing some views around town and from Dave's fishing spots.

The photo above was taken on Christmas Day, the only gray day we were there. The photo below was taken another day from the deck, and I've posted it just to give you an idea of the view from that upstairs living room. The tree in the foreground is a cabbage tree, a native New Zealand tree, which was blooming when we were there.

The upstairs living room had an electric heater and a small closed stove with a basket of coal beside it. By the outside door was a bin of coal (with Dave's fishing boots beside it). I read recently that more people in Europe and the US are heating their houses with coal. Lots of people in NZ and in our Dunedin neighborhood do it, and it makes for an odd smell outdoors in the winter. Dave grew up with a coal stove, so it reminds him of childhood. It's a smell I've never experienced before.

One of the funny things about our stay in Te Anau and our experience of Christmas is that our house was SO quiet six of the seven days we were there, but on Christmas Day someone close by played rock music with a very loud bass beat all day long. We could feel the throb of the bass throughout our house

Now, on to the question of what people in New Zealand do on Christmas Day (besides play rock music really loud). Barbecues are the tradition. On Christmas Day I walked over to the park right by our rented house and took pictures. The first picture shows a nearby house with a bunch of people barbecuing. Then the next five photos show people in the park. There was a group playing informal cricket, some people walking a dog, a father and his kids in a go cart, and another small family flying a kite.

Doubtful Sound

As I described in the previous post, to get to Doubtful Sound we drove four hours, rode across Lake Manapouri in a boat for an hour, then crossed a mountain pass in a bus, which took another hour. Near the top of the pass, they stopped the bus and let us pile out to take photos of this first glance of Doubtful Sound from about 2000 feet above the sound.

We drove down, down, down on a road with a gradient of one in five to the dock you can see below, where we got on a boat. The bus on the dock is one of three busses that brought people over the pass from Lake Manapouri.

The next two photos are taken from the same place. This is the only spot in Doubtful Sound where you can see out to the open ocean and also see back to Wilmot Pass that we came over. In the second photo, look for the notch in the hills in the background. That's Wilmot Pass.

Below is another photo with Wilmot Pass visible. It's one of about 50 pictures I took of the beautiful mountains, stacked up, gray on gray. I'll spare you the other 49, but I was entranced with the shapes.

The boat took us into one of the arms of the sound, then out toward the mouth. The photo below shows the mouth of the Sound.

As we approached the mouth of the sound, we could see the rocks that shelter the sound. Beyond those rocks is the open ocean, the Tasman Sea. The boat went briefly out into the Tasman. The swells were huge, and I immediately turned green. I was grateful we didn't stay out there very long or I would have been very sick.

The rocks at the mouth of Doubtful Sound are covered with New Zealand fur seals, as you can see on the next photo. We also saw a fjordland crested penguin, a small light colored dot on a different rock, which Dave could make out pretty clearly with his binoculars. We also saw blue penguins swimming in a group near the mouth of the sound.

Because of my propensity to get motion sick, I stayed on the outdoor deck the whole trip. People kept coming up to keep me company from time to time. The next photo shows me with Carol, our friend who was visiting from the US.

On the way back toward the dock, they cruised into one of the arms of the sound and turned off the engine. The next photo shows the place where we stopped. They asked people not to walk around and not to take photos, so everyone could enjoy the silence. It was amazing. We could hear the wind on the waves and birds in the trees a long distance away. Pristine, primordial silence.

We got to see a few waterfalls. It rains most days at Doubtful Sound, so we were really lucky that all we had were clouds that day (especially me, who stayed outside the whole time). Because it wasn't raining, we didn't see a lot of waterfalls, but below is one of the tallest ones we saw. Because there is almost no topsoil, when it rains the water rushes off the hills in waterfalls, and when the rain stops, the waterfalls stop pretty much immediately.

There was a naturalist on the boat who explained a lot of things. One of the most interesting was learning about tree avalanches. The fjords were carved by the last ice age, leaving bare rock. Very little soil has accumulated, so the trees are growing precariously. If a tree gets sodden and heavy, it falls down, crashing into the trees below it. They uproot, fall, and create an avalanche of trees. We saw a lot of them, or more accuately, we saw the results of a lot of them. In the photo below you can see how the avalanche was started by one tree at the top, then widened as the trees crashed into trees below.

The next photo shows two tree avalanches. The one on the right is about three years old, the naturalist said, and you can see the moss starting to grow on it. He said the one on the left was less than a week old.

Below are a few more views of tree avalanches at various points on Doubtful Sound.