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Tauranga is on the North Island, three hours southeast of Auckland, on the Bay of Plenty. For many years Dunedin has been the fifth largest city in New Zealand, but Statistics New Zealand recently announced that Tauranga has surpassed Dunedin in population. Big event! Dunedinites assert that the counting method wasn't accurate! Tauranga puts up billboard in Dunedin saying Tauranga has better beaches! Is more beautiful! Is better than Dunedin!
Internet war starts!
We had heard about the population issues, but the internet war started while we were visiting Tauranga and we read it about it in the Tauranga newspaper. Pretty funny.
The beaches there are gorgeous, and certainly much warmer than Dunedin's beaches. The city is growing so fast that there were traffic jams when we were there, which we never see here. A slow-growing (or no-growing) city has its advantages.
Downtown Tauranga is mostly along the water, because it's a city surrounded by water on almost every side. I was captivated by one part of the downtown, where interesting paving and tiles had been used. Ever since I visited Portugal in 2003, I have admired interesting paving and tiles. Here's what one intersection looked like:
On the sidewalks around that intersection, mosaic squares were scattered along the sidewalks. The squares were about eight feet on each side. Here are some of the ones I liked:
In early January we met a couple, Margie and Graeme, who were visiting Dunedin from the North Island. When they told us where they were from and what church they attend, I realized we would be in their area in late January and would, in fact, be attending their church one Sunday we were there. One of the recent graduates from the Presbyterian seminary where I teach has just begun to serve as minister at their church, and I wanted to attend church there to show him support. When I told them which Sunday we would be attending their church, they said they would definitely see us because they were scheduled to be ushers that Sunday.So in late January we flew to Auckland and drove about three hours south and west to the Bay of Plenty near Tauranga. The next day we went to church, and there were Margie and Graeme, as promised, handing out bulletins at the door. They invited us over for lunch after church. Their house overlooks a huge bay. On the other side of the bay, you can see a long island. In the far distance is a round hill. That's Mount Maunganui, close to Tauranga. Dave later walked around Mount Maunganui and took some great pictures, which I'll put in another blog post.
Margie works in a kiwifruit and avocado orchard. Before I go further, I have to explain that in New Zealand, "kiwi" is used to refer to the iconic flightless bird and to New Zealanders. The fruit that we call kiwis in the US are called kiwifruit here. They are originally from China, but thrive in the New Zealand climate. They are a major export fruit, and apparently all the best fruit is exported and we only get to eat the seconds. The next two photos give you a sense of what a kiwifruit orchard looks like, with Margie standing in front of the vines.
The first orchard she took us to was a yellow kiwifruit orchard. Yellow kiwifruit is fairly new here. I've never seen it in the US. I love it. It seems sweeter than the green kiwifruit. The skin is the same color, but not furry, and the fruit is yellow with a slight green tinge and a slightly different shape, more pointy, than green kiwifruit.
To convert a green kiwifruit orchard into a yellow kiwifruit orchard, yellow kiwifruit vines were grafted into an old green kiwifruit vine. In the next two photos, you can see the original (green) vine at the bottom and the two new (yellow) vines that were grafted into it.
Margie took us to a green kiwifruit orchard as well, and you can see the difference in the shape of the fruit. One of the things she explained to us at length is that there are male and female vines. The male vines are needed for the pollen produced by their flowers.
REALLY tall hedges surround a lot of kiwifruit orchards. The Bay of Plenty region is very windy (while we were there the weather was blissfully just like Maui), and wind is bad for kiwifruit because it causes the fruit to rub against each other and get damaged. The high hedges protect the fruit from the wind. The hedges also keep the orchards warmer by trapping the warmth of the sun.
The man Margie works for also grows avocados. Most of his avocado orchards are young. In the two photos below, the avocado trees (the ones with the orangish leaves) are about five years old and are planted among orange trees. The orange trees provide protection for the young avocado trees. As the avocado trees grow, first the adjacent orange trees are cut down. Then as they grow even bigger, the next closest orange trees are cut down. Then finally this orchard will be all avocado trees. They get very big, several stories tall, and are picked by people in cherry pickers.
Brighton is a small town close to Dunedin, just a little further south and east along the coast. From our house in North Dunedin, it took only twenty minutes to drive there on a Sunday afternoon in early January. The day had started out brilliantly sunny, so I thought a walk on the beach at low tide would be fun. In typical Dunedin fashion, by the time low tide had arrived in mid-afternoon, the weather had completely changed, but it wasn't raining, so we went. In the first photo, you can see the town of Brighton nestled on the hills above the beach.
After we walked for a while, we were thrilled to see a seal coming up out of the water. The seals here are New Zealand fur seals, and we saw hundreds of them on a rock at the mouth of Doubtful Sound in November. The first Europeans who lived in New Zealand were whalers and sealers. This is the closest I've gotten to one. This fellow stayed on the beach for about 10 minutes, then ambled back into the water.
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.
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."
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.
