The Wandering Tattler

Most photos taken in the "wild" except for the platypus (Sydney Aquarium), koala, amd echidna (Featherdale Wildlife Park). We did see a wild echidna and many wild koalas, and we were in the near presence of wild platypuses on Kangaroo Island. We saw and heard laughing kookaburras in many places; their mad, hystrical call is the iconic sound of Australia.

The Blue Mountains lie to the west of Sydney and separate the low coastal plain from the elevated interior. The main part of Australia is an enormous mesa, separated from the shore by a rugged series of escarpments.

Here are some images of the UNICEF bears on the plaza at Sydney's Circular Quay.

Here are some images from Sydney, Australia. I don't know how to control the order in which they appear, so I won't try to post captions for individual pictures.

We didn’t have to arrive at the Auckland airport until mid-afternoon, so this morning we drove east of the city center along the suburban park that lines the shore of Mission Bay. We spent a few hours here walking along the ocean, climbing to the top of an overlooking hill, and eating lunch at a sidewalk cafe. When we arrived at the Qantas international terminal in mid-afternoon we were able to check in and pass through security fairly quickly, although the protocol was definitely more rigorous here than at the domestic terminal. Unfortunately, our flight was delayed by the late arrival of our 747 aircraft, a development that would definitely cause problems in Los Angeles. We had originally reserved flights that would give us a 4-hour layover in LA, but the airlines had juggled schedules, leaving us only two hours to deplane at LAX, retrieve our luggage, clear customs and immigration, and check ourselves and our luggage onto the Boston-bound flight. The flight delay in Auckland meant that we’d have no more than an hour in Los Angeles to accomplish all this.

The twelve-hour flight eastward was far more difficult than our original flight from Honolulu to Sydney. There were few empty seats (there was one between Lynn and me), so neither of us could stretch out on an empty row, and we were located near one of the food-preparation areas, so during the short night, when the plane’s interior was darkened, bright light flashed on our faces whenever a flight attendant entered or left the kitchenette. The passengers in front of us had reclined their seats, and it was impossible to find a comfortable position, especially if one was over five-foot six-inches, so the economy section was filled with people silently struggling and shifting to find a tolerable posture that would allow a brief snooze. There was nothing to do but to suffer through the night, minute-by-minute, patiently confident that someday all would be well.

Undoubtedly each passenger had at some point contemplated the surreal circumstances of this flight, which left Auckland Thursday evening in the autumn and would land in California Thursday morning in the spring, but this noteworthy distinction offered little comfort to those of us coping with life in economy-class seating.

Our plane encountered daylight in the eastern Pacific and after a long descent into the LA smog, we hobbled off the plane in Los Angeles, waited twenty minutes for our luggage, and wrestled our six pieces over to immigration and customs, hoping that the screening and stamping of passports and import forms would go quickly and that none of our bags would be pulled aside for investigation. The federal authorities at LAX were mercifully efficient, and American Airlines pulled us up to the front of an incredibly long security-check line, sparing us a thirty-minute wait. Despite having to remove our shoes and empty our pockets and laptop case, we somehow managed to reach the gate for our Boston flight just as our row was called for boarding. Here we entered a plane that was completely filled with passengers, with even less leg room than on the Qantas flight, so once again, sleep was out of the question. The five hour flight to Logan Airport, however, seemed almost trivially short after our transoceanic ordeal, and soon enough we felt the predictable shock of a cool April Atlantic breeze as we wheeled our luggage out to the curbside at Logan.

Our Thomas Transportation driver made us wait thirty minutes before picking us up and taking us back to Keene, where we arrived around midnight. After a quick drive down to Hannafords supermarket (with corrective moves into the right-hand lane on Arch Street) to pick up milk, juice, and cereal, we hit the mattress and slept soundly until Friday morning. Home – at last!

This morning we walked down to the waterfront and boarded a ferry for Tiri Tiri Matangi Island. Tiri is an “open” nature reserve, whereas Kapiti was “closed” (Kapiti required special advance permission, granted only to a few people, and was closed to private boat landings). Tiri, like Kapiti, is now predator-free due to intense trapping and poisoning campaigns that have eliminated introduced mammals. Though cleared by Europeans in the nineteenth century for farming, it has been largely reforested in the last few decades, and in the absence of rats, stoats, cats, and dogs, native birds are thriving and the forest rang with their calls and songs. Tiri is a low island, so we were able to combine birding and hiking with little difficulty. On the trail to the visitor center at the center of the island we were led by an Englishwoman along the beach and then up a meandering forest track. Near the bottom of the trail we spotted two dead blue-eyed penguins. Our guide indicated that they had probably starved due to a failure of parental feeding. Otherwise, however, we enjoyed an abundance of native birds, including some endemic species that are rare or absent from the mainland. These island species are typically ground-loving creatures that have little fear of humans, so they would not fly away as we approached. We saw bellbirds, Tomtits, stitchbirds, saddlebacks, tuis, kakarikis (red-crowned parakeets), whiteheads, fantails, north island robins, purple moorhens, and – rarest of all – takahes and kokakos. Takahes are very large, flightless rails; they were nearly extinguished by introduced mammals but today about 60 individual survive. Kokakos are the largest honeyeaters, hence largest songbirds, in New Zealand. Though capable of weak flight, they move about primarily by running and jumping. Thanks to captive breeding, about 200 breeding pairs now survive, a few of which live in the wild on Tiri Tiri Matangi. We also saw a pair of Brown Teal, a critically endangered species with fewer than one thousand surviving individuals. To learn more about this endemic duck (and to hear a good example of the Kiwi accent), go to http://www.brownteal.com/.

This evening we were treated to dinner in a fine harborside restaurant by Fran Silvestri and his wife Susie. Fran, who was formerly the executive director of our local Monadnock Community Mental Health Center, is now the director of the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership; Susie is a psychiatrist and mental health administrator. They spend most of the year in Auckland, but Fran visits the States and Europe each year on business and they maintain a residence in nearby Swanzey, NH. Our daughters met at the home of a babysitter in Keene 24 years ago and have been friends ever since. Erica and Lisetta toured New Zealand in 1999 and walked many of the main scenic hiking tracks through the South Island. It was great to see Fran and Susie and to bring our New Zealand journey to a close with such a satisfying dinner visit.

This morning we visited Auckland’s War Memorial Museum (http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/). This fine museum has fine exhibits of New Zealand military history and unique flora and fauna and an exceptional collection of Maori and Polynesian art and artifacts. We were given a terrific tour by Barry, a retired gentleman who is an enthusiastic and very erudite docent. Afterwards we roamed the museum independently for a while before attending a Maori musical performance.

A few words about the Maori (pronounced “Maw-ri” with a rolled ‘r’) are appropriate at this point. The native people of New Zealand have fared better than the aboriginal peoples of many other lands colonized by Europeans. The Maori were a fierce and warlike people with a strong sense of pragmatism. They were notoriously tribal and cannibalistic, and during the years of English settlement, they may have fought more with each other than with the English. They adapted European weapons and religion, put up fierce resistance to English authority, and yet learned to negotiate with the colonials and to exploit them as trading partners. As a consequence, they were never swept away into reservations or marginalized into the realm of alcoholic unemployment. They intermarried extensively, to the point where few “pure-blooded” Maori remain today, but they also retained their language, their tribal affliations and music, and their meeting places, the marae (“muh-rye”), which include ceremonial structures, community dining halls, and gardens. They formalized their relationship to the Crown during the time of Queen Victoria in the Treaty of Waitangi, an important document that forms the basis of English-Maori relations in modern New Zealand. Unfortunately, the Maori and English versions of this document describe aboriginal sovereignty in slightly different terms, a semantic inconsistency that has imbued ethnic and political relations with a degree of ambiguity and tension. A special commission is charged with the task of applying the Treaty of Waitangi to legal cases.

New Zealand, like other nations within the British Commonwealth, does not have its own constitution, and the Queen remains the formal head of state. National offices are “Crown” agencies, and the Queen appoints a governor who is the ceremonial head of state. NZ has a parliament; the current prime minister is Helen Clark, a political scientist and leader of the Labour Party who was formerly a university lecturer. Certain government posts and parliamentary seats are reserved for Maori citizens. Aotearoa, as it is known in Maori, is an officially bilingual nation, and most public signs and government documents use both languages. School teachers must know some Maori phrases, and Maori have risen to prominence in many arenas. Perhaps the most famous of modern Maori is Tiri Te Kanewa, the great soprano, but many civic leaders, artists, and athletes are Maori. When Maori people address the general public, they typically begin with a few sentences in Maori and then continue in impeccable English, delivered with an English accent. A degree of “political correctness” prevails in government and public culture: considerable deference is paid to Maori history and cultural views, though privately some resentment of these concessions is expressed by individuals of European ancestry. Predominantly Maori neighborhoods or suburbs are usually less affluent than those that are primarily populated by European Kiwis. Museums often contain lavish exhibits documenting the Maori view of the origins of the world and of the Maori people; neighboring exhibit halls present western descriptions of the migrations that brought humans to New Zealand (about 1,000 years ago) and of the evolutionary processes that generated the country’s native flora and fauna. The institutions do not attempt to reconcile these widely disparate narratives.

Auckland, which is home to more than one quarter of New Zealand’s four million people, has become the largest Polynesian city in the world due to recent immigration. Most of New Zealands 435,000 Maoris live on the North Island, and many reside in Auckland, where they have been joined by large numbers of Samoans and other Pacific Islanders. The growing number of non-Maori Polynesians has perhaps weakened the Maoris’ special status as the primary non-European population segment.

Later this afternoon we drove up Mt. Eden, one of the 48 volcanic cones that dot the Auckland landscape. Mt. Eden is in a large park, and a one-way road brings vehicles to its grassy summit. A small herd of cattle was grazing down inside the crater, probably to suppress shrubs and tree saplings. The summit provided a commanding view of the greater Auckland region and of its convoluted harbor. Busloads of Japanese tourists came and went while we took in the sights. Road-hardened runners pounded their way to the top and paused for breathe before descending back to the city.

From our hotel we walked a couple of blocks to the largest cinema complex I have ever seen, where we ate in the food court and then viewed “Sione’s Wedding,” a comedy about a group of young Samoan men living in Auckland who are banned by a priest from attending weddings due to their drunken misbehavior. They will be allowed to attend a friend’s wedding only if accompanied by a real girlfriend; the movie follows their efforts to establish genuine relationships with women, and although the plot is formulaic and the outcome highly predictable, we enjoyed the perspective it offered of Samoan-Auckland social life.

Today we drove west of Auckland through a ring of suburbs to Waitakere Regional Park, located on a hilly, forested peninsula. We drove to a visitor center whose viewing platforms offered amazing views of coast. In front a tallwood carving (like totem pole) celebrated the phallic supremacy of Maori warriors. One certainly wouldn’t see public art like this in an American park!

We then followed one of the most terrifying roads in New Zealand to Piha Beach (where we ate lunch) and later to Bethels and Karekare Beaches (the latter was featured in the Jane Campion movie ‘The Piano.” Our route presented an extreme version of the classic NZ “scenic tourist route”: far too narrow for the 2-lane traffic it carried, zig-zagging across the walls of a heavily forested canyon with no shoulders – only overhanging cliffsides or sharp drop-offs into the abyss. Though I sounded the horn at every bend, several times we met cars coming in the opposite direction in “our lane” and only my desperate dexterity at the wheel spared our lives. We had long ago realized that we were much better driving on the left-side of the road than most Kiwis are on either side of the road, but the natives here have no fear of death and no capacity to imagine what might lie around the next curve. Even our tortuous drives along the ridge of the Banks Peninsula outside of Christchurch or into Milford Sound did not prepare us for the adrenaline rush of this experience. Having faced hazardous road conditions each day, no wonder Kiwis seem to enjoy bungy-jumping and tower-diving.* The waves along these beaches are very tall, providing spectacular surfing opportunities, but by the time we reached Bethels Beach in the late afternoon, the wind was blowing the tops off the waves, and the sands and water were deserted. The tall cliffs on the near side of the cove the sheltered this enormous beach were in deep shade and the general sense of desolation was accentuated by a sign warning of quicksand (but not indicating where this hazard might be encountered). Our trip back to Auckland city took only one hour but might have been much shorter had the names of the roads been posted at the major intersections. (The principles of road-signage for the entire road system of New Zealand seem to be based on those used in Boston). Still, we arrived safely at Ponseby Road and ate a nice meal at a restaurant named “GPK” before returning back to The New President.

* It is worth mentioning that every Kiwi's favorite expression is "No worries."

We returned to the Wellington Airport this morning and took an Air New Zealand flight to Auckland. New Zealand airports are remarkably informal and security measures are quite minimal compared to the US or even Australia. Passengers are often allowed into the gate areas (though not for international flights). Upon landing in Auckland and picking up our last rental car, we made our way north along the M-1 into Auckland to our lodgings at the The New Presidential Hotel near the harbor. After checking into our basic suite on the twelfth floor, we walked a couple of blocks down Victoria Street to Auckland’s SkyTower, tallest building in the southern hemisphere, which had dominated our hotel window view. From the top of the tower we enjoyed a commanding view of the city and its complicated topography -- like Sidney, it has many bays and harbors, many points and peninsulas, and even an isthmus, plus many grassy volcanic cinder cones. After watching some people jump from the tower (it’s a controlled fall along a zip line, but the looks on the jumpers’ faces as they hung for a few seconds in front of the observatory ranged from panic to terror), we descended, watched a multi-media presentation about Auckland (“largest Polynesian city in the world) and then strolled through the open markets by Queen Victoria Park before exploring the waterfront, which is lined by modern apartments and hotels (including a large white Hilton shaped like a pair of ships) and noisy clubs, cafes and seafood restaurants, some with live music. Mounted prominently above the esplanade is one of NZ’s entries in the America’s Cup competition, it’s long white hull gleaming above the brick plaza. The harbor is filled with sailboats and yachts, befitting Auckland’s claim to be “The City of Sails.” As we returned to our hotel, we saw people lining up for buses that would take them to a Rolling Stones concert at a suburban stadium. We ate a fine meal at the Lord Nelson Pub and Restaurant next to the hotel before retiring for the night. From our windows we have an excellent view of the SkyTower, glowing lavender in the urban night sky, and directly across the street from this hotel, in front of a car park are a pair of tall steel towers connected by a long cable which catapults thrill-seekers thirty stories into the air in an open capsule. This being a long (four-day) Easter holiday weekend, this action, accompanied by shrill screams, continued until midnight, but we were in our bed and mostly unconscious by then.

This morning we took the Wellington cable car up to the botanical garden, walked about the garden a bit, and then drove down to the harbor to spend some time in Wellington’s famous Te Papa (national) museum. This museum has wonderful Maori exhibits, as well as excellent representations of European settlement and of the hybrid culture that has evolved in this country. Here I was finally able to find, with help from the staff of the museum gift shop, a couple of excellent recordings of traditional Maori music, performed with traditional instruments and accompanied by historic Maori chants and songs.

Midafternoon, we left the museum to greet two Keene émigrés, David and Dana Orsman. Dave worked in the College Relations office at KSC, where his job of writing about and photographing professional activities and cultural and recreational events took him into every office and dormitory and allowed him to become one of the most widely known (and admired) individuals on the campus. He’s a native Kiwi who had lived in Tonga in his childhood and, after developing a passion for mountaineering and climbing, had spent considerable time in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, where he met a lovely lady climber from Connecticut. Dave and Dana (a Boston University graduate) were eventually married in North Conway, New Hampshire, and after living for a while in New Zealand, returned to New England so that Dave could work at KSC and Dana could pursue a master’s degree at Antioch New England. Both are thoughtful, articulate, warm, interesting, and immensely likeable people, and their departure from Keene this past fall caused widespread regret. Both Dave and Dana are far more physically active than either of us, and New Zealand is obviously a good place for people with such enthusiasm for the outdoors. On Sunday, Dave was planning to run for about 3 hours along a ridge-top path above the city in preparation for an upcoming marathon; Dana would accompany him on her mountain bike. Both of them appear to miss New England, however, and both suggested that they might return to the States within a few years. We walked about Wellington, where Dana teaches Maori and Samoan children and Dave works for Land Transport, a Crown (national) agency. They showed us some of the major new developments in the waterfront area, including some public artwork, and took us to a city museum where we viewed paintings, photographs and sculptures by an eccentric Australian artist. We drove up a remarkably narrow road to the summit of Mount Victoria, highest point in the city, to enjoy a panoramic view of Wellington’s many hills and harbors, and then drove to their home suburb of Tawa, where we ate at a Thai restaurant and visited with them (and their cat) at their comfortable home. Our return to the Mecure was quick and uncomplicated, and when we tried to watch a movie on television, we both promptly fell asleep.

We arrived back in Keene after midnight (in the early morning hours) of Friday, April 21, after a wearying 18 hours of travel, not counting time spent in the Auckland, Los Angeles, and Boston airports. I'll be posting more descriptions of our last week in New Zealand soon and after that will begin to post some images form Australia and New Zealand (and maybe a few more from Hawaii).

I've also established a word-verification requirement for commenting on this blog, since a spam artist has been hitting it recently, presumably using automated techniques. All you'll have to do is type in the string of letters that appears on your screen as a graphic image. Hope that won't be too much of an obstacle.

I'll start responding to your regular emails and to your blog comments in the next week, I hope. Thanks for your interest.

Lynn and I are still jet-lagging phenomenally, especially me.

Kapiti Island: April 14

After getting too little sleep, we arose early on our first morning in Wellington and drove on the M-1 to the attractive coastal resort town of Paraparaumu, about 40 minutes north of the capital. Here we boarded a small boat, along with about 25 other people, and were taken across a narrow strait to famous Kapiti Island. (First, a word about the remarkable way boats are launched in New Zealand. We boarded the vessel while it was perched on a trailer attached to an unusual tractor. The tractor had very tall wheels and its engine and driver’s seat were elevated high above the wheels. The tractor pulled us down onto the beach, where it turned around and backed us into the water to a depth of about 4 feet. There it gave the boat a shove that set it backwards off the trailer into the water. This method requires firm sand but has the benefit of reducing the number of docks and moorings required, as most boats are taken out of the water at the end of each day.)

Kapiti is a rocky island of about 8 square miles. It is now covered almost entirely by a thick forest of native trees, as it was before the Maori arrived. The Kapiti Maori were a particularly fierce, warlike tribe (the Maori were generally formidable warriors) who raided and enslaved mainland Maori and were enthusiastic cannibals. This group did considerable burning and clearing and maintained control of Kapiti until the mid-nineteenth century, after which British settlers displaced the Maori and converted much of the island to farmland, a remarkable feat considering the general steepness of the land, which rises to a summit of about 1800 feet. Needless to say, the clearing and burning of the land, along with the introduction of domestic animals, as well as rats and bush-tailed possums from Australia, led to the demise of almost all native wildlife (birds). The possums were probably the worst pest, consuming enormous amounts of native tree foliage and fruits and killing much of the forest.

After nearly a century of restoration work and – in the late 20th century – the removal of all rats and possums, the native forest is reclaiming the island, which has become one of NZ’s most important wildlife refuges. On Kapiti Island native birds, including most of the country’s endemic species, are now thriving. In fact, some of these species are now extinct on the mainland. Among the management policies that have permitted this revival of natural New Zealand on Kapiti are a restriction on visitation (only 50 people can visit Kapiti each day) and strict monitoring of everything brought onto the island (our bags were searched to confirm that we weren’t accidentally bringing along rodents or stoats). I had applied for a permit to visit the island many months before, and we were very pleased that the day was clear and dry, since the government does not offer refunds if the permits cannot be used due to bad weather.

Lynn and I managed to see most of the endemic birds as well as to reach the summit, which required a strenuous effort. We saw tuis, stitchbirds, saddlebacks, NZ robins, kakas (large red parrots), wekas (large flightless rails), takahes (huge flightless iridescent purple moorhens), kerurus (enormous, strikingly colored pigeons), kakarikis (red-crowned green parakeets), bellbirds, whiteheads, NZ kingfisher, and tomtits. We did most of our birding in the early stages of our visit, and then set about the task of reaching the summit, from which we could see the South Island quite clearly across the rough waters of Cook Strait. Given the brief time allotted for our visit, we had to hurry down and couldn’t do much birding on our return to the rocky beach. Our boat picked us up at 3:00 pm and after the 15-minute cruise back to Paraparaumu, the tractor picked up our boat and pulled it up onto the beach. Despite our exhaustion, this was an immensely satisfying trip.

Our return drive to the hotel was much simpler than our initial trip from the airport. Wellington is a small city (about 250,000) but its built on steep hillsides around an extremely convoluted series of bays and peninsulas. It has many one-way streets, and not all streets are clearly labeled. After successfully finding our hotel on the narrow Terrace, we ventured out once more to find a seafood restaurant down by the bay. When we finally retired for the evening, we quickly fell asleep.

Wellington: April 15

This morning we took the Wellington cable car up to the botanical garden, walked about the garden a bit, and then drove down to the harbor to spend some time in Wellington’s famous Te Papa (national) museum. This museum has wonderful Maori exhibits, as well as excellent representations of European settlement and of the hybrid culture that has evolved in this country. Here I was finally able to find, with help from the staff of the museum gift shop, a couple of excellent recordings of traditional Maori music, performed with traditional instruments and accompanied by historic Maori chants and songs.

Midafternoon, we left the museum to greet two Keene émigrés, David and Dana Orsman. Dave worked in the College Relations office at KSC, where his job of writing about and photographing professional activities and cultural and recreational events took him into every office and dormitory and allowed him to become one of the most widely known (and admired) individuals on the campus. He’s a native Kiwi who had lived in Tonga in his childhood and, after developing a passion for mountaineering and climbing, had spent considerable time in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, where he met a lovely female climber from Connecticut. Dave and Dana (a Boston University graduate) were eventually married in North Conway, New Hampshire, and after living for a while in New Zealand, returned to New England so that Dave could work at KSC and Dana could pursue a master’s degree at Antioch New England. Both are thoughtful, articulate, warm, interesting, and immensely likeable people, and their departure from Keene this past fall caused widespread regret. Both Dave and Dana are far more physically active than either of us, and New Zealand is obviously a good place for people with such enthusiasm for the outdoors. On Sunday, Dave was planning to run for about 3 hours along a ridge-top path above the city in preparation for an upcoming marathon; Dana would accompany him on her mountain bike. Both of them appear to miss New England, however, and both suggested that they might return to the States within a few years. We walked about Wellington, where Dana teaches Maori and Samoan children and Dave works for Land Transport, a Crown (national) agency. They showed us some of the major new developments in the waterfront area, including some public artwork, and took us to a city museum where we viewed paintings, photographs and sculptures by an eccentric Australian artist. We drove up a remarkably narrow road to the summit of Mount Victoria, highest point in the city, to enjoy a panoramic view of Wellington’s many hills and harbors, and then drove to their home suburb of Tawa, where we ate at a Thai restaurant and visited with them (and their cat) at their comfortable home. Our return to the Mercure was quick and uncomplicated, and when we tried to watch a movie on television, we both promptly fell asleep.

On to New Zealand: March 31, 2006
This morning we took an early shuttle back to the Sydney Airport. As usual, pre-boarding security was less rigorous than in the States, even though we were leaving on an international flight. As usual, Qantas provided exceptional service in economy class, even though our departure was delayed by a power failure in the departure terminal that prevented immigration officials from screening the two last passengers for almost an hour. The one-hundred-sixty minute flight was uneventful, but we enjoyed spectacular views of the Southern Alps as we flew across the mid-section of the South Island in our approach to Christchurch. We were heartened by the extremely friendly manner of the New Zealand immigration officials who looked at our passports (compare that to the ill temper of most American passport officials and the bored indifference of the French passport stampers), and even the extremely rigorous quarantine screening for biological agents by the New Zealand customs officials was carried out with good cheer. If the Kiwis find that you have lied about bringing hiking boots into the country, they will confiscate them and fine you $200 instantly or even more for serious attempts to breach their safeguards against the introduction of alien organisms or disease agents.

We picked up some NZ dollars from an airport ATM, picked up our rental car, and soon were on our way northward to Kaikoura. Our egress from Christchurch was simple and direct. The city lies in the rainshadow of the central mountains, and the landscape we saw initially reminded us very much of California – dry, grassy hills with many vineyards – except for the extreme clarity of the air. We also saw more sheep along the M-1 than probably live in all of California. As we drove northward, traffic thinned out and the landscape became more dramatic. The place names on road signs were either English or Maori; the latter resembled Hawaiian place names, requiring a mental shift from the aboriginal names so common in Australia. After two hours of driving, we followed the highway through several tunnels and along a serpentine course above a rocky shoreline. Dramatic cliffs rose from the sea, and just before we saw Kaikoura, an eagle or large dark hawk flew up from the road and into the forest, dropping its prey on the road.

Kaikoura lies on a rocky peninsula jutting into the Pacific. It is a a tiny (population 2,500) resort community whose primary virtues are a spectacular setting combining mountains and ocean and direct proximity to some impressive marine wildlife. Our room at the Panorama Motel has a terrific, unobstructed view of a wide cove and the rocky shore opposite. Tomorrow we’ll go out on a Maori vessel to look for sperm whales, orcas, and albatrosses; in the afternoon we may explore a nearby fur seal colony.


Kaikoura: April 1

In Kaikoura the days before our arrival had been windy and rainy, but todaywas sunny and dry, with flat seas. We took two cruises out of Kaikoura, one for whale-watching and one for albatross-watching. We didn’t need to go far from shore, since the continental shelf extends only one or two kilometers: beyond that point the sea floor declines very steeply (as in Monterey Bay) into a deep canyon. The waters off Kaikoura are therefore the site of strong upwelling currents which bring nutrients into the sunlit surface waters, which support an extremely rich marine community. At the top of this food web are dolphins, fur seals, sperm whales, and albatrosses and other seabirds. This abundant wildlife is the basis for the present economy of Kaikoura, a former whaling community.

This morning we went out on a Maori vessel, a modern twin engine catamarin holding about 30 passengers. We saw three adult male sperm whales resting on the surface. Their appearance and behavior were radically different from the humpbacks we’ve seen in New England (nd Hawaii. These are deep-diving whales that spend about 10 minutes breathing at the surface between half-hour expeditions into the abyssal depths where they consume giant squid and large sharks. They lie stationary at the surface, about half of their length exposed as they breathe frequently, their exhalations projecting forward at about 45 degrees, apparently the signature of the species. They dive slowly, their bodies oriented almost vertically before they submerge completely. These males may remain near New Zealand for two or more decades, awaiting an opportunity to travel to the tropical seas where female sperm whales live. These are very big animals, substantially longer and heavier than humpbacks but much less playful and demonstrative. On this trip we also saw several albatrosses at a distance and a colony of endangered New Zealand fur seals that were rearing young pups on rocky islands near the shore.

Albatrosses, which we had previously seen only off Kilaeua Point in Hawaii, are generally southern hemisphere birds of immense size, and we wanted to see more of them, so as soon as we returned to port we jumped on a smaller vessel with two other couples for an “albatross encounter.” Captain Gary took us out a kilometer or so and then “chummed” up some extraordinary seabirds by throwing a wire-mesh cage containing oily fish meat overboard. Within seconds albatrosses began to arrive, along with several giant petrels. The relationship of an albatross to gannets, boobies, and pelicans is that of a Boeing 747 to a 737. Albatrosses are immense! At least two albatross species, representing four subspecies, splashed into the water to compete for our bait. The larger of the species was the Wandering Albatross, which has the longest wingspan of any flying bird in the world. Old records indicated a record wingspan of just under 11 feet for this species, but current records suggest some individuals may achieve 13 foot wingspans, quite a bit longer than that of a California condor. These birds were breeding over a thousand miles away, and most of them probably had left chicks on tropical islands while they searched for seafood. They can travel several thousand miles to find fish for which they dive, often to considerable depths (where they often become hooked on long-lines set for swordfish and tuna). They can afford to make such extended foraging flights because their travel mode, called “dynamic soaring,” is extremely efficient. Using updrafts from ocean swells and waves, they follow a looping course over great tracts of ocean, only rarely flapping their wings. They are the paragon of elegance in motion, but at close range they are extremely vulgar creatures: snapping at each other with 8-inch long bills, aggressively trying to drive each other away from this unnatural food source, they issue long, guttural vocalizations, somewhat between a bark and a growl but extended into long nuanced, angry “phrases.” At one point we had nearly 20 albatrosses around the boat, many of them so close we could easily have touched them if we hadn’t been shy of their long bills. The second albatross species was one of the Shy Mollymawks: it was almost as large as its wandering sister but had a slightly smaller wingspan. In the middle of the noisy feeding frenzy were several Giant Petrels, an atypical, gigantic representative of an abundant group of seabirds: the body size of most petrel species is somewhere between those of a swallow and a dove). It was the most aggressive species we saw, holding its own with the enormous albatrosses. Several other species of petrels and shearwaters showed up, but the albatrosses and giant petrels stole the show. It was a bizarre but exhilarating experience, and it was odd to consider that these birds might well be regurgitating our chum to their chicks in a few days on a coral atoll a thousand miles away. On our way back to shore we saw two species of dolphins, one of which was the extremely rare New Zealand endemic, Hector’s dolphin, the smallest of the world’s dolphin species. Both types of dolphin were very playful and acrobatic and made several passes at our boat, like aquatic Blue Angels, streaking just beneath the water or curling up above its surface in graceful arcs.

We definitely got our money’s worth from these boat trips. In the late afternoon we walked along the top of the cliffs on the peninsula north of Kaikora. We could see snow on the peaks of the Southern Alps to our west, and in the dimming light we spotted some New Zealand shelducks in a pasture at the top of the cliffs.

Kaikoura to Christchurch: April 2

We left Kaikoura about ten in the morning for the two-hour drive back to Christchurch, where we visited a weekly Sunday outdoor public market at the Ricarton Race Track, which featured local farm produce, woolen products, and fine Maori crafts. This afternoon we took an antique tram tour of the inner part of the city, which departed from its central Cathedral Square. We walked through the city’s Arts Center, a former college campus (of the enclosed English style), now converted into artist’s studios, galleries, shops, and theaters. We also browsed through an open-air crafts-market next to the Arts Center.

We’re staying in the Grand Chancellor Hotel for three nights in the center city. It’s a very nice, comfortable hotel with a great shower. At twenty-two stories, it is one of the taller buildings in this city of 350,000 people. Internet service is very expensive in the hotel, however, so we’ll check our email at one of the several internet cafes nearby.




Banks Peninsula: April 3, 2006

We drove to the coastal hills to the east of Christchurch, and there we rode a gondola up to the top of Cavendish Peak overlooking the Banks Peninsula. This mountainous peninsula, named after Captain Cook’s famous botanist, was formed from two major volcanic craters which eroded into a deeply convoluted, steep-sided land mass. We followed the windy, narrow Summit Road aross the peninsula, gaining spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean and several deep, sinuous coves which extended into the interior of the peninsula. Our ultimate goal was the small resort town of Akaroa, very quiet at this time of year but still able to provide tea and ice cream to weary travelers. We spent most of the day driving our car, trying to stay on Summit Road, an “alternative” tourist route which offered brilliant scenery but no turnouts from which to enjoy the views. It takes a little over an hour to drive from the center of Christchurch to Akaroa via the most direct route, but our meandering thread of pavement, which followed the highest ridges on the peninsula, permitted only gradual progress towards Akaroa Harbor. The steep rocky hills were covered by short grasses and patches of shrubby vegetation and forest. We saw an Australasian Harrier hanging in the strong winds that swept across the peninsula, occasionally swooping down to the ground as it hunted for dinner. In Akaroa we found a statue commemorating Frank Worsley, who captained Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, which was crushed by sea ice in Antarctica in 1915. He subsequently performed perhaps the world’s most astonishing feat of nautical navigation by leading Shackleton and a few other men on a 28-foot life boat over 800 miles from the frozen ice shelf to South Georgia Island, taking star sightings through rare breaks in perpetually stormy skies on a small boat that was pitched about by relentless 8-foot swells. The seal and whale-hunters on South Georgia sent a larger boat to pick up the men whom Shackleton had left behind, and no one perished. Having read accounts of Shackleton’s ordeal and having visited an exhibit of large photographs taken by Shackleton’s photographer in a Seattle museum which included a full-scale replica of the life boat, a simulation of its motion, and examples of the primitive instruments used by Worsley to take his star measurements, I was very pleased to find this monument to such a heroic genius.

On our drive back to Christchurch I was struck again by the madness of kiwi drivers, who seem to believe they are all Grand Prix racers and that the windier the road, the less relevant the posted speed limits. Since most NZ roads have a single lane for each direction and seldom follow a straight or flat course for more than 50 meters, traffic piles up behind an American driver who travels only slightly faster than the official speed limit (but far faster than his better judgement would mandate).

Arthur’s Pass: April 4, 2006
Today we decided to drive as little as possible and to take one of New Zealand’s most splendid rail tours, the TranzAlpine passenger train that runs westward from Christchurch across the agricultural Canterbury Plains and up along a series of river canyons to the high peaks and rainforest of the Southern Alps. Remarkably, the person assigned the seat next to ours was a pediatrician from Mt. Ascutney, VT, just a few miles from Keene. We enjoyed both the increasingly monumental scenery and our conversation with Kathy from Vermont. About 10:30 am the train delivered us to Arthur’s Pass, a village with a general store, two cafes, a national park visitor center, and several small hotels and hostels. It was raining when we arrived, and it continued to rain for almost 4 hours. We’d brought our rain gear and hiking boots, however, so we figured we were ready for the weather and the terrain. After lunch in the general store, where we waited in vain for a kea to appear, we set off on two hikes to view waterfalls at close distance. From the pass itself we could actually see a dozen or more waterfalls, all running full blast as a result of the day’s rainstorm. Our paths (the Bridalvail and Devil’s Punchbowl Tracks) took us up and down rocky paths through a very rich temperature rain forest. The ground was very wet (and in many places the trial had become a small creek), the vegetation was saturated with rain, the waterfalls created their own showers, and the sky, of course, continued to leak, but as we worked our way up and down the slopes of these river canyons, we began to perspire heavily. Our rain coats and rain pants didn’t allow our clothes to breathe, so by the end of our hike our pants and shirts were as wet as they would have been if we’d just walked through the rain without any protection.

The trees and the ground were completely covered with mosses and lichens; we saw none of the large epiphytes that had been so conspicuous in the Hawaiian and Queensland rainforests, but the total epiphyte mass on each tree here might have been as great as in those places. There were no palm trees or bromeliads in these forests, and the tree species were not familiar to us, except from text descriptions of southern hemisphere flora. Along one trail a small black and white bird approached me, landing on the ground and walking and flying towards me. I took out my Canon with its 70-300 telephoto lens, but the bird was soon so close that I couldn’t focus on it. At one point, as I tried to center it in my viewfinder, it disappeared from view as it landed on my camera lens. It was amazingly inquisitive and tame, and I had to shoo it away in order to take a picture. Upon our return to Christchurch, I pulled out Robinson and Heather’s guide to NZ birds and found that it was a New Zealand Robin, an “uncommon endemic” songbird. This sighting partly compensated for our failure to find a kea, the world’s only alpine parrot, which is “always present” around the Arthur’s Pass general store and café. These large, robust, and notoriously assertive birds chose not to appear on the day of our visit to Arthur’s Pass.

As we ended our hike the sun broke through and a beautiful rainbow appeared above the village. We spent part of our train ride back to Christchurch on the open viewing platform, trying to capture impressions of the dramatic scenery on the Olympus. The route carries the train through 16 tunnels and over 9 viaducts before descending to the Canterbury plain, which is dominated by sheep and venison farms. We enjoyed an excellent seafood meal before retiring for the night. Our waiter was a young American from Westchester, PA.

Oamuru: April 5
We took a walk through Christchurch’s wonderful botanical garden this morning. The garden, which is part of a very large public park, contains some immense old trees, including several Giant Sequoias. The Avon River, which runs through central Christchurch, meanders along one side of the botanical garden, and we watched several punts filled with tourists pass by, each powered by a young man wearing a vest and bowtie and pushing on a long pole. After checking out of the Grand Chancellor Hotel, which had been a very comfortable residence, we drove south on highway 1 toward Dunedin, a somewhat smaller coastal city. We had planned to visit the royal albatross and yellow-eyed penguin colonies on the Otago Peninsula outside of Dunedin, but Lynn had read that superior viewing conditions prevailed at Oamuru, north of Dunedin, so we stopped there in mid-afternoon, killed a little time wandering the streets, admiring the large penguin statue in the town centre, looking at New Zealand woolen goods, and buying dinner at a local Countdown supermarket. At five o’clock we drove out to a beach where yellow-eyed penguins are nesting on the cliffs. These small penguins spend the day fishing offshore, often swimming 30-60 miles per day. Just after 5 pm they come ashore, bobbing in on the surf and climbing tentatively out of the water. They pause on the beach, as if unsure of their next move, but eventually all of them make their way across the sand and kelp to the vegetation at the foot of the cliff. They spend considerable time climbing the steep cliff, following paths and tunnels through the shrubs and across the rocky surface, eventually emerging near the top of the cliff, almost one hundred feet up. Here they call to each other, locate their mate, and seek out their nest site. They are handsome critters, dressed in penguin tuxedos with yellow heads and eyes and colorfully patterned bills. They approach within ten feet of the watchers on the boardwalk, often pausing in the open before they disappear into their shelters.

On the boardwalk we met a warm, interesting couple from Cooperstown, NY. Barbara is an environmental educator, while Bill runs an aquatic biology field station on the lake in Cooperstown for the SUNY system and teaches at the university in Oneonta. Barbara’s camera died while she was trying to photograph the penguins, so I promised to send them some pictures. We’ll try to meet when we are in Cooperstown this August for Glimmerglass Opera.

After watching the yellow-eyed penguins for an hour, we drove a mile to a pier close to town where a colony of blue-eyed penguins are nesting. These small penguins come ashore from their daily foraging trips after dark in a protected reserve shared with fur seals and enormous Hooker sea lions. We accompanied a guide into a viewing area where we saw about 35 birds emerge from the sea and make their way to their nests. These were the second and third penguin species we had seen in the wild, after the fairly (little) penguins of southern Australia.

We drove on to Dunedin, which lies in a coastal valley surrounded by very tall hills. We were to spend two nights in a modest hotel where the M1 enters the valley.

Dunedin and the Taieri Gorge: April 6
This morning we walked about downtown Dunedin, which was founded by Scottish settlers. At the center of the city is the Octagon, surrounding a small plaza with a fountain, an open-air market, and a statue of poet Robert Burns beneath a cathedral. Dunedin has many old Edwardian and Victorian public buildings and residences, but the crown jewel of the city is the railroad station, an incredibly ornate and heavily ornamented edifice with Daulton tile floors and stained glass windows. After lunch in a sidewalk café on the Octagon we boarded the Taeiri Gorge train for an afternoon ride up a river valley. The train passed over many viaducts and through several tunnels, each of which was described in loving and eloquent detail by an elderly train manager who provided a thoroughly scholarly narration. The scenery along the rocky gorge was quite interesting but not as grand as the views we’d enjoyed on the TranzAlpine train a few days earlier. After the heavy driving of the previous day, however, we were glad to let someone else do the driving. The train stopped in several places to allow us to get out and stretch our legs, finally letting us disembark in an isolated, windy grassland with scattered rock outcroppings while the locomotive was transferred to the opposite end of the train in preparation for pulling us back in the opposite direction to Dunedin. We enjoyed a nice dinner in a restaurant named “A Cow Named Bertha,” where we visited with two young English couples (from London and Oxford) before returning to our Spartan quarters in the Panorama Motel for the night.

Dunedin to Invercargill: April 7

Today drove the ‘Scenic Coastal Route” from Dunedin to the southernmost mainland city in New Zealand, Invercargill, another Scottish-Kiwi community. This lengthy road meanders through sheep farms, forested hills, and small resort communities along the rugged coast. We turned off on a four mile-long unpaved spur to a high, narrow peninsula called Nugget Point, where fur seals and sea lions roost on a series of jagged islets far beneath a lighthouse, keeping company with shags (cormorants), sooty shearwaters, and yellow-eyed penguins (although the latter were not visible at this time of day). A narrow dirt road led to a small dirt parking lot high on the side of the cliff; from there we followed a foot path far above the sea to a viewing platform by the lighthouse, where we met a family from Switzerland and a young woman from San Diego. On one of the beaches we saw pied stilts and dark black variable oystercatchers.

After four hours driving on this hilly and largely untrafficked road, during which we passed several million sheep, quite a few New Zealand harriers, and one pukeko (a large, highly iridescent moorhen or gallinule), we arrived in Invercargill in time to visit the Southland Museum, an extremely nice natural history and art museum whose top attraction is the Tuatarium. Invercargill, a small attractive, comfortable city with impressive parks, is the center of an extensive agricultural region, but it does not qualify as a vibrant center of the arts and entertainment, and few new developments in New Zealand pop culture are likely to arise here. Clearly the museum is the town’s top attraction, and it features modest but superbly well presented exhibits on NZ natural history and cultural history, as well as some artifacts and photographs from Admiral Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition.

The tuatarium is the museum’s unique asset, however, and that is what had first attracted my attention to this obscure town. This modern facility is home to one of the oddest reptiles on the planet, the tuatara. I’ve been describing tuataras to my Vertebrate Zoology students for years, trying to help them understand that this little beast is not a lizard but a distinctive kind of reptile, the most evolutionarily, taxonomically isolated reptile alive today. Two species of tuatara survive today, both of them found only on a few isolated New Zealand islands, both of them highly endangered. The animal’s skull is strikingly different from that of other reptiles, and it lives in habitats that are much colder than those of most other reptiles, feeding on the invertebrates that populate the guano deposits of large seabird colonies. Invercargill’s tuatarium has about 20 animals (both species are represented), including one that is probably more than a century old and others just recently hatched from eggs produced by the museum’s breeding animals. These creatures, which can reach more than a foot in length, live in a a series of giant terraria that form one side of the museum building, surrounded on both internal and exterior walls by bright floor-to-ceiling glass walls. I took many photographs and met an Australian wildlife biologist and photographer who had traveled to Invercargill for the same reason. I also met Lindsay Hazley, the zoologist who initiated the museum project and has promoted tuatara conservation efforts on several predator-free offshore islands. Lynn, needless-to-say, was underwhelmed by the whole affair, despite the monumental tuatara stature that stands outside the museum’s main entrance.

We retired to extremely comfortable quarters in the Tower Lodge Motel, where we made dinner and also did a laundry. Traveling abroad for many weeks requires the reuse of clothing to a degree we never tolerated at home, so finding laundry facilities in a hotel is always a pleasant surprise.

Invercargill to Queenstown: April 8

Today we drove north into the interior of Southland, through hiller country dominated by sheep and deer farms, finally reaching the mountainous region surrounding Lake Wakatipu and the resort town of Queenstown. The mountains here are part of the Southern Alps, a long range of very steep peaks that runs the length of the South Island, from north to south, close to its western (Pacific) shores. This a very dramatic landscape, carved into fiords, cirques and U-shaped valleys during the Pleistocene, today covered with ice fields, glaciers, and lakes, and cloaked in extremely thick rainforest. The prevailing winds are westerlies that bring immense quantities of rain and snow to the western slopes of these mountains, and on the night of April 7 had brought an unusually early snowfall that had covered the mountains with a white blanket down to about 600 meters. The snow accentuated the contours of these towering, serrated peaks and delineated each set of ridges. The effect was stunning, and we pulled off the road on many occasions to use our cameras.

Queenstown a small town dedicated to tourismi and recreation, lies on the north shore of a very large lake. It rises up into into steep hills, and a gondola carries visitors up to a restaurant and observatory about 600 meters above town. Queenstown is the place where Western bungy-jumping was invented, and it remains a primary destination for thrill-seekers who enjoy hurling themselves off tall surfaces, jet-boating, mountain-biking, and skiing. It also serves as a “base-camp” for those heading into the massive, nearly-roadless Fiordland National Park for trekking or cruising on Milford or Doubtful Sounds. We checked into our budget hotel and then rode the gondola to the top of the ridge overlooking the lake and town. While we were hiking along the top of this ridge to a lookout point, it began to rain; soon the rain turned to snow and we returned to our hotel without having enjoyed a clear view from our alpine vantage point. The Thomas Hotel was an older, no-frills establishment, but our room had large windows overlooking the lake, and we found we could easily overlook the hotel’s deficiencies.

Milford Sound: April 9

This morning we departed Queenstown about 9 am for the four-hour drive to Milford Sound. The first two hours of this drive were along fairly flat but windy roads. The last hour or two took us through increasingly rugged countryside as we headed west into the Southern Alps and Fiordland NP. The views became increasingly spectacular, and we pulled off frequently to admire the landscape. We drove along cold, deep lakes, through rainforest, across plains of giant tussock grass, and beneath towering, nearly vertical rock walls, climbing gradually until we reached the entrance to the famous Homer Tunnel. The West Coast had been hit by a major autumn storm overnight, which had dumped up to six feet of snow in the highest elevations; lesser amounts of snow extended down to low elevations that usually don’t receive snow until midwinter. We encountered six to eight inches of snow on the ground as we ascended to the eastern tunnel entrance and saw that the road had just been plowed. Homer Tunnel is long and narrow, with unlined walls and ceilings; it angles strongly downward through the granite ridge toward the fiord on its west side. Like many bridges in New Zealand, this tunnel allows only one direction of traffic at a time.

The traffic lights controlling entry to the tunnel had just turned red before our arrival, and knowing that we’d have to wait nearly 15 minutes before entering the tunnel, we pulled off the road to look for keas, which are often reported from the tunnel’s east entrance. The endangered kea, the world’s only alpine parrot, is a very large, robust bird that is reputed to have one of most intelligent of all birds. With its inquisitive, experimental temperament and an extremely long, deeply curved bill, it is notorious for carrying off hiking boots and cameras and for stripping the rubber molding from automobile windshields. In contrast to our experience at Arthur’s Pass, good fortune was with us today, and a pair of the giant green parrots were playing in the snow just beside the tunnel entrance. They walked across the road and obligingly posed on some rubble left when an avalanche carried away part of the tunnel a few years ago. I was able to get some terrific shots of these birds with my Canon.

The lights turned green, and we passed downhill through the tunnel into the deep glacial valley below. The narrow road snakes along the sides of a river valley through thick rainforest. The vertical cliffs above were lined with scores of ephemeral waterfalls, and we could see many signs of past avalanches and rock slides. Eventually we arrived in the village of Milford Sound and saw the sound itself. The view was just as overwhelming as we’d been led to expect, due to the exceptional height and steepness of the fiord walls (they rise almost vertically about one mile above the water), the brilliant snow fields on their upper heights, the torrents of water cascading down after the recent rains, and the thick horizontal bands of mist that curled about the mid-elevations of the dark rock walls, high-lighting a long succession of parallel vertical ridges. It was a captivating sight.

We boarded the dark blue two-masted Milford Mariner at 4:30 pm, along with about 40 other passengers, and as the vessel pulled away from the dock we placed our luggage in our cabin, which opened to the outside of the boat, and joined the rest of the eager fiord explorers in the dining area for introductions and light refreshment. The group included a set of young people who had just finished walking the Hollyford Track and another just off the Milford Track, several groups of Americans, some Australians, a Japanese couple, and some folks from New Zealand, the UK, and Australia. We had dinner with a delightful young couple from Glasgow, Scotland, and later enjoyed conversation with Sandy, one of the local Kiwi nature guides, a former school teacher with a passionate devotion to biological conservation and a strongly intellectual manner. She was very knowledgeable about the glacial geology of the Southern Alps, about the native flora and fauna, and about the introduced species that were eroding New Zealands unique endemic species. The Mariner’s captain, we discovered, had formerly lived in Stow, Vermont, and on Nantucket, Massachusetts. We also met a lady from Auckland who had grown up in San Francisco. Before dinner we were allowed to cruise a local cove in a small tender with a guide or to paddle a kayak on the sound. Several of the young people dove into the icy water so that they could brag about swimming in Milford Sound. Dinner was a feast, of course, and after dinner Sandy presented an amusing and informative slide show about the human and natural history of the Sound; she included an admonition to rid the country of sixty-million bush-tailed possums, a noxious introduction from Australia that is aggressively destroying forests and forest birds.

Milford Sound and Queenstown: April 10

The previous three days had been stormy on Milford Sound, but the waters were calm last night, allowing sound sleep. Lynn and I arose early and enjoyed a substantial breakfast before moving out to the front deck. The captain started the engines and we moved northwest to the mouth of the Sound and out into the Tasman Sea, where strong swells rocked the boat and strong winds kept us hanging on to rails. After the boat had returned to the calmer waters of the Sound, the captain took us directly to a large waterfall, placing the bow of the vessel almost directly beneath the cascade, which was significantly taller than Niagara Falls. The saltwater of the Sound, which is almost 900 feet deep, is covered by several meters of freshwater, whose high tannic acid content blocks light from the fertile salt water below. As a result, there isn’t a lot of biological activity in the Sound, but it is home to NZ fur seals, Fiordland penguins, and a variety of deep-water fish and invertebrates, including soft corals, normally seen only beyond the continental shelf. We saw several fur seals and a school of bottle-nosed dolphins, which played around the Mariner for a while. Eventually, several of us left the boat to visit the Underwater Observatory, which is a plexiglass-lined cylinder that extends about 30 feet down into the sound. A spiral stairway led us from a floating deck down into the observatory, where we enjoyed nice views of some interesting and colorful marine species. The guide their took us on a tender back to the head of the Sound where the Mariner had docked. We collected our luggage and got back in our car, grateful that the weather had been so nice and the skies so clear during our Milford expedition.

We drove past Te Anau back to Queenstown along the shores of Lake Wakatupi, stopping here and there to take a few rainforest walks and to enjoy the views alond the lake shore. We walked in a park in the peninsula across from our hotel and then enjoyed one of the best dinners we’ve had during our extended travel at the Lakeside Palace, a fabulous Chinese restaurant.

Queenstown to Mt Cook: April 11

This morning was clear and sunny, so we visited the Queenstown Birdlife Park up on the hill next to the gondola station. The primary goal of this visit was to see New Zealand’s national emblem, the kiwi. In a dark room illuminated only by a few red bulbs, we were able to watch two kiwis; later we enjoyed an informative and interesting talk by a young naturalist who also demonstrated several birds and presented a living tuatara. The flightless kiwi is as odd as the tuatara; it is almost mammal-like in many of its features, and it lays the largest egg in proportion to body size of any bird (it occupies almost 25% of the volume of the female’s body!).

Leaving Queenstown, we drove northward toward New Zealand’s tallest mountain, Mt. Cook (Arakoa in Maori). Our route took us through a dry interior valley filled with fruit orchards and vineyards and then through a desolate, undeveloped valley covered by giant tussock grass. To the west we could see a distant range of rugged peaks covered by snow. Eventually our highway mounted a tall hill, from which we saw our first stunning view of Mt. Cook itself. Before us was a mixed forest, and beyond that a long glacial lake. Beyond the turquoise lake waters rose several spectacular jagged mountains, the tallest of which was Mt. Cook. In this part of the Southern Alps are more than twenty peaks that exceed 12,000 feet in height. Their peaks lie only about 20 miles from the ocean, yet the entire range is so rugged that only two or three paved roads cut across the South Island from east to west. From the ocean come tremendous amounts of rain and snow, and all of these mountains had been heavily coated with snow a few days before. My initial impression of Mt. Cook was that it resembled Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, mountains that rise abrumptly from an elevated plain without intervening foothills, but as we drove closer we saw that the extensive grasslands that lie at its base are devoid of large mammals (no elk, bison, or bears) and that these mountains bear permanent ice fields and large glaciers. Broad glacial, U-shaped valleys contain fast-flowing milky rivers that carry sediment-laden water from the glaciers in braided stream beds across the gravelly plain. In a bowl at the base of Mt. Cook lies Mt. Cook Village and the national park visitor center. Dominating the village is the tall modern construction that is the latest version of the venerable Hermitage lodge, our destination. This new lodge lies on a slight slope rising from the valley, and the glass windows that face its lobbies and all guest rooms offer a spectacular view of Mt. Cook and the surrounding peaks and glaciers.

Checking into our detached Hermitage “motel” unit, we found that its windows also afforded a terrific view of the snow-covered mountains. Before dinner we hiked aross fields of rocky talus, covered with thorny shrubs, spear grass, and tussock grass out to Kea Point, atop a lateral moraine of the Mueller Glalcier, one of several mountain glaciers that converge on the valley floor. The moraines are enormous ridges of boulders and gravel deposited by glaciers; when glaciers retreat, icy meltwater typically accumulates between the lateral and terminal moraines, forming a lake into which ice bergs calve from the front of the glacier. The lower portions of the glacier itself were dark with rocks and gravel scoured from the mountaintop. For most of these mountain glaciers, the ice at the bottom end of the glacier is approximately 500 years old. We could see across the lateral moraine on the other side of the lake to the Hooker Glacier as it descended into the valley. From time to time we could hear a thundering sound as ice cliffs collapsed on the heights. It was odd to consider that if we were on top of these 12,000-foot peaks, we could see the Tasman Sea. The sun sets early over these tall peaks, and the air became chillier as we returned to our room and prepared to make dinner.

Mt. Cook: April 12
This morning was wonderfully clear, and as we ate breakfast it seemed that we could see every detail on the face of the mountains above us. We had signed up for a “glacial exploration,” and at 10 am we climbed aboard a small bus, along with 16 other people for a drive into the Tasman Valley. Our guide, a young man who had worked on Russian ships in the Arctic as well as in the Antarctic, drove us into a broad, flat treeless valley in the middle of which ran a braided stream of turbulent, icy glacial meltwater. He drove us to the base of the terminal moraine of the Tasman Glacier, the largest mountain glacier in New Zealand. We hiked over the moraine and were split into two parties to board yellow outboard vessels that took us across the glacial lake below the glacier. The water was covered by a crust of ice, which our boat shattered as it sped along, bringing us up close to the many icebergs floating on the cold, milky green water. The icebergs were mostly about 18 months old, though a few were younger, and they came in a variety of bizarre shapes. All carried large burdens of rock and gravel, but as we approached their surfaces we could see that all were composed of very large crystals of ice. One had a pair of open conduits through which we could see blue sky. We eventually made our way to the glacier front, where we saw dense blue ice and wondered which area might split off next and crash into the lake, sending a wave that would swamp our boat. (Fortunately, that didn’t happen.) It was a strangely exhilarating experience.

After lunch, Lynn and I took a long (3-hour) hike into another glacial valley, crossing two swinging foot bridges, and finally reaching another iceberg-filled glacial lake (that of the Hooker Glacier). We were very tired by the time we returned to our room, but we found the scenery very inspiring.

Back to Christchurch and on to Wellington: April 13

The great weather continued another day. We drove this morning from Mt. Cook north and east to Christchurch, a trip that took over 4 hours and led us along large lakes with stunning mountain views, through arid interior valleys, and finally through the rich agricultural land east of Christchurch. On the outskirts of Christchurch we visited Willowbank, which combines the features of wildlife park and Maori marae. After seeing live kiwis up close (but in the dark) and a variety of other animals, we joined a group of Maori people for a cultural encounter. I was chosen chief of our band of visitors and received a wooden club which I had to place in my belt. Then I had to negotiate peace with the local Maori chief, which I did by accepting a peace offering in the form of a leafy branch. I pressed foreheads and rubbed noses with this fellow and also with our guide, a young Maori woman. After the Maoris had demonstrated and described specific features of their traditional lifestyle, they sang several Maori songs, taught the women in the group how to perform a dance-like movement, and taught the males how to perform a Haka, an empowering chant designed to intimidate enemies and prepare warriors for battle. As soon as I my job as chief was complete, we rushed to the airport and waited to board our Air New Zealand flight for Wellington on the North Island. Our departure was delayed, and when we landed in Wellington after the 45-minute flight, we didn’t receive our luggage for almost 35 minutes due to inadequate luggage handling by ANZ. We picked up our rental car and drove to the Merure Hotel on The Terrace in the city, once again conquering confusion resulting from the prevalence of one-way streets and construction sites. Our hotel room is quite comfortable.

Finally, excellent but expensive internet services in Wellington, NZ. Here are several posts which should almost catch us up to the present.


Today was rainy and warm. This weather is not atypical of Queensland in March, but until today the rain had occurred mostly in brief light showers, conditions that had permitted us to enjoy a lot of outdoor activities. Yesterday was by far the best day for us to have taken a boat to the Barrier Reef; most visits to the reef occur during the Australian winter, when south Australians escape cool conditions for the mild tropical climate of north Queensland but find stronger winds and rougher seas offshore. This morning we boarded the Rainforest SkyRail just north of Cairns and enjoyed the three-segment hour-long ascent to Kuranda, on the crest of the Great Dividing Range. West of the Dividing Range lies the elevated flat plateau which forms most of the Australian land mass. In east Queensland, this area is known as the Atherton Tableland, and it is drier and less heavily forested than the moist coast. The cyclone that hit the region a coule of weeks ago struck about an hour’s drive south of Cairns and traveled over the mountains into the tablelands, where it caused massive damage to crops and communities. We had originally intended to explore the flora and fauna of the Tablelands but were advised to abandon that plan due to the widespread damage to that area.

Karunda, a tourist-trap site, would be the closest we would come to the Tablelands, and we used it primarily to reverse our course on the SkyRail. This very long cable-car system takes passengers over the rainforest, and we could look down onto a thick mass of very tall trees, most of them carrying as much epiphyte foliage as tree leaves. The massive staghorn ferns and other epiphytes, as well as the thick drapery of lianas and vines, leave a very strong impression. The canopy is very thick, even though a guide estimated that the cyclone hyad removed about 20 percent of it. Some of the trees consisted only of dead, branchless trunks rising a hundred or more feet vertically, entirely cloaked with ferns and other rainforest plants. The north Queensland rainforest is considered to be the oldest rainforest ecosystem in the world and, along with the Great Barrier Reef, has been designated a World-Heritage site.

March 30
Enjoyed our last sumptuous breakfast with John and Pam before driving down the Captain Cook Highway to the Cairns Airport for our flight to Sydney. We checked into an awful hotel near the Sydney Airport after waiting an hour for the courtesy shuttle to pick us up. There was virtually no space for luggage in our room; the shower head was broken; the hotel had no ATM; there were no eateries within walking distance; and the hotel’s restaurant was far worse than a college cafeteria. But it was quiet and cheap, and after splurging at the Marae (our luxurious Port Douglas B & B) and spending too much for meals in up-scale Port Douglas, it was appropriate to revert to more economical lodgings.

Before we leave Australia, it also seems appropriate to pay tribute to this wonderful country. We’ve been driving on the left-side of the road (and the right-side of the car) now for three weeks, and it has finally begun to feel more natural than it ever did during our travels in England. The efficient use of round-abouts here, as in Europe, makes American traffic-stalling intersections seem appallingly inefficient. The Australian perspective on world events is far more cosmopolitan and global than that of most Americans. The superiority of American plumbing, particularly in sinks and showers, remains obvious, although the standardization of half- and full-flush options on the Australian toilet is something we would do well to emulate. An Australian hotel room is decorated with a great excess of tiny electrical switches whose functions sometimes remain obscure; flip them as many times as you will, nothing seems to turn on or off. The Australian television system seems impoverished (seldom does a hotel offer more than 3 or 4 stations), but at least one isn’t subjected to a proliferation of shopping channels competing with Fear Factor. Internet access is not widely available in hotels here; when it is, wireless service is uncommon and broad-band service isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes only one or two terminals are available, for a fee. Internet cafes are popular, but I’ve seldom been able to use my own laptop, which has made blogging a challenging proposition.

The landscape is interesting (though not grand in the manner of New Zealand or the American West), and the flora and fauna are infinitely fascinating and unique, as I had expected. I quickly abandoned any attempt to survey the Australian flora, aside from observing in general the prominence and diversity of eucalypts and the impressive variety of lianas (including palms with a vine habit!) and tree-ferns. I focused on mammals and birds, and by the end of our stay had identified 96 bird species, only a few of which I’d seen elsewhere. Here I encountered for the first time entire families of birds and experienced the delightful and perplexing sensation of seeing birds whose affinities I could not begin to decipher. Most of these birds were colorful, often brilliantly colorful. And, of course, we watched koalas mating and saw at night roadways lined – and often blocked - by marsupials, some large and some small. We saw marsupials with joeys in their pouches and learned the distinctions between kangaroos and wallabies and wallaroos. We saw tree kangaroos and possums with bushy tails. Of course, we ate kangaroo, finding it more interesting than ostrich but far less appealing than bison or elk. We were chased from beaches by deadly box jellies, marveled at the extent and richness of the Great Barrier Reef, and were soaked in the rain forest. And we saw fruit-eating bats as large as small dogs, hanging from branches and flying about. For a biologist, these were a richly rewarding experiences.

I had not thought much about the national temperament and culture before we arrived here, but I probably harbored an unarticulated expectation that the Australian mannerisms would be a bit rustic and coarse, though quaint in an easily caricatured way. In reality, the people were remarkably gracious, generous, friendly, helpful, patient, and amusing. When we visited the UK in 2004, we found the Brits, if a bit reserved, very cordial and far more courteous than most Americans, but the Aussies clearly surpass their English brothers in good spirits, apparent sincerity, and good will. If we paused on a street corner in Melbourne or Sydney to orient ourselves, within seconds a native would stop to ask if we needed help finding our way around. If we asked a simple favor of a store clerk, we were rewarded with strenuous -- and sometimes extreme -- efforts to satisfy our requests. One almost hesitated to ask the slightest favor of these extremely obliging people.

These Australians are unfailingly cheerful and chipper, but they are also capable of a very sharp and self-deprecating humor, sometimes in response to trifling or meaningless small talk. When we asked a friendly Sydney bus driver about his impressive consumption of coffee, he responded with a hilarious speculation regarding how a chap might feel in the morning had he had a difficult time with his wife the prevous night. When we remarked on the large number of joggers in the Royal Botanical Gardens, he noted that most of them were female and told us that the average Australian bloke spent more time in the pub and on the sofa in front of the tellie than working out. This sort of sardonic humor was never hard to evoke. Lynn toured Government House in Sydney and reported that her guide was not only very enthusiastic about the history of this official establishment, where he organize diplomatic events and maintained protocol, he was also uproariously cynical about politicians and about his role in the affairs of state.

We saw no evidence of the rowdiness and antisocial behavior so common in English cities, and although the Aussies are renowned drinkers, we saw only one minor incident of public drunkenness. We found little sign of crime or vandalism, seldom noticed a policeman or a police car, and witnessed no obvious concern about personal safety. Both men and women walked through the streets at night without looking over their shoulders. We were harassed only once: we were accosted by several thoroughly drunk aborigines in a nearly empty pedestrian mall in Adelaide, but those poor folks weren’t aggressive and no one else in the mall seemed concerned or made any effort to avoid the scene. This is a society that treats its pensioners and workers with great dignity and provides proper healthcare for its members. The Australians, both young and old, place great emphasis on treating each other with respect and courtesy; even people whose appearances would suggest a cautious approach were they encountered in the States treated us with distinct courtesy. Our birding guide, a thoughtful middle-aged fellow, agreed with our suggestion that the Australians are largely self-regulating and are willing to relinquish some opportunities for self-aggrandizement or personal success in order to maintain a strong community and a high degree of mutual trust. He speculated that, given its dark history as a penal colony (read “Fatal Shore” by Robert Hughes), the populace was determined to out-do the English in propriety and decency and to show that a peaceful and prosperous commonwealth could be maintained without strong class distinctions or pretensions to high status.

Australia is also an extremely multicultural society, with a strong flow of immigrants from Asia and the Pacific. A vigorous sense of political correctness seems to govern relations with these new immigrants, although recent rioting in Sydney, a shocking event for most Australians, reveal some resentment of Middle Eastern and Islamic newcomers among working-class white Australians. The recent Sydney riots shocked Australians because they pride themselves on being laid-back and accommodating; one of the most commonly heard expressions is ‘no worries.” Our host at the Marae, John Burden (a retired BBC and NY Times journalist) speculated that a forgiving climate encouraged the good will and anti-elitism he enjoyed in his adopted country but also promoted a general lack of ambition and dynamism. Concomitant with the Australians’ optimistic good will, he suggested, was the greatest threat to their long-term prosperity – a sense of complacency. And, of course, beneath the impressive civility and cordiality remains the unresolved dirty issue of aboriginal rights and welfare.

I won’t try to formulate a finely nuanced conclusion about the Australian character, footnoted with precise caveats and counter examples, but will adopt a narrowly practical outlook in predicting that if you travel here you will enjoy a level of hospitality and personal comfort that can be matched almost no where else in the world. (Except perhaps New Zealand, eh?) We give Australia several thumbs-up!