The Wandering Tattler

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.