STARTING IN THE LOWER NORTH ISLAND

A quick update - we were on a bus for 10 hours, so pictures are few.

March 27th was a travel day. We made our way by motor coach from Rotorua to Wellington. We are not part of an organized tour group, but we are touring New Zealand according to an itinerary organized by Relaxing Journeys New Zealand based on our specifications for timeframe and lodging. We are nearly half-way through our time in New Zealand!

For the first hour out of Rotorua we were again in the long white cloud from the geothermal steam. We eased out of the fog near an even larger caldera lake than Rotorua called Lake Tuapo. If anything, the geothermal fields are more extensive near Lake Tuapo, but the air was clear because the steam is harnessed to spin turbines and generate electricity. We made a brief picture stop at Huka Falls, where, we were told by our driver, more than 220,000 liters per second of Lake Tuapo water pour through a narrow channel near the headwaters of the Waikoto River. The water going over the falls is a beautiful sky-blue color mixing with the usual white froth of turbulent flow. Pure and cold, and showing it, more like the wake of the cruise ship in Hawaii than your average waterfall.

The landscape around and beyond Lake Tuapo was volcanic hills colored in the dark green of pine forests and the intense green of prime grassland. Another small crossroads staked a claim to corrugated-iron fame with a large gum boot, and the annual All New Zealand Championship Gum Boot Throw. Dave our driver observed that you can throw a gum boot anywhere you want, but in that town it is official. We never did catch the name of the town.

The rest of the ride was along magnificent towering mountains and then mostly farmland, with lots of sheep and cattle grazing in the green fields. It reminded us quite a bit of Ireland, only the hedges to separate the paddocks were neatly trimmed evergreen bushes instead of the stone walls in Ireland.

We got to Wellington around 7:30 pm and stayed in a lovely Hotel close to the harbor. It was a very industrialized area and we were too pooped to wander to the city center for dinner. We ended up getting room service and called it a night. The next morning we took the ferry to Picton and from there, the TranzCoastal train to Christ Church. More news and pictures to follow.

Land of the Long White Cloud

Aoteoroa, the Maori name for New Zealand, means Land of the Long White Cloud. First thing today we headed to the long white cloud formed by the steam of the thermal area condensing in the cool air of the austral autumn morning. More specifically we toured Te Puia, a park in the geothermal area owned and operated by the Maori. Tom’s inner geologist was in a frenzy of excitement as we waited for the eruption of the Pohutu geyser. (Pohutu means constant splashing in Maori.) Pohutu and its nearby smaller geysers and steam vents are active 2 or 3 times an hour. They began with short bursts a meter or two in height. The bursts grew taller and more frequent while the cascades to the river below splashed with increasing volume. Finally Pohutu was a column reaching to 20 meters while its companion, the Prince of Wales Feather, angled away to form a V that Churchill would have endorsed.


From Te Puia we motored to the other side of Rotorua to an attraction called the Agrodome. Any business that promises, with no winks, “intimate encounters with friendly farm animals” certainly deserved our attention for an hour or so. It proved to be an hour of wholesome entertainment as our Kiwi host shared the stage with representatives of the major sheep breeds.


He then sheared a sheep for our education and passed around the wool.

Four audience volunteers were selected to demonstrate cow milking while the shtick kept flying. Mike the border dog showed his skills with a couple of ducks, sheep being too likely to jump from the stage, then with a few other dogs demonstrated how they can control up to 3000 sheep by running on the backs of the flock. You could make this stuff up, but you had to be there to enjoy the show.
Our next stop was a nature park where we saw some of the local birds, including kiwi,

and reptiles while we walked through a forest of tree ferns. This concluded our tour bookings for the day. We stopped in to the Rotorua Museum

to learn about the eruption in 1886 of nearby Mt. Tarawera. We returned to our hotel via a path along the shore of Lake Rotorua

to Sulphur Bay, enjoying the forest and the sea birds, as well as the hydrogen sulfide which supplies the local atmosphere as well as the suspended sulfur which makes the water appear milky green.
Tomorrow we board the bus for Wellington and stage ourselves for a week in the South Island. Love to all and goodnight.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

Today’s theme encompasses an incredible natural wonder and the character of a tourism-driven small town just about anywhere.

This morning we boarded a bus for the Waitomo cave region (about 100 miles south of Auckland), waitomo being Maori for water hole. We were told that there are about 300 caverns in the limestone around Waitomo. The longest extends for 10 miles. The one we visited is about a mile long, and on the ceiling above the river which flows into and through the cave reside what the brochures call glow worms. These insects are not really worms; they are the larval stage of a fly. In a fascinating adaptation to life in a cave, these larvae lower a sticky strand of web-like material 1 or 2 feet long, and attract mosquitoes, and other insects that come in on the river, with a bluish bioluminescence. When they catch a meal, they just reel it up into their mouths. We took a brief boat ride on the river and in the darkness you can get only in a cavern, the larvae glowed in numbers that made one think of a planetarium, or the overpopulated near-planet starfields favored in sci-fi special effects. What’s more, the water reflected the glow. We were not allowed to capture images of any kind, so this crude description has to suffice for something one has to observe to appreciate.
From Auckland to Waitomo and on to our hotel in Rotarua we rode through farming animal country: cows and horses mostly, but also sheep, goats, ostrich, alpaca, and deer. For lunch we enjoyed a venison burger. It may be that we’ve enjoyed New Zealand venison elsewhere because they mostly export to the USA and Europe.
About half-way from Waitomo to Rotarua we made a rest stop at Tirau. As matter-of-factly as he might describe how to change a tire, our driver explained that Tirau calls itself the corrugated-iron capital of New Zealand, and to demonstrate this distinction their visitors’ information center is constructed of corrugated iron in the shape of a sheepdog. The sheepdog is conveniently located on the main street between a corrugated iron sheep and a corrugated iron shepherd. “The toilets are inside the dog and to the left,” our driver informed us as if that was the location of any toilet worth using.

As we approached Rotarua we drove past several miles of small conical mounds which we were told are plutons—magma chambers which never erupted and solidified in place—which have accumulated volcanic ash and soil. (Half-Dome in Yosemite National Park is a much larger pluton which has been carved by glaciers.) Rotarua is in one of the geothermal fields of the North Island. The town is on the shore of Lake Rotarua, which occupies a caldera and is complete with a dormant volcanic cone near the center of the lake. A block from the hotel is a natural hot mud spa, and we’ve already become accustomed to the sulfur odor.

We are now relaxing and having a drink in the bar area as we blog. We will have a small dinner somewhere nearby and call it an early night since the bus for tomorrow's festivities arrives at 7:30 am. G'night, mates!

Old Zwiers in New Zealand

Hello Everybody! Here's the latest from the Zwiers in Auckland. Hope all is well with everyone back home.

March 23

We departed Los Angeles at 8:30pm on Saturday, March 21 and arrived on time in Auckland at 5:10 am on Monday, March 23. In retrospect we should not have been so surprised to see free coffee and tea offered in the baggage claim area of Auckland International. New Zealand seems as tourist-friendly as we Yanks would want but they need a better publicist. It was a bit of a bumpy flight but we slept well and long, and we felt no need to nap on arrival.

After breakfast we walked downhill from the dormant volcanic cone on which the Hyatt Regency is built to the dormant volcanic cone on which the Auckland War Memorial Museum is built. The Museum should more accurately be named the Auckland War Memorial and Museum. It was commissioned firstly as a Memorial to the New Zealanders who died in overseas wars, but at the same time was constructed to house the Auckland Museum. A major portion of the museum is devoted to the indigenous Maori people and their culture. The Maori did not know metal prior to European visitors, and must not have found suitable clay for pottery. The exhibits demonstrate the sophistication they achieved in the use of wood especially, and other organic materials, to make everything from boats to bowls. Elaborate carvings depicted genealogy and the achievements of their ancestors on lintel-pieces, walls of communal houses, and stern pieces of canoes.
Our docent John pointed out a carving of the Madonna with Child created by an artisan who converted to Christianity. The missionaries were not keen on the application of Maori style to Christian icons. The Maori were a warrior people and used sharks’ teeth in clever ways to make some of their weapons.

The Museum had many excellent exhibits on the natural history of New Zealand. We knew that the islands are at the boundary of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates, but we did not know that in the north the Australian plate is overriding the Pacific plate, while in the south the opposite is taking place: the Pacific plate is overriding the Australian plate. Auckland is built upon more than 40 dormant volcanic cones and calderas. Dormant, but not extinct, the exhibits stressed. One chillingly depicted the resurgence of volcanism in Waitemata Harbour, which we can see from our room.

From the Museum we walked back to the downtown area to enjoy a dinner of grilled local seafood at a restaurant on the harbor and were afterward suitably tired to call it an evening early.

March 24

At mid-morning we headed for a tourist attraction called Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter and Underwater World. It was a bit too far away to walk, and our cab driver offered to return to pick us up in an hour, assuring us that if we’ve been to Sea World we would be through this exhibit in about half an hour. We told the driver to return in two hours, and he was skeptical but compliant. What he didn’t take into account was the attraction to Tom of the partial reconstruction of the hut Scott and his men built on Cape Evans in McMurdo Sound. Tom enabled his “bipolar disorder” – an obsessive fascination with the areas around 90 degrees north and south latitudes and all things pertaining thereto --for a full hour in this part alone, studying the detail of the reproduced artifacts from reindeer-pelt sleeping bags to canned and bottled foodstuffs. If the reproductions are accurate it’s a wonder why Griffith McAllister is not a global brand. They provided Bacon Rations, Potted Veal, Tapioca, Semolina, and Beef Marrow Fat. Sunlight Soap and Dettol Antiseptic are still on the shelves in Auckland’s Foodtown Supermarket, in addition to Kelly Tarlton’s.
Another aspect of the Antarctic Encounter was an indoor (of course) breeding collection of Gentoo and Emperor penguins, which we could study and photograph from the warmth and much better aroma of a SnoCat ride. The Underwater World was a Plexiglas tunnel through an aquarium containing rays and sharks from New Zealand waters, as well as two of the fish species which contributed to Monday’s dinner. Walk-through aquariums can be found in Sydney and Singapore, among other places, but Kelly Tarlton’s claim theirs was the first and the model for the others. There were other traditional aquariums for smaller creatures like puffer fish, seahorses, and New Zealand ocean crayfish more than 2 feet long.

It is early autumn in the Southern Hemisphere and we have been blessed with beautiful weather: clear skies, light breezes, and temperatures in the low 70’s. Tomorrow we begin our tours of the North and South Islands by bus, train, and ferry.

On our way to New Zealand

We're waiting in LAX for our evening flight to Aussieland. With a 9 hour layover, we have plenty of time for reading, email and blogging. Y'all keep in touch now.

The Zwier-Brennan Hawaii Adventure

Our trip to Hawaii was fantastic!  We are sorry we weren’t able to blog – we were busy in the ports and when out at sea, we couldn’t keep an internet connection long enough to post.  We had better service in the Galapagos for cryin’ out loud! 

 In Honolulu, we first met up with Tom’s sister Sue who was there on business, coincidently enough, and then we joined Mike and Jan Brennan, dear friends for more than 35 years for the rest of the trip.  There was much laughter and adventure as we made our way around Honolulu, Kahului (Maui), Kaua’i, Kona, and Hilo.  Our excursions included Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial, snorkeling near Molokini Crater, a whale watch while in Maui, Volcanoes National Park, Waimea Canyon, and the Wailua River and Fern Grotto. 

The weather was uncharacteristically cloudy and very windy.  However, it was warm, so it was still preferable to Michigan in March!  The views were awesome, the volcanoes still active, the cruise outstanding and the company fabulous.

 Above are some highlights.  Enjoy!