First set of pictures is up

I've got all my pics bulk converted and posted online. I'll have Jester's up soon too.
Click here for the album

Highest Paved Road in New Zealand

This is just before our flat tire. Location is best described in two words: VERY. COLD. We took this route because it's shorter than going the long way around, but it's also a really fun drive - lots of twisties. 

TheJester Paraglides

Jester went Paragliding in Queenstown a few days ago. They're cool enough to have a digital camera with them on a long stick with a remote shutter release. They hold it out, and then aim it back at you for the photo you see here. As Cleric sez "eet is a camera on a steeck". We're about 1000 feet up over the bay here. Right after this was taken, we heeled way over and did a tight descending spiral and pulled a few g's. Was AWESOME. So much fun. Doro's gotta try this. The interesting part of doing this is you start out by basically walking off of a cliff, and letting the wind grab your chute and pull you up into the air. SO much fun. 

Queenstown Botanic Gardens

Posting this a few days late - we went through the Queenstown Botanic Gardens a few days ago. Ocean view, cool breeze, fantastic view. TheCleric and I agreed: if they'd had Internet access and power there, we'd probably not have moved for the rest of the day. :)
This is a closeup of an interesting plant called a MonkeyPuzzle Tree. It's like a variant on a pine tree, with a few noteable exceptions: the "needles" as you can see here aren't really needles. They're more like narrow, sharp-pointed leaves. Also, the WHOLE PLANT is covered in them. I imagine it's totally un-climbeable: only the main trunk isn't covered with these - everything else: all branches, all tips, everthing, is covered in these sharp spines. Just touching them puts them through your skin - like needles. Really cool looking - this one was at least 5 stories tall. 

Flat Tire

Coming down this mountain slope from the Highest Paved Road in NZ (shown here) we got a flat just before it got dark. It was all really fun switchbacks with no shoulder and blind corners (a blast to drive!) so we couldn't easily pull over. We had to go about 1/3 of the way down before we could find a pulloff. Totalled the tire - hole was too big to patch, and we had to run it flat long enough to get off the road, so we basically pulverized the sidewall and melted the tire at the same time. Oh, and it was really cold and windy. Never before have we changed a tire so quickly. :) 

Pillars of the Kings and the Return of the TeamGeek

what you are seeing is the river Anduin. Here, Aragorn and the Fellowship passed the Pillars of Kings. I don't actually know what the name of the river is off hand, bus this was one of the locations we are sure was in Lord of the Rings(scene where they are in boats going down the river and there are 2 large statues on the sides of the valley). It was pretty cool...we also went up to the winery that sits on this, or this sits on, and picked up some wine.

I'm posting from the Starbucks in Christchurch. They had Internet access and are near to our motel tonight, which is important as we have bid our rental car adieu, after some brief heart palipitations. I called to verify the location of drop off and the first guy, who sounded like he was probably in Bombay but would have claimed to be in Orlando, Florida, said, "You are supposed to return it to Wellington." For those not keeping track, Wellington would be on the north island, and the car was not getting returned there unless it could float.

So we did get that straightned, and we had a nice bit of luck, the hotel we are at was booked so full we got a magic upgrade to a bigger suite room. I'm sure the room we would have got would have been great anyway. This is my official plug for South Pacific Tours, they did a great job, Sandi(our agent) was really good to work with and really helpful when Chicago/weather/United screwed the pooch and we missed our original flight. I highly recommend them. I'd also like to say the tourist industry is actually really nice here, not out of control, and not too gouging. That could just be the general nice setup of most things here. Although I still get quesiton marks with everything closing at 4...

Which leads to...Christchurch, where everything does not actually close at 4! It's actually a bit odd to see so much open! Also they have real 4 lane roads here, real traffic, and not quite congestion, but some messy streetage. So driving here is interesting. Jester and me agree, we're both conerned about re-adapting to driving at home, since we're both pretty comfortable on the wrong side of the road now. Although there was a PL5(that's Pucker Level) moment today when a car in the oncoming traffic direction decided to make a quick pass in a short gap...I believe my response was, "OOOOOooooooo".

Tonight should be a fun filled romp of repacking and DVD burning so that I have a copy of the pictures too, and prep for tomorrow. I think we've settled on taking a taxi to the airport but we are worried we have enough funds between the 2 of us to afford it. We'd rather not withdraw more funds if we can avoid it. We're trying to spend all the NZ$ in NZ. Christchurch is nice though, seems like a nice city otherwise. I can't say that anything stands out per se, as we won't have much time to look around. They have a lot of greenspace, but they are enough of a big city that we can't see the ocean or mountains which are both near the city.

The last thing to do is arrive at the airport tomorrow early, probably around 1PM, we're trying to get our hop flights to Auckland sync'd, as right now my flight is 1 hour later then Jesters. If not, not big deal, we'll manage. I think with that, this will very likely be my last entry from New Zealand, it's been great, I highly recommend it. I might post one more entry from the States, advice for travelling to NZ and any loose ends(like the location of the website for pictures and the web based scrap book I'm going to make). Farewell NZ!
The Cleric 

Nov 8 - "Ride Me" and Faith Based Driving

So the partially obscured image you see is the tattoo on the lower back of a girl we saw at the top of the gondola ride in Queenstown. It’s a little hard to make out, but it says “Ride Me”. Sadly, I wussed out of flat out asking her if I could take a picture, so what you see above is the best effort to sneak one. It’s the first lower back tattoo I’ve seen that I can recall since we’ve been here. Tattoos don’t seem as common here as in the US, but piercings seem to be more common, if anything. Lots of pierced nostrils and lips here.

The other part of the title is what I have labeled driving in New Zealand. It’s very apparent that Kiwi’s very early on must develop a certain amount of faith that the lorry (that’s a truck to us Yanks) in the oncoming traffic lane around the blind turn or over the blind hill is in it’s correct, intended lane. The faith works both ways of course, and I say the have to develop it because I think I have seen exactly 2 turns in NZ that weren’t blind. You have more views of magnificent precipices that you could easily drive off of then you do of the oncoming lane of traffic. If it weren’t for the driving on the other side of the road, I’d strongly advocate sending Americans here for a week to learn to drive. There’s no “not paying attention to the road” here. You pay attention or you get flattened. I wonder what the accident statistics are like here.

So we drove to Dunedin today, from Queenstown. I’ve been having a great time, the scenery is fantastic, and traveling about with the Jester has been great fun, but I think I’m ready to pause for a bit. The downside of seeing so much of the country in such a short period of time is that you burn out from being always on the move. We go from here to Christchurch, and final winding down to head back to the States. Last night I didn’t sleep well, couldn’t get to sleep, and woke up early. It was like I had an exam today or something. Jester developed a migraine, or started to; he’s catching a nap in the other room right now. So I think the travel has started to take its toll on us. The weather today was also not great, so that wasn’t much help. I’ve started to look forward to getting home, organizing the photos and making a trip scrapbook type thing (which will most likely be online of course, although I am thinking maybe I should print off a batch of the better pictures). Seeing the friends and such is also sounding good. I’m going to really realize just how out of touch I’ve been the last few weeks when I get home.

Let’s see…drive here was not bad, despite the weather. We stopped at a Lord of The Rings filming location, one that I think is very recognizable, the Pillars of Kings on the River Anduin. I will of course have to check my DVDs when I get home and compare to photos. I’ll put some kind of screen capture of the scene vs. my picture up. Geek cool! We also stopped at the winery that the location sits on and picked up some wine. Sadly, there was no “Return of the King” label wine.

We bought sandwiches this morning, planning on stopping at a scenic location to eat them. The weather foiled this plan, and we hit some construction (we suspect they were clearing the road of debris from a rock slide) which sat us on the highway for 20 or so minutes so we ended up eating mostly there, in the car. Oh and it started to snow (small hail really) while we were eating. Once we got rolling again we stopped a little further up at a nice lookout point, finished eating, and took some more pictures of the strangely green water. Had we mentioned the water yet? All the bodies of water in this country seem to be this deep, but bright shade of green. It shows up well in the pictures, that’s not a goof on the cameras part, it’s really that color. No idea why. Dunedin is a bit of a mess, and oh, they actually had HIGHWAYS on the way in. Not much by our standards, but a little bit. It was odd actually driving on two-lane high speed roadways again. Return to civilization!

Now that I said that, I just realized I think that’s nearly true. Our next stop is Christchurch, the major city of the south island, so we are most likely done with wilderness areas, other then the final drive to CC. The CC drive is along the coast, so I expect it will be very nice, and since it is our last drive, and we are in CC for a day, I feel no need to hurry. I expect we’ll make several scenic stops. Hey, it just started raining! For real rain though, not the miserable cold drizzle that’s been pretending to be rain most of the time we said there was rain! Maybe that means we’ll be owed some sunshine tomorrow!

Back to the drive in…supporting the getting wore out theory, Jester and me both took brief naps in the car during the drive, something we’d both managed to avoid doing until now. The landscape is still varied and incredible, but it’s hard to get decent photos with this weather, and missing 30 minutes of it isn’t the end of the world. Dunedin is a college town it seems, with the University of Otago, Dunedin College of Education, and Otago Polytechnic all located here. The total enrollment is around twenty thousand, so none too large by US standards. I don’t know how that places them in NZ ones.

I’m not sure how much we’ll get done in Dunedin, we had some stuff planned out, but the traffic and roads here are a mess(lots of one ways, and complex traffic patterns) and the rain means we probably won’t want to walk much. Not too much of a loss I suspect, the things we’d be going to see are city color, like a train station, so if we miss it, not a big loss, not to me anyway, that’s not what I came down here to see. I’ll have to write another post later about what we actually end up doing. 

Nov 6 - Franz Josef

We’re getting ready to depart F-J for some of the longer drives ahead of us. That’s not so great. What’s great is we’ll be passing through a mountain range called the Southern Alps by the locals. I’ve looked at the route and it should provide some pretty spectacular views. That’s the norm in this country, so unsurprising. After having scrambled around those rocks the other day, I wish we had time to do more such goofing off, but I’m primarily here oriented as a photography/sight seeing trip, so more active activities will likely have to wait until the next time I visit. I think that you’ve have to focus the geography you’ll be playing in much more to do that here too. Unless you are here for like a month, there are just too many places to explore and trek around in to be able to do more then 1 a week.

Today takes us to Queenstown, which is relatively far to the south. It’s impressive looking on the map until you look at a city map and realize it’s quite small. According to the resources we have with us, it has a permanent population of 11,000 with more then 1 million tourists passing through annually. I guess that makes me 1 in a million, yuk yuk.

Many LoTR scenes were filmed in the regions surrounding QT, so I think we may catch one or two, and Jester also mentioned the possibility of an aerial trip. We’ll swing through town so we can catch a shot of the Internet Bus on the way out. Oh, one thing we were noticing here in F-J. We’ve seen several girls walking about who appear to be couples, or at least far friendlier with each other then girls in the States seem to be with each other. We haven’t noticed it elsewhere, which might not mean anything, but guys do tend to notice things like that.

Jester mentioned to me yesterday that NZ would be a really great place to retire to. I could see that. Living here now would probably be tough for me, but retiring some day far off might be cool. It’s a really awesome place for nature, until you want something you get from modern society, then things could get ugly. Decent Internet access throughout the country would go a long way to fixing that though. I live for information, and it’s not as easily had here as I’m used to.

Oh, one other thing which I had commented on to Jester several days ago, but I think is worth a mention here. Due to our US-centric focus of news, what we most often seem to get the impression of is that the US is sucky/declining, and things are fabulous in the rest of the world and we should take more after them. Well you read world news here, and what you see is a couple pages on the US, which like the US, is focused on our elections and what they mean. And then a whole lot of pages about how the rest of the world is in fact not quite as rosy as some in the US might think. There’s no shortage of problems elsewhere in the world. Fiji (where more then one person suggested I go spend a week) is on the verge of either a military coup or a civil war, Italy is having a mafia war so severe that the government is considering army intervention, and NZ seems to have some employment issues. Papers are using the number of jobs listed in them as a selling point.

Greetings from Dunedin

After much correction by locals, we have the pronunciation (or at least one of them) for our current location correctly sussed. It's "Du-NEED-in".
And have we mentioned, paying for Internet access by the minute stinks? We're in an internet cafe that closes "late", which is, appearantly, 8pm. We're not sure what New Zealanders do at night, but it's appearantly not anything involving retail, because they rolled up the streets here at 4pm. :)

Whinging aside, we're doing well. Drive from Queenstown today was about 5 hours, plus a stop at a vineyard (Gewurtztraminer purchased), and another stop at a LOTR site. We'll send photos, but today's stop was where the Fellowship was boating down the Anduin river, and they pass the Gate of the Kings. Ask Brian for a translation of that, everybody. :)


Yesterday in Queenstown, we did the Street Luge (which I think makes us BIG LUGERS ha ha!) tho it was on a track, not actually on a street with peds, cars and oil spills. So pretty safe.

The Cleric watched while TheJester did a tandem paraglide from approx 3000 feet up down to about 1000 feet. Wicked fun! Doro- you gotta try this - I have their card, and photos. Much fun.
They're closing here, so we'll see you later and post photos when we have better access.
Love to all!
-TheJester

TheCleric Climbs 2

After posting that last photo, I realized that I really like this photo of TheCleric. So I posted it. 

TheCleric Climbing

TheCleric doing his Dynamic Climbing thing before falling in later. Actually, he didn't fall in. Only TheJester did. 

The Cylon Crab

did we mention that the crabs here, in addition to being purple, have Cylon scanning lasers in their heads? They do. Just look! 

GreatStuff seaweed

TheCleric pointing at some of that strange seaweed that looked like it was made of GreatStuff crack filling compound and rubber gloves. Note the expression of Fascinated Ick. 

Climbing outside of Nelson

TheJester doing some clambering about on rocks earlier on in the day before falling in later. He's still dry in this photo. Note the big camera above the waistline. Note the ex-Sony camera in his pocket. 

Ice Ice Baby

TeamGeek
It's been a few days since an actual proper entry. There will be no pictures from me unfortunately as the Jester has them all on his laptop and I'm just using a random terminal in at this Internet place. Downside: I think it's satillite internet, which means it's got this really nasty lag. Upside: the computer room is an old bus that's been converted for this use. It's pretty funky. It's kinda hippy, kinda trippy, and all bad ass.

So yesterday we went to...I can't remember the name off hand, or rather, I don't want to take a guess at spelling it just now. Punaiki or something like that. Anyway, the big thing there is the "pancake" rocks, and blow holes. The pancake rocks look sorta like these chunks of rock made up of a stack of flat ones. It's really not that impressive as a specific feature, although like everything else here, it does look pretty cool. The blow holes are these pseudo-geyser things, at the high tides, water rushes into a cavern where it squeeze out an opening in the top, with varying force, creating a blast of water. We initially went during low tide, so there was nothing to see. When we went at high tide...there was also nothing to see. I guess we didn't wait around long enough or the high tide wasn't high enough when we went. I've seen some pictures of it, and the pictures at least have a pretty impressive look to them when it's really going off well.

The real awesome part of that actually happened before we ever got to the rocks though. We pulled off at this...natural beauty site thing, they have them all over the place here...well anyway, we got to climb around on these really large rocks in the surf, it was really awesome! I got some sweet pics, although I admit I was worried here and there I'd drop my camera in the drink. Speaking of which...so The Jester was also rock hopping around like me, and at some point we decided it would be a good idea to go out to this really large rock that was really far out in the surf. On the way out there, Jester did this really cool save, I think the gymnastics from years ago must have paid off, he did this really neat spin around, and post-wedge of a foot into a rock and barely saved him self from a pleasent dip ino the ocean. Just kidding. He totally slipped and went in. It was classic. I'm moving in my ninja-like manner from rock to rock when I hear him yell and laugh. I turn around and he's waste deep in Pacific. I start yelling about the camera. He yells back the camera is fine. Only thing is, he's talking about the one he's wearing around his chest that's riding high up on his back. I'm talking about the small one that is in the fanny pack on his waist.

So the long story short is we took the camera apart, and valiently tried to save it, but it's now a very stylish, brand name paper weight. We were able to save the pictures off of the memory card however, so it wasn't a total loss. Of course the pictures are the things that I was really concerned about.

Anyway, after that tramping about the rocks on the ocean, a really awesome interactive deal, the pancake rock things were pretty...flat.

Today we had a nice drive further south to Franz Joeseph, which was cleverly named after the Franz Joeseph glacier which is nearby. We trekked over the glacier. It would have been a nice hike with some kick-ass scenery except it was raining on us constantly, and I wasn't quite equipped to handle it. Pretty cold and miserable, worth it I'd say, but the experience would be vastly better in nice weather. If it's nice in the morning I think that we will go back as I'd like to try and get some better pictures, the ones I took I think will be mediocre. Or at least I won't be happy with them.

Oh, side note, the place that we stayed at last night had it's own little glow-worm thing. It was actually better in my opnion then the Waitomo caves because we could get close and take pictures. I mean seriously close, like I could have touched one if I wanted to. I didn't. I think I did get some way better pictures. Again stuff that's all forthcoming when better internet access is available to us. I'm starting to think that much of it will have to wait until we get back to the statues. We'll easily have more then a thousand pictures, I think a good many of them will be worth taking a look at, which is serious upload time, so I'll be using the work internet connection.

It's still raining here as I write this btw, I felt the need to mention that as my segue into the weather. You can tell it's spring here, at least I think this is a side effect of spring. The weather is crazy all over the place. Where we were yesterday I could have worn shorts. Today it's freezing cold and raining. Tomorrow I expect donuts to fall from the sky in a shower of fatty goodness. Except I think people will be confused here as they don't seem to have donuts much around here.

And speaking of tomorrow, we drive to Queensland. I think it's the longest drive yet, estimated at like 5 hours. I think that means it will take us around 7. A very long time in the car anyway. But we're there for a couple days. We've got some activities scheduled for Queensland that I think will yield some great pictures, but only if the weather clears. I have to keep reminding myself this place is like the size of Michigan, only with lots and lots of mountains and awesome curvy roads...well awesome if you are on a fun, good handling vehicle. Otherwise it takes extra long to go from place to place. But it's ok since the scenery looks grand.

I've realized today that in only 4 days I'll be back home. I own't quite be in my own bed, as work in my house is not estimated to be quite done by then, but with in a day. Anyway, I'm both sad, and a little excited. A bit of rest from the vaction will be nice. But I've started thinking about my next vacation. The houseboat thing we saw a few days ago would be kick ass awesome I think, for a week long thing to do, but I'd also like to see some other places. Japan seems like some place I should go - I've been accused of being obsessed with Japan in the past.

Course it also means I'm getting close to my knee surgery, no real worries there, it' should be all plusses, I think I'll be able to get my fat ass more active if my knee doesn't become gimpy for 24-48 hours at a time when I put stress on it.

I think this place is closing up soon and I really wasn't prepared to write this post. Plus I need to do laundry. So I'll sign off now...from the Franz Joeseph glacier in New Zealand...
-The Cleric

Pancake Rocks

Pancake Rocks
If you look closely, you can see the horizontal striations that result from the sediment layers that were compressed to form the rock formations here. The layers between the major layers weather/erode faster, so you get this really regular pancake effect. Means that the stone breaks into very regular plates when it erodes. Tumbled in the surf, this is how you get the beachfull of perfect skipping stones I posted in my last note. 

Punakaiki from Nelson

Jester here.
writing this a day late. At the moment, we're actually in Franz Joseph at this really, really trippy Internet In This Bus cafe. It's a bus parked permanentely outside a cafe, and it's got heat, bar stools, computers, and Internet access wired in. Really trippy concept, but it's cool.

The South Island is much more sparsely populated, so cell service and internet access are correspondingly harder to come by.
However, update from yesterday. So, TheCleric and I drove down from Nelson (home of Lord Rutherford, the physicist, by the way - go geeks!) and, for a day with nothing planned, packed in a really full day. We were supposed to drive about 4 hours, and instead, we stopped at just about every pulloff that looked interesting and so the drive took way longer.

While on the way down, we stopped at a really rocky beach, and were clambering around in the surf, leaping from rock to rock, harassing crabs and starfish and in turn getting harassed by angry gulls. It was way fun, but the tide was coming in, so our chances of marooning ourselves on some rock and having to wade out became progressively higher the more time went on. Photos are fantastic from the experience, however. Lots of fun.

Which was good, because you knew we were going to be climbing around until one of us fell in. sadly, I eventually did. I say sadly, because I thought the water was about 2 feet deep, which wasn't going to be a problem because I'd had the cameras slung higher than that. Unfortunately, when I fell in, I didn't actually fall, I slid down the rock I was climbing on and half-buried myself below the rock next to it. I wound up being in 4 foot deep water and angled way over. The camera on my shoulder didn't get dipped (fortunately, that was the really expensive one with the telephoto lens), but the little Sony point-and-shoot I'd purchased for the trip wasn't so lucky. It was in a lower pocket, and it got totally dunked in saltwater. It is now Defunct, Demised, an Ex-Point-and-Shoot - after a thorough disassembly, blotting and blow-drying, it still doesn't power up at all, so it's officially dead. Photos from the experience were worth it, but the last video it ever took is me talking about how we're trying to go from *this* rock here to *that* rock there, via these two here.... "tune in in 5 minutes to see if we make it." Heh. I didn't. So no sequel to that video. Still have the main cameras, so we're not crippled, but it's a pain to haul out the big cameras every time we want to snap a quick photo.

On other notes, there was these really weird high-density seaweed. Imagine if someone made a plant out of that Great Stuff crack filler you can buy at home depot and rubber gloves. That's what this stuff looked like. Kinda fleshy, and kinda rubbery and kinda gross, in a fascinating "dude, I dare you to poke that with a stick" kind of way.
Purple crabs, starfish with WAY too many arms (like 10), purple crabs, and these weird, half-transparent and half-brown little zebra fish.

Also, for Gavin (MaryC, tell him about this, would you?) there's an area in Punakaiki called Pancake Rocks - it's this strange, stratified metamorphic sedimentary rock, almost like slate, but more regular. The cool thing is that it breaks into pretty regular plates, that then get pounded by the pretty violent surf. The result is a beach that's made of almost entirely PERFECT SKIPPING STONES. TheCleric and I spent nearly an hour skipping stones into the surf and didn't make even a dent in the supply. Fantastic.

Dinner in Punakaiki and then our hotel had Glow-worms outside it. They're these little worms that don't move much, but they have these blue lights on their tails. They nestle in overhead or upper reaches of grottos, let down sticky threads and shine their lights at night. Bugs see the lights, think they're stars and blunder into the sticky threads where the worms then crawl over and eat them.
We actually saw a cave-full of these on a formal tour at Waitomo Caves, but they wouldn't let you take photos or get close, so it was only OK. In Punakaiki, however, they're down in this little depression in the earth, so you can go right up to them and take photos. So we did - we back-lit the little worms with TheCleric's green laser pointer (they don't seem to notice green, but will turn off if they see full-spectrum light). Between the backlight, and a very steady hand on TheClerics part with a macro lens, we got a really good photo of them. Good enough, that the proprietor said it was the best photo he's seen of the Glowworms yet, and asked us to email it to him, which we will after this post. Pretty cool.

While we were pfaffing with exposures, backlights, and lasers, a nice young german couple came down to look at the worms, and we cheerfully told them what we were doing, let them get up close to see the lights, and generally did a full brain-dump to them on the topic. About 3 mins after they left, TheCleric said "you know, I hope we didn't prevent them from coming down here for a romantic moment under the Glowworms." If we did, sorry German Tourists - I think we TeamGeeked them.

blah blah blah

I seem to be out of creative titles for the moment. I blame it on posting from a McDonalds, which oddly enough had the easiest Internet access for us in this area that was opened late. Which, incidentally, is Nelson, south island New Zealand. There's a mass of teenage girls stomping around screaming about...no idea.

Anyway, this McD's is surpringly progessive, other then the lack of wireless internet, they do have 3 terminals with restricted access. Not so restricted I wasn't able to run the terminal services client from a flash drive though, which was helpful. The inside is very clean and neat, and the design is less kiddie-fluff and more effort to be a real restaurant I think. Also, there's the McCafe, which I just can't get over, a coffee shop inside the McDonalds. Pretty good smoothie, although a lot of seeds, but I think that might be a NZ thing?

So my take on the Abel Tasman national park:
Very cool. It has first and formost really hammered home the goodness in relying on the locals, particularly the people running the lodgings we are staying at, for reccommendations. We took that trip because the owner of the last place we stayed at had gone recently and highly recommended it. We decided to give it a try and it was totally worth the drive. we're trying to upload at least some pictures now, although not of that trip, as they are still on the cameras. We napped after getting back, it was a pretty tiring day.

Anyway, lots of cool thigns were seen, the boat was a great deal of fun, and Sean, our driver was very nice and friendly, as is the kiwi way. i'd put more here but without my pictures in front of me I won't be able to get enough detail, I think I'll make a special entry for it or something. I've decided the blog is good for the immdiate day to day, but I'll probably compose a website of the trip when I get home. something along the lines of the geek version of a scrap book. Then I'll more room for pictures and such there.

let's see...we bounced around nelson some more, ate dinner at a pub. Jester took pictures of my meal as usual. I think that he should let me start ordering for him, as he seems unsatisfied with his meals of late and jealous of mine. nice weather today, with standard impressive scenery everywhere. I think that it must be a jarring experience as to how boring the country side can be in the US to a Kiwi, if they visit the wrong areas. Although our cities are certainly more overwhelming experiences then theirs.

Oh, one interesting thing I've noticed about Nelson/Picton at least, and I wonder if it applies to the whole south island, the vehicles. There are actually quite a few motorcycles, surprisngly of all makes, included H-D's and a larger variety of cars. Including some US models, I saw a 68ish Musting and an 80 or 81 Trans Am, and a stingray corvette today, all in show room shape. All with US steering, so sitting on the left side...must be interesting to drive here. Also, there are SUV's here, full sized ones. No escalades, but 4 door ones, a few US, mostly japanese ones. But I can't think of any in the north, and I did look for them. There was even a full sized Dodge RAM truck, again I was surprised because I think cars built for US roads are probably a bit squeezed on the narrow NZ ones.

Driving, I'm pretty comfortable with now, i've noticed most kiwi's dont' seem to have any issue with turning utilizing the minimal shoulder as much as possible. It's how they are keeping speed while going around the tight turns without risking drift into on coming traffic.

On a more personal note, while I'm not exactly missing TV, I am missing some of my shows. I'm so offset and I don't know how TV works here(they don't have our traditional CBS/NBC/ABC/FOX setup) so I can't figure how to watch my shows. They are primarily this Sky-One(a british based network) thing as far as I can tell. sky does have some kind of broadcast partnership with at least some networks, but I don't know how that works. So that means that i have like 10-15 hours of TV shows I do want to watch, to catch up on when I get home. It sucks my DVR is not working because Dish gave me the shaft(that's a different, long story) but fortunate I have the Internet. :)

Sorry this entry kinda sucked.

Nelson: evening of nov 3, 2006

Wow. Jester here.
The boat tour was totally worth it. We declare ourselves Much Pleased. Abel Tasman Park where we took today's boat tour, was really, really beautiful. We’ve got a ton of good photos of the area.
We also had a good time talking with the tour operator, a 40-ish guy named Shaun, about cameras. He's planning on upgrading to digital later this year. They have so much FILM cameras still down here. We're a bit surprised. Kodak's film that they're trying to get rid of in the States seems to all be shipped down here. Big 40-gallon bins of film cannisters to purchase.
Shaun's use for this planned digital camera is interesting. He does some community work with a group that goes and visits really out-of-the-way Maori villages for community outreach, and he'd like to bring his digital camera (he's been using his wife's 5MP for the last year), and a little digital printer. The places they're visiting just barely know of the camera. *Maybe* one person in a village has a camera or has seen one before. So he gets great results when he offers to take a photo of someone's family and print it out. They're thrilled, and it's good for trade - he can get fruit or goods for the photo. They don't have money in those villages, but the barter is good.

NOTE to TheJester’s family – we should come back here when TheBoopster is older. The hiking and car camping is fine for families. We encountered lots of seals, and lots of sea kayakers.
The granite in this area is weirdly sheared by the plate tectonics, so it falls off in these huge artificial looking diagonal square chunks. You’ll see what we mean when we upload photos later.

For TheDoro, there’s a backpackers’ boat here in Abel Tasman National Park – it’s in permanent anchorage in a cove called, appropriately enough, "Anchorage". They offer pickups from the beach, a dorm room, dinner and breakfast then off you go tramping again. It seems to have been in permanent anchorage there for years, so we’re hoping it shows up on Google Earth.

Near Abel Tasman Natl. Park, there are these HUGE tidal plains that are exposed when it's low tide (like a 1/4 mile out). There's a nifty eco-friendly pseudo-graffitti that the locals seem to be doing: when the tide is out, they gather up a bunch of fist-sized stones, and spell out letters and symbols on the tidal flats within sight of the road. When the water comes back in, they're a different color from the seabed, and are visible through the water, which is only a foot or so deep. Normally, they're lighter, but once they've been there for a while, they get moss and stuff growing on them, and they become darker than the background seabed. Pretty cool. Also, all seem to be g-rated messages, which probably wouldn't happen in the States.

TheCleric seems to have picked up The Parsley Game (research under the heading "Penn and Teller" and ask TheBoopster’s mom for details). *sigh*. He does, however, seem to think that it can be combined with the Jedi Mind Trick ("I saw you put that on my plate." "No, you didn’t" "Yes, I did." "No, (Jedi finger gesture) you didn’t.") Doesn’t work.

A "dude, blog this conundrum": TheCleric’s meal this evening has a little short corn on the cob, but it’s drowning in the rest of the gravy. One wonders how you eat it without getting gravy everywhere. Too big to spear, too small to just gulp.

We have got to figure out a way to transport home or find in the States some of the Sweet Chili Sauce they have here. It’s really good. Not quite like the asian variants we can get in the states. It’s good, sweet, a bit hot and sour, and really, really good on Fish and Chips.
Which we have been eating regularly. weirdly, the best Fish and Chips so far was a chain restaurant called "Breakers" in Rotorua. It's got a heavy surfer ethos (tables are surfboards, dishes are called things like "the Big Kahuna Burger", etc.) The Fish and Chips there were FANTASTIC.

Nelson: morning of nov 3, 2006

it's just about 7AM, we're up early to drive up the coast from Nelson(haw haw) to take a 3 hour boat tour, a 3 hour boat tour. The proprietor at the last place we stayed highly recommended it. It's about an hour drive though and we have to be there at 10:30 so we got up early. I was unfortunately up early this morning anyway, briefly, for a bout of Maori's revenge, but it was defeated by me with some backup provided by Sir Imodium AD.
So anyway, we started writing down a list of the little things to mention that are different, so without further rambling:
Gas. It only seems to come in 3 varieties: 91 octane, 95 octane, and diesel. Very odd, what we consider premium is the base level here. No idea why though.
There are ads, at least in Wellington, that are actively recruiting for the police. Somewhat like our military ads I guess, but for the local police.
Street level parking is paid for at a central box, that might cover say 6 or 8 spaces, there aren't meters for each space. And you get to pay for the privilege of paying - there's a surcharge to pay at the box.
Individual servings of condiments are very big here, so big you can buy individual servings in stores. Including vegimite, which is apparently very popular here, as the vegimite was sold out where we were.
Ketchup, with the exception of Heinz, seems to be generally labeled tomato sauce.
The have chicken flavored potato chips...among other flavors you don't see in the states.
Cars don't seem to have cruise control, but you couldn't use it if they did, especially in the mountains, which are everywhere.
Police cars look like they are rally cars with blue sirens stuck on the top.
The turn signal lever in the car is apparently not standardized. In the 2 cars we've now tried, one was on the right(which was weird and led to much inadvertent use of wipers) and one was on the left(which was happily normal for us).
It's apparently common for lodgings here to give you a small container of some dairy product, presumably for your coffee, when you check in(your choice of half/half, skim, or whole milk I believe).
It seems like it's also common for the room key or a fob with the key to be needed to have room power on(it inserts into something, you leave and take it with you the power goes out...no heating the room up while you are away).
BYO wine to restaurants is allowed and common even. It looks like there is a licensing for it for the restaurants.
There's no shoulder, or nearly none, on most roadways.
Food serving sizes are reasonable, you get enough food to not be hungry, but not so much that you get full. It's probably part of the reason why there appear to be much less obese people about, that and many seem to walk most places. But there have been a few, there was a young girl on the ferry who I placed at probably 1.2 Cleric's.
The McDonalds here in Nelson had a McCafe(their name, not mine) in it, separate from the food counter, which was like a little coffee store. Pastries in glass displays, and a full on coffee setup. Also they had internet in the McD's, with 3 terminals for use even. We knew they were rolling internet out at McDonalds, we just didn't expect the one in Nelson ot be so progressive.
The McDonalds around here also have playlands, like the US, but they aren't in a separate enclosed room, the crawl around thingies go outside the building. There seem to be many things here that I would say are the way things would be in the US if we didn't have a litigation happy society right now.
Surprisingly, some things are apparently universal. A quick flash of the lights from the oncoming traffic means that a cop car is ahead, same as in the US. People like to stop in entryways suddenly to have their conversations. The 4 slowest walkers in the building will walk abreast of each other in the passage way that is wide enough for 5 people, centered nicely so that you can't get around them. They are of course oblivious to anyone trying to get past them(because what could possibly be so important that you want to move more quickly then the 4 elderly people that are using 1 regular walker, 1 mega walker, and 1/2 a coffin).
Nearly the whole country(as far as we can tell) shuts down at around 4PM. Things that don't close at 4, close at 6. This even includes a good portion of restaurants, which seem primarily to serve a lunch based crowd. It's very strange to us, like Kansas City on a Sunday. A few things don't open till 4 or 5(the movie theaters specifically). Grocery stores seem to be open 24 hours or until 9. Otherwise we can't figure out how anyone gets any other kind of stuff done.

W for Wellington

I realise this post is out of order. After I wrote the other one, it came to me that I hadn't actually written anything about what we did today.

So today, the big scheduled event was a cable car ride up to one of the higher(highest?) points in Wellington. By the way, this is the capital city of New Zealand. Anyway, the views from this high point were quit nice. There's a massive botanical garden there, and also a small museum about the cable car and it's history.

We trekked around the gardens a bit, quite nice, not much of a garden per se, but that's probably the time of year. Lots of green, minimal flowers. The views of the surrounding region are impressive. It reminds me of pictures of Greece, much of the housing is built directly into the sides of the mountains. Strangely, for a city of that size, it seems very quiet. You can hear very little auto traffic, mostly juts the occasional souped up car or motorcycle revving really hard, or a emergency vehicle siren once or twice. There doesn't seem to be as much noise pollution in general.

Back to the view...the harbor is magnificent, very impressive. Houses everywhere, like barnacles on the mountains, overlooking this large chunk of water. The water was fairly devoid of activity, I'm assuming that it's a bit early in the year for much to happen. A few sailboats, 1 speed boat, and late in the afternoon a single cargo container ship. We did see some kids jumping in to the water. I can't imagine that was anything approaching warm, it's the friggin' Pacific.

We also went to the Te Papa museum, a very impressively modern museum. It was a combination of history, nature stuff, and art. I liked the nature stuff the most, it's a stark contrast to how all the local varieties of things we have back home are often super sized versions here. Also interestingly, the museum has no admission cost, although there are donation bins. Same for the cable car museum I mentioned earlier.

I sorta skipped lunch, and a picture of my breakfast is visible below I think. Dinner was fish and chips and a local beer for both of us. The fish was nothing special here. We were in a bar though, and it seems a universal truth that the bar equivalents of any given food outside of a burger or hot dog, are almost always inferior to a real restaurant.

We decided to call it a night after that and do some upkeep things, repacking, electronics maintenance, pictures(which we still have a good number to go through), and a load of laundry. Nothing exciting. There are fireworks going off though. I'm not sure if for the ederly rugby thing that's happening in Wellington currently, or Guy Fawkes day(Remember remember the 5th of November...or something like that. See "V for Vendetta" to learn all I know about it).

 

Farewell, North Island!!!

That's similar to the face we will make from the back of the ferry if we see any United Airlines airplanes, since we hold them partly responsible for us missing Auckland completely.

For accurate reporting purposes, that is in fact a Maori warrior greeting our group(Yes, that is in fact a face made for the purposes of greeting another tribe) that was visiting their village. I tried to post it the other night, but had issues so I gave up. Interesting factoid you didn't know about traditional Maori meals made in earth ovens: they make a pretty good pasta salad.

So, tomorrow we get up very early so that we can catch a ferry boat over to the south island of New Zealand. And with that, other then a brief passing through on the way back home, we part ways with the North Island and head south towards colder climates. Yeah, it's weird to think of that, south = cold. The ferry ride should provide us with time to catch up on lost sleep from getting up at 5ish in the morning, since it's 3 1/2 hours long, give or take. It might be overkill, but we're giving our selves something like 30-45 minutes to travel the <5 km to the ferry, because missing it would be bad in ways approaching missing our connecting flights.

Once safely across the tiny bit of Pacific ocean that separates N and S, we'll pick up our new rental vehicle, and head to Nelson. We'll have to figure out what to do there. It's a "at leisure" day, which means no scheduled activities. We had planned out some stuff, but due to my laptop at home crashing at an inconvienent time, we are not sure what. With any luck my dad will have rebooted it for me before then and I will be able to dig up the ideas then.

I uploaded some more pictures to the Picasa album tonight too. The link can be found in my 2nd post I think. It's the word "here" that is green.

The Cleric