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.