travels with janne

I think I have died and gone to heaven. To be more specific, I am now in Abel Tasman National Park on the northern part of South Island – and what a place!

I have spent the past two days on, in and near pristine, clear, turquoise-green water the likes of which I have only previously seen in tourist brochures touting expensive hideaways for the select few. The park has lots of little Robinson Crusoe beaches where the waves are perfect, the surf soothing, and the land is covered with lush green forests. Superlatives come to mind much too easily but without them it is hard to describe this place fully. Let’s just say I have spent one of the best couple of days so far on this trip.

Yesterday I paddled in a sea kayak for a few hours, passing islands, bays and beaches. It was lovely to sit out on the water bobbing on the waves and feeling the rhythm of the sea. After lunch on the beach I walked for a couple of hours along the coastline on a path which led me through the forest and opened onto spectacular views of the ocean and the forested bays.

I swam in the crystal clear water, let the waves buffet me and continued my walk. It led me over low tide areas where tiny crabs scampered away as I approached and where the different colours of sand were swirled in beautiful patterns by the water. The tide was not completely out, so I doffed my sandals and waded through the cooling waters barefoot. After another swim at the last cove on my route I took a water taxi back to the starting point. The speedboat-like boat literally flew over the waves and landed with huge splashes during the half hour trip.

Today was more of the same: lolling on the beach, listening to the surf, collecting seashells and watching birds.

First white man

Abel Tasman was a Dutchman who was actually the first European person to arrive down here in 1642 (Cook was the first to set foot on New Zealand – Tasman never made it that far). Apparently, the local Maoris greeted Abel Tasman with their traditional eye-bulging, tongue-protruding, conch-playing performance. Tasman answered in kind by playing a tune on the bugle, not knowing that by responding with music he had declared war.

The Maoris paddled out to him in their huge and impressive war canoes. Abel Tasman shot at them with his cannons, killing one Maori. That was the white man’s debut in New Zealand. Typical. Despite that, many things in the area are named after him, including the Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand, the Australian island of Tasmania, the Tasmanian Sea, the Tasmanian Devil and so on. The park was officially opened exactly three hundred years to the date after his arrival by the Dutch queen.

The particular Bed & Breakfast we are staying at deserves a mention, too. It is like a mini Scottish castle nestled high up in the hills. The view from the bedroom window over the forests and the sea is astounding, as is the night sky with its many constellations – none of which are familiar to me. I can see Jupiter shining brightly in the total silence of the night and in the morning I wake to the sounds of birds twittering in a spring chorus. What a place! What a life!

Large rolls of lard with big brown eyes are basking in the sun amid the black rocks and the noisy surf. Seals. Lots of them. They are lolling on the beach, one eye open to keep an eye on me and one eye closed ready to continue napping. These New Zealand fur seals are apparently not afraid of humans and I am able to get quite close and take pictures.

Unwittingly, while sneaking up on one particular seal to get a close-up shot, I almost step on another one that growls at me. I have never been growled at by a seal before. Later, another seal emerges from the water. I stop to change camera lenses but the seal disappears back in the water before I am ready. Suddenly, the seal is once again out of the water but this time much closer to me. On purpose, I think. It barks and growls and starts flopping towards me in a rather aggressive manner, so I back off. I wouldn’t want to get caught between a grouchy seal and a rock – seals do have rather sharp teeth, even though they look cute and docile.

This area is also well known for its Lord of the Rings film locations. In fact, our road map has them marked and you can get brochures describing Lord of the Rings routes. Today, we visit one of the sites – the Putangirua Pinnacles. These strange rock formations that jut up like huge, pointy arrowheads are 12-14 million years old. They are made of gravel and rock and crumble like poor quality cement. The river and rain erode the gravely parts and leave the larger stones but with time these, too, are eroded away. It is an otherworldly walk along the more or less dried out riverbed with the pinnacles on each side.

At times I feel like I am back in my beloved homeland Canada, with its burbling brooks, splashing waterfalls and snowy mountains. At other times I am reminded of walking through the rain forest in Borneo, with its abundance of botanical wonders. And sometimes I think of England – or New England, for that matter, because of the quaint gardens, pots of tea and names like Wellington, Nelson and New Plymouth. New Zealand has an amazing variety of landscapes and flora. It is as though the whole world is packed into a tiny area.

The landscapes remind me of so many places that I have been to before, but somehow I keep feeling that something is off with regard to what I am actually seeing and what I am used to seeing. My perceptions are perplexed. When I see snowy mountains I think of the Rocky Mountains in Banff or the Alps in Switzerland. I think of skiing and hot chocolate. I expect pine trees or edelweiss.

Instead, here in New Zealand, I stand amid fern trees, eucalyptus and palm trees while viewing the snowy mountains. I see ski lifts on slopes where the virginal snow risks a sudden melt from a volcanic burst of lava. I see handsome Maoris and expect them to speak with some kind of Polynesian accent. Instead, I hear the charming dialect of New Zealand.

In the lush, jungle-like forests I expect to hear the screech of monkeys and the strumming of cicadas. I expect to be drenched in muggy sweat and attacked by swarms of mosquitoes. There is nothing big, dangerous or annoying! All we have seen and heard so far is a wide variety of birds, some of them unrecognizable to my ear.

Our next little adventure was a day spent in Tongariro National Park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There is an abudance of volcanic activity in this area, the latest major eruption being in 1995 right in the middle of skiing season. Fortunately, the volcano erupted in the middle of the night so no one was on the slopes, but eruptions that destroy buildings, ski lifts and railways do occur with alarming frequency.

Mount Ngauruhoe is a beautiful, cone-shaped mountain with snow glazing its slopes like ice cream running down an ice cream cone. The mountain looks just like a volcano is supposed to look. Its next-door neighbour, Mount Ruapehu, is completely snow-covered and is a popular ski area.

We are incredibly lucky with the weather: it is sunny and warm and the skies are very clear – so clear, in fact, that we were able to see the 2518 metres high Mount Taranaki about 150 kilometres away. The clear skies and the holey ozone layer are also two reasons that I am pretty pink in the face and have started to smother myself in high-factor sun block.

The combination of snow on the mountains and fiery lava within them is fascinating. I would love to see a volcano in action, but what we saw today was pretty good, too. We did several walks of various lengths and with quite variable nature. Altogether we hiked about 12 kilometres up and down mountain slopes, through lush green forests, and past busy brooks, rushing streams and plunging waterfalls. We have had great views of the snow-covered volcanic mountains and seen lots of nifty plants, lichen and mosses.

There is just a thin layer of crusty earth between me and the workings of the earth. A huge area of North Island is a wide belt of geothermal activity with boiling and bubbling mud and water and lots of stinky steam escaping here, there and everywhere. Today, we visited Wai-O-Tapu, a huge geothermal area south of Rotorura and north of Turangi.

Such an amazing and weird landscape!. It bubbles, it boils, it smells, it steams. Geysers gush and mud roils like a huge cup of hot chocolate in which the milk has gone off. Bacteria and mineral deposits create amazing colour displays of rusty red, emerald green, murky green, sulphur yellow, and turquoise. The mud, stones and water contain gold, arsenic, mercury, antimony, iron and sulphur, so it is a veritable hot pot of alchemy, poison and valuable minerals.

We also watched a geyser go off at its appointed time thanks to the park ranger pouring soap into the chimney to alter the surface tension of the water.

After the geothermal area we drove past Lake Taupo, New Zealand’s largest lake, which gave great views of Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe. In the foreground were flowering yellow lupines and gorse.

Speaking of snow and flowers, it seems so incongruous to be seeing lupines, gorse, cherry trees, roses and rhododendrons in full bloom at the same time as advertisements for Christmas bargains and shop windows displaying snowy landscapes with Santa Claus and sleigh bells.

It’s like a direct connection to Hell. Boiling, bubbling, and foul-smelling, the hot, sulphurous waters just under the surface in and around Rotorura create mysterious, steamy areas that look apocalyptic. Smelly steam rises from the Government Gardens in the centre of Rotorura town, where a park full of hot pools is situated; it rises from the chimneys of thermally heated motels; it rises from the sewers, and it rises from holes in the ground that appear here and there like rabbit warren saunas.

The bubbling hot sulphurous water pools sound like casseroles of water just before they are ready to boil over. Pools of luscious fine mud blop and plop like a coffee percolator that is just starting up. The sounds and the smells are not all. The water, earth and surrounding plants are coloured from a palette of sulphurous yellow, rusty red, murky grey, opaque turquoise, ashen white, and mossy green.

This is also the land of the Maori, New Zealand’s proud, original people. Like other Polynesians, they have their origins in Southeast Asia. Both men and women are often beautifully tattooed with individual, symbolic designs. When greeting each other in the traditional way, they gently press noses and exchange the breath of life. Not quite as gentle is the way they greet enemies. In this case they bulge their eyes and stick out their tongues as far as they can go, shout terrifically and show muscle almost like gorillas hammering their chests. It is quite daunting!

We were given an impression of this, as well as a beautiful love song and various games and dances in a local Maori village that has opened its doors to tourists. The village, called Whakarewarewa, is situated right in the midst of a huge area with steamy, sulphurous pools. This gives the village a rather mystic atmosphere.

The villagers use the hot water to dip food into for cooking, to bathe in and to wash clothes in. Living right on top of so much geothermal activity does pose practical problems, though. When people die, it is not possible to bury them six feet under. In fact, just digging down a couple of feet will reveal bubbling hot water. Instead, the dead are placed in stone coffins above ground, with the result that space for the dead in the village is at a premium.

Huge ferns and fern trees, kauri trees, palm trees and trees to me unknown that look like they have an ancient genetic history fill this primordial forest. It is reminiscent of illustrations showing what the world looked like when the continents were joined in Gondwana, when dinosaurs wandered the earth, before the Ice Age did it off with them, and before we humans came and mucked everything up.

Verdant, lush, mysterious. Epiphytes attach themselves to the trees like botanical penthouse apartments, providing living space for tiny insects and other organisms. Everyone strives for the top, reaching for the light. It is like walking through a rain forest but without the mugginess, the snakes, the leeches, and the creepy crawlies. This is the Coromandel Peninsula on the east side of New Zealand’s North Island.

We walk through an area containing New Zealand’s few remaining kauri trees, called Kauri Grove. The kauri are ancient, slow-growing trees. The wood is very durable making it a sought after product for timber. That was almost it’s demise but just before loggers rendered it extinct, environmentalists stepped in and now the precious kauri tree is conserved. They grow tall (up to 50 m), wide (3 m in diameter) and old (several thousand years). A great tree for a nice big hug.

At every twist and turn (and there are a lot of those!) the hilly and sometimes mountainous landscape is lush and green. When not covered with forest, the land is covered by a velvety green carpet of grass, and huge herds of dairy cows and sheep and beefy cattle graze the slopes (and burp and fart lots of greenhouse gases). The plants in people’s gardens merge with the wild plants and it is sometimes hard to see where the man-made stops and nature takes over. It must be a dream to be a gardener here.

Occasionally all of this incredible greenness is broken by clear-cut areas, where the forest has been shaved away, leaving just the bare slopes and something that looks like an ecological disaster area. It looks like forests are replanted here and there but just with a monotony of pine trees. Such a shame.

We are now on the other side of the world. We have crossed the equator. We have flown about 20.000 kilometres, which is approximately half of the earth’s circumference. We have crossed umpteen time zones and we are now 12 hours ahead of home. If we had flown just a little bit more we would have crossed the international date line and ended up in yesterday again. I have given up trying to eat and sleep regularly and just try to go with the flow. The result is that I am sleepy and hungry at all the wrong times. Tomorrow is today and today becomes yesterday.

At any rate, we have finally arrived in New Zealand, a full three days after leaving home. Auckland is an okay city, I guess, although right now I’m mostly itching to get away from it all and see some kiwi landscape. The city has a youthful feel, especially the kind of youth who go bungy jumping all over the place or do other crazy outdoorsy thing. Just outside out hotel window (we are on the 13th floor) there is a kind of ride that simulates a bungy jump, so we hear screams at regular intervals. Further on down the road is the Sky Tower, from which people pay to bungy jump, right in the middle of the busy city. Weird tastes!