WESTCOAST AYE OH! 

Jacob and Bekah West Coast NZ

        I have finished my New Zealand to do list so I'm ready to be home and get my lights strung up and a wreath on the garage! This week we had our terrestrial ecology class and took a 10 day field trip that consisted mostly of van rides. Not kidding. So as we wound our way around and over, down and under, I got real sick of the terrible dead mildew smell that lives inside our vans. One good move I made was before I got in the van, I downloaded the new Katy Perry album and grabbed my head phones so I could escape into my own world. If you’re not listening to “Love me” then something is not wired up right in your brain. The west coast is made up of temperate rainforest and the lower alps mountains. Lots of mountains, beaches, tree ferns, waterfalls, and not many people. 

Lots of Christmas painted windows and displays in the stores but there aren’t any lights! Maybe its too early but I would have to doubt that. On this trip we saw a live kiwi bird. It was pretty cool but it wasn’t a wild one. It was at a kiwi hatchery/animal hospital, I don’t know what it really was but it was a museum type place with a few chicks and one 12 month old bird running around sticking its beak deep into the ground. I could have touched it but I've been walking a tight line and had to be on my best behavior. Just kidding. 

We also saw cave glow worms! It was really dark after class and we loaded into our vans and walked a little ways to a limestone cave.  I led everyone in “Silent Night” and we serenaded the glo-worms. There weren’t too awful many but there were more than I expected. They just hang from the ceiling and glow a bluish green color. We also woke up way too early one day at 6:30 and were on the road by 7:00 to find crested penguins. We got there and had to hike a little ways, but it was still too far for me on too little coffee. Steve and I were the first to arrive. To our disappointment we couldn’t find any birds but there were lots of really tall rock formations with huge green waves crashing against them.

Pancake Rocks!

Finallly!

We sat for a while, then 1 penguin came up out of the water about 150 feet from us and put on a little show as he strut his stuff! He had a little bit of yellow around his eyes and I would guess about 2 feet tall. A plump little guy.

At this point I'll tell you about the other wildlife we saw.

New Zealand West Coast Sandflies

We saw lots of sandflies (blackflies) and let me tell you I have never heard anyone moan and groan about flies like these guys here. Yes, they are bad but you can't do a thing about it so just ignore them. I heard over and over from one individual “oh my word I these are so bad! I just got bit by two of them!’...... two bugs and your complaining? We also saw the Fox Glacier and hiked up to it!

Fox Glacier

It was smaller than I 

thought it would be, but I guess that is because its been melting for a little while. This coming week we will be doing some field research projects. My group had chosen to study bird species and their proximity to water sources, so that should be fun. Our teacher has hiked the Appalachian Trail. He didn’t stop in at Jo Mary but he did know what Great Northern Paper Company was. He is a cool guy from Michigan. 

Kiwi Bird

Today we had a free day so Rob, Steve, Jenna and I went on a hike. UNDERGROUND! It was a mile long hike through an underground stream that was about waist deep and the walls were only about 4-8 feet wide. The ceiling would be anywhere from 6 -30 feet high. It was awesome and not even cold at all! Saw lots of spiders but no bats or dead bodies...or treasure. 

Entering the cave!

Marden's Scuba Boots were the envy of the group!

My kind of man cave!

I don’t have any funny stories to share, I think I'm running out of excitement so I will tell you about random New Zealandness:

My last internet source was at a grocery store in some random town. Yes, I did steal the internet but I did buy a Cadbury caramel filled chocolate bar that was on sale for $2.50. "Chocolate bars" are what they sell instead of "candy bars". They are about 5 inches by 10 inches big and 3⁄4 an inch thick. They are filled with anything you can think of. Dried kiwi, coconut, caramel, dried berries, honeycomb. 

Bridges here are one way. Almost every one of them. So one direction always has the right of way. If there is a car coming at you on the bridge then you have to pull over before the bridge and cross when there is no one on the bridge. You could never have two cars side by side because they are not wide enough. One car would eventually be pushed off the edge if someone tried that. 

I have seen a kea. It is the only alpine parrot in the world. It's on the endangered species list but I have seen so many of them here! They are as social as sea gulls and as big as a chicken. They are green in color and don’t talk.  And..they have Christmas colors because under their wing is red. Hill would hate them. (They still don't compare to flamingos)

Right now I am staying in a room that has bed bunks stacked 3 high and there is a hole in the 

wall that says “barny the rat lives here”.... I have yet to see him but I don’t doubt he lives there. 

Every shower in New Zealand is awful. The one at the convent only lets out as much water as a person drizzling a cup of water over your head and you’re lucky if its hot. Every other shower here hits about lower neck, high chest level and you are still lucky if its hot. 

Cars are either really new and nice or pretty old but never have any rust on them because they don’t use road salt I'm guessing. 

Rob snores a lot but it really doesn’t bother me too bad. Last week I moved into a different room so I could get caught up on my sleep.... I have since moved back into my room. 

At the grocery store (New World supermarket) they have a 15 foot long, floor to eye level of just chocolate bars, they also sell raw eggs that would normally be refrigerated in America but here they only sit on a normal shelf not even in the refrigerator section. 

Does the toilets flush the opposite way? I don’t know they don’t have whirl pool toilets like America, at least that I have seen. The toilets are really weird here a bunch of water just drops into the toilet and then goes down. But. When we drained the tub on spring break, like 7 times, the water whirl pooled clockwise. 

They do drive on the opposite side of the road. I'm glad I'm not driving because I would not be able to pay attention long enough to go around all these curves and sharp corners. The common speed limit is 100 kmh. My car sickness sets in about 10 minutes into each ride, or maybe it’s just the smell that makes me want to vomit.  

I get mail every now and then in my mailbox. I get wicked excited when I see it setting there. Theresa Peters sends me great Maine postcards every now and then with words of encouragement. I even got a package once! So if you’re feeling nice you can send me a Christmas card or two and I wouldn’t be ungrateful. And it would guarantee you no coal this year. But it might be too late to send anything now so you all might just be doomed to coal. 

I have been to where they filmed the last battle in the Prince Caspian Narnia movie! It was a really boldery hill, with lots of rocks and gullies and grass growing between the rocks. Soooo I was pretty much Aslan when I was there. 

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Research: 

At the west coast we had a week long research project and we could choose any topic we wanted to study. My group was Emma, Bekah, and myself and we were "Team Riflemen." (Riflemen is a type of bird here in NZ. No shotguns here, save the planet, don’t kill anything!) We choose to study birds and how populous they were in regards to water. It would have been right up Aunt Kims alley! 

We would leave where we were staying and got dropped off at about 9:00 AM from our mildew stinky van, at a place called Hawdon Valley in Arthurs Pass National Park. You may noticed this is kind of early, which means I was kind of cranky and didn’t have much to say at that time of day. Most of the time on this project I was running on both a coffee low and a sugar low, but as Dad says, those go hand in hand because I put too much sugar in my coffee. You can blame Jim Smith and Grammy Pelkey for that. When we got there, we had to walk for about 35 minutes up a river bed. I had flashbacks of spring break because we had to carry all of our equipment and we had to do several river crossings. 

More river crossing...

On one crossing Bekah (aquarium friend, Bekah) was going across barefoot and holding her boots in her hand so they would stay dry. The water was a bit over knee high and really cold so that compensated for the lack of coffee to wake me up. As I got to the other side and begin to regather myself, I heard, for the very first time, a very bad word come out of her mouth! I didn’t know if I should be proud that she had finally sworn or what to do. Then I noticed she lost her balance and had tried to catch herself, but at the expense of her boots. She completely submerged her dry boots into the frigid waters. Lets just say, Bekah had wet boots that day. 

Monica and I with our Rainforest notebooks and matching outfits!

Missing Aunt Kim!

You are probably imagining a nice, sunny New Zealand day, that we are doing our two days of field research right? No, it was raining from sun up to sun down both days. If you thought I couldn't get any crankier than I am in the morning to start with, you’re wrong. Just kidding!! It wasn't too bad...just cold, wet, and long. Kind of like how it is for me this time of year back in Mattamiscontis putting up my Christmas lights! Emma also led us in some “in field” yoga stretches to release some of our tension. I tried to record it but I’m just not very good with the camera.  

We counted birds for two days and over the rest of the week. We then put our information into a paper and presentation. It was cool to see what we had seen and the different trends we could find in our data. While at our observation spot, we saw a long tailed cookoo bird. It’s pretty rare and we weren’t supposed to see it but we did. It was really cool!

We were supposed to be identifying birds and recording it in our notebooks, but as Im sure you can guess, I really can't do that. My note book was filled with a lot of “FPFBPF UNID 27snd @ 3:24 PM” and that meant "fly, perch, fly, brief perch, fly, and I saw it for 27 seconds at 3:24 Pm"... yeah I came up with that system and I'm pretty proud of it!! 

Using secret code for my birding notes :)

I didn’t watch the Macy’s parade on TV or eat lots of turkey and pie or go Black Friday shopping this Thanksgiving. Instead, I spent Thanksgiving sorting through all of our data, but I had good company and Christmas music was playing. 

  

So peace out, cub scouts, this is probably my last update on here. Who knows, you might get another one but they take a lot of time. 

Spring break! ...or fall break depending on your equator side

Spring Break Hiking

Holding the Hutton Shearwaters

Our plan was to drive a few hours and stay the night at a hotel before waking up and tackling a five day hike. I packed up my ol' faithful children's lightning bolt sleeping bag and bought enough Ramin noodles, pb+j, and candy to last me 5 days in the woods. Lisa, from the whale watch place, drove us (Emma, Monica, Rob and me) 5 hrs in the pouring rain. As we wound our way around one way roads that were squished between the foot of mountains and an ever rising, raging river, we realized that this might be a terrible hike because our entire trail was supposed to be between two mountain ranges on the banks of a river that was rising.

Jacob, Lisa and Rob

Playing with Emma :)

Spring Break Road Trip!

We got to the hotel. It was wicked nice with two bedrooms, a full kitchen, living room, and a whirlpool tub. The best part was there were homemade fresh butter cookies waiting for us in our room. After five minutes of being there, we tried to fold the couch out. Monica gets all gung-ho and starts pulling and shoving the thing around and next thing you know she was holding onto a bar that was once part of the couch… talk about a bull in the china closet! We decided to go look at the beach and get fish n chips in town. We did that, hit up the grocery store for some last minute food items, and bought some scratchys (we lost). As we are checking out, Monica is paying and fumbling around with her coins trying to figure out what to pay. There was a large line behind her and she was as slow as cold molasses. Then she proudly proclaims to the cashier that she was sorry it was taking so long but we don’t have these coins in America. I don’t know what part of America Monica is from but up to Maine we have quarter’s, dimes, nickels, and pennies. Then Emma (girl who laughs funny) hopped on one of the mini coin operated kiddy rides and starts laughing hysterically at herself. That drew the attention of every cashier and every person in line.

Emma on her Kiddi Ride

Change of plans

Obviously like any normal person the first thing I did when I got back to the hotel was to start filling up the whirlpool tub. I got it all filled up and Monica called dibs on it and runs in. As we are watching TV (American TV-ESPN, even over here!) we hear her thumping around in there and don’t hear her turn the jets on. Next we hear a wwwhhgrrrrrrggguuuuglurgle noise come out of the bathroom and Monica opens the door all finished and tells us that the jets didn’t work. I wasn’t going to be let down that easy so I moseyed around and found the switch to turn the tub on and started to re filled it for the second time. 15 minutes later, its ready and I go in with my consumer report magazine all ready to hunker down for a little while. I got the jets on and turned the heat lights on so I could enjoy the thing. I don’t know about you, but baths are weird. I mean what do you do? You can’t sit there and put your legs out because it's too small. I don’t know. I thought it was weird so I was in it for maybe 5 minutes tops and pulled the drain. Then Rob went in for his turn and decided to refill it for himself. He liked it, I guess but I just couldn’t enjoy it. We only filled and drained it 3 times, good thing we are studying sustainability.

We woke up the next morning to more rain but we were pretty set on sucking it up and tramping. We got in the car and drove an hour to the trail head. After calling the department of conservation and having them advise us not to do it we were still going to do it. Then we stopped in at an information place and they informed us that the river had filled up and there were some bridges out. That's when we decided we would drive back to Kaikoura and stay around there for the week. As it started to spit snow, we stopped at a nearby stream and decided to take a boxer plunge. It was a pretty full stream of fast moving water. As we neared the water and I became more sensitive to the freezing cold. I wanted to turn back, but I was too far into it to quit now and Rob and I had a Corolla full of supporters cheering us on! We made the plunge and when I ran back to the car, Emma had my lightning bolt sleeping bag ready for me to jump into. We drove off looking like half drowned rats. At this point, Rob happily points out some 'wicked red rocks' on the edge of the road and advises Lisa to make sure she doesn’t hit them. Lisa starts laughing hysterically. The red rocks he pointed out turned out to be 'ordinary traffic cones'. But props to him for knowing they weren’t any good to run over. And the snow raged onnnn.

Lisa didn’t take us right back to Kaikour. Instead, we drove to her sister’s house. Well her family knew Lisa was coming but they weren’t expecting 4 Americans. As we pulled in, it felt like we were being stared at from every angle. After noticing a large number of K9’s running around we went in. We realized we had stopped in at their house in the middle of a Sunday family gathering with about 25 members of their family there for lunch. They were wicked welcoming and asked us to eat with them. I didn’t refuse that! I must say they were wicked good cooks! Well, it soon turned into a three ringed circus. After eating, we got challenged by Lisa’s brother-in-law to some races. Being naive Americans, we joined in. If I knew it was going to be as intense as it was going be, I would have done some stretches or something. He organized a bunch of funny relay races, using solar lights as batons; flashbacks of the 4x4 and 4x8 relay races from my track and field days came flooding back. That was just the first test. Then we had to play touch rugby. There is a reason Americans are no good at rugby, it’s because we can’t comprehend it. Rob and I both got trys (touch downs) and I think, but am not a 100% sure, our team won! (And I wasn’t the last one picked!). They had a killer trampoline. Rob bounced and bobbed around on, but after hearing mom tell horror stories about how you could die or snap your neck on it, I was hesitant to give it a full whirl.   

Playing with Lisa's family

Fitting right in as 'Family'

“Death Valley”

After getting back to Kaikoura we decided to go on a 3 day hike around the back side of Mt Fyfe. It was along another river bed. The first day was a real test and I would say that I was not qualified for what I was getting in for. New Zealand rivers are called “braided rivers.” They are gravel and stone rivers that are as wide as the turnpike, but only have a small flow of water about the size of Mattamiscontis stream. It weaves its way down the gravel river in a way, that from the air, looks like a braid. It is somewhat similar to hiking up the middle of the Grand Canyon of Maine. We had to do a lot of knee deep or higher river crossing because the rivers was wedged between two mountain faces. You couldn’t always walk along the edge of the water or on the dry loose gravel. At one point it took about 30 minutes to find a point to cross the river because we were walking back and forth trying to find a crossing point. Another one we had to edge across above the river on a 2 inch ledge with our 40 lb hiking backpacks on. It was sketchy and I thought for sure I was falling in, but kept a reassuring attitude and convinced the others that we could do it. I can’t describe how hard it was to cross this death river at some points and how annoying it was to find rocks to hop across on. It took some solid convincing/brainwashing to get Emma and Monica to cross the river at many points. Even when I had doubts about how, I would try to say with a some kind of confidence, that I was 100% sure they would make it, even though I was really only about 50% sure. For the first time in my life, raman noodles let me down! They just weren’t as good as I remembered them being, but maybe that was because I had to carry them in my backpack for 3 days.

We named the hike “Death Valley” because along the way we found numerous dead animals including but not limited to: sheep, wild goat, lamb, hutton shearwaters, (see profile picture on facebook) other birds, possum, and a house cat. So if a wild mountain goat couldn’t even make it out of this valley alive how in the blazes was I supposed to? Other unique features of this hike included: sides of the mountain sliding over the “path. ” We had to climb our way over huge landslides of mangled trees, large bolders and loose gravel. This happened on the first day when we got stuck hiking in the dark. No big deal, right? Not like we were going to die or anything. Twith the trail just ending on a concave cliff that was about 30 feet above the river, where are you supposed to go from there?

Starting out...

An intense river crossing where we had to make a tree bridge, lots of stress and anxiety, food shortages (but mostly sugar and candy shortages), climbing for an hour up a 60 degree incline of all loose gravel that was comparable to a gravel pit, FALLING ROCKS. And words being said that sometimes weren’t very nice. “Death Valley”

Back in Kaikoura

It was only Tuesday. At this point, we were homeless: not being allowed to stay at the nun house, we had to find a place to stay. We choose to stay at the sketchy backpackers/hostile lodge called the Dusky Lodge for two nights. It's the place I go to get internet but never thought I would ever have to stay there. We became internet addicts that only left the lounge to get Fish and Chips from the Topp shop. Rob and I had fish and chips from the Topp shop four days in a row. Everyday, the same women waited on us but she never let on that she recognized us!

I was pretty happy to get back to the convent and eat a carrot after a week of eating that. While here in Kaikoura we biked around, ate, sat in the hot tub, ate, watched a movie, ate, went to the driving range, ate. Rob, Emma and I biked to the golf course which was up a huge hill and then all down hill from there. It didn’t take much energy to get there but coming back my thighs got toned. At the golf club was a sign telling us we needed a collared shirt, but we walked in anyway. Everyone was all gussied up in their Sunday best, and we had t-shirts and gym shorts. We stuck out like sore thumbs, but the old men were really nice. They told us they didn’t have a driving range but we could hit some balls in a field, then go pick them up. So, that is what we did: we hit the balls and picked them up. 4 times, I think. I had to pretend it was an Easter egg hunt so that I could stay interested. I'm just going to say, that golfing for Rob and Emma is very different than when I go to the driving range at Barns Brook in Enfield. Rob and Emma were very serious and, I will just say, acted like the people Hillary and I make fun of when we show up at Barnes Brook with our blue Slushies’ and Swisher Sweets.

This week was the Kaikoura Cup Harness Races. Once a year they hold races here on the track and it’s a big deal. Like at home, they get dressed up and make a big event out of it and bet money. I was wicked excited to go and couldn’t wait for it, but nobody else here at the convent had even been to a racetrack or even understood how much fun it could be. So, Sherry Contella, these are the horse racing virgins, that I am here with. That afternoon I got a haircut by Emma. She did a good job of lopping my hair, but missed a spot in the back, so I put my hat on and went to the races. I was too late and only got to see one race. Rob didn’t even get to experience the fun of harness racing. I didn’t come home with my pockets loaded. Its always a real shock to me when people say the things they have never done and then ask questions that are glaringly obvious to me just because I grew up somewhere else. I'm not going to say what their questions where but sometimes people just have funny questions. And..I'm sure I ask them stupid questions sometime, too.

Speak Like a Kiwi:

“Wee” = little

I’ll be done in a wee bit. It’s just a wee chicken.

“Tea”

Is supper or dinner, not a hot beverage but we do drink a lot of tea all the time here.

“Jolly”

We had a Jolly time on the whale watch!

“Dodgy”

The Dusky Lodge was Dodgy hotel.

“Eeg”

Do you want me to cook you an eeg (egg)?

“Kia ora”

Is a greating! Like hello or welcome but also like a good bye

“Kaikoura”

Eat crayfish

“Convent dog”

Is a phrased commonly used to describe Lisa Bond or LB :)