On February 16th we left Wellington and ferried back across the Cook Strait for a ten-day tour back to the South Island.

The very next day we went off on a charter boat tour of the Sound, visiting rare hector's dolphins and bottlenose dolphins, a former whaling station, an abalone farm where a guy from California and his Kiwi wife are pioneering abalone aquaculture, a restored island with native plants and birds, as well as a beautiful mainland beach with chicken-like birds called weka. The water's cold, but not quite Oregon-coast cold, and it was calm the day we were there.

Since then, we've spent many hours on the bus, just as many hours in the rain, but all of it has been in good company and with gorgeous scenery. We have our trip leaders from Victoria University Tim Markwell and Ken Ryan, Victoria Univ. professors George Gibbs and Phil Garnock-Jones, chef and PhD student Catherine Duthie, assistant chef Lynn Ryan, and our excellent bus driver, PhD geologist, rowing and gymnastics coach Michelle Hawke. Our Kiwi team provides not only expertise on the flora, fauna, biogeography, and geology of New Zealand, but invaluable insight and guidance as we navigate the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Kiwi language and culture (see previous blog entries for more of what we've learned in this area).

The West Coast of the South Island holds a good part of New Zealand's remaining 30% of native forest, in a climate that is very wet. It's also home to huge swarms of sandflies, whose bites seem to increase in itchiness every day after the initial bite for three or four days. We were very fortunate (or not) to experience the full West Coast treatment from Thursday morning until. . . well, we've crossed over the southern alps, supposedly in the rain shadow, and it's still raining. At least there don't seem to be as many sandflies so far here on the east side.

After Picton, we moved a bit south to St. Arnaud, where we visited Lake Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes district, which sits in a "mainland island," a conservation area that, while on the mainland, strives to apply here the success NZ conservationists have had removing invasive pests and restoring native wildlife on coastal islands. Some of those pests include mammals like stoats and omnivorous Australian possums, but also European wasps that have invaded the native beech forest in this area, eating the honeydew that would normally feed native insects and birds as well as baby birds themselves. Besides that, they sting the humans, making them really unpopular. The Department of Conservation has had considerable success in removing invasives and creating an environment in which the native species have a fighting chance. While there, we also climbed Mt. Robert and came to know him and his amazing views over Lake Rotoiti quite well.

Back to the rain. It started, and it kept coming, and there was a lot of it. our first outing in the rain out from St. Arnoud was a fossil field just off the main road. There's a hillside that sloughs off rock every year, and the rocks are filled with fossils, mainly plants, that literally land at your feet. So we got back in the bus slightly damp after that outing, to stop next at a trail covered in ferns and trailing vines leading to a beach covered in smooth pebbles with waterfalls cascading over eroded cliffs at our back and a climbable rock outcrop a few feet off the beach in front of us. Think Northern California coastline on steroids, but with easily accessible beach. Another half-hour down the coast we visited the Pancake Rocks, cool and weird geologic features that look like the piles of drippy sand that we used to make on the beach when we were kids, but these tower several stories out of the ocean and don't melt away. Driving on another hour or so we arrived at the Franz Josef Glacier, where it rained and rained and where the glacier made a huge impression. I finally learned what a glacier is and how it works, and getting up close to it gave me an appreciation of how powerful water and ice are. We got wet from the rain, but also from the creeks that we forded without benefit of dry crossing so that we could get up close. We were pretty soggy and bedraggled by the time we got back to the bus, but it was worth it.

During our tour of the west side of the island, besides visiting amazing places and seeing gorgeous scenery, we learned about the geologic forces that created the landscape--the Australian and Pacific plates meet here at the Alpine Fault, creating high peaks that are home to glaciers that carve out valleys and erode down to the ocean to create vast plains on one side and sharp valleys and high cliffs on the other. The collision of the Australian and Pacific plates also causes earthquakes that rearrange the landforms every 160 years or so, and in certain places you can still see pieces of Gondwana, the ancient landmass that broke apart to form New Zealand, Australia, South America, southern Africa, and the Antarctic.

There are a few days left on our South Island tour, and then we go our separate ways for spring break (that would be fall break here, you know).

--Valeurie