Tassie

Wow. Tasmania is one awesome place. I had hoped to put up some pictures midweek, but I’ve been pretty far from electricity let alone the internet. But before I get ahead of myself, we’ll start in Hobart.

Tasmania is a battlefield for logging interests and environmental warriors. A swarm of protesters marched from the capital city’s park to the police station to chant and wave signs and, of all things, arrest themselves.

It was a show of solidarity among the greenies whose leadership had been singled out and arrested two months prior at a rally attended by hundreds. Thirty dissenters successfully entered the station and turned themselves in for illegally trespassing on Forestry Tasmania property.

From the protest I went straight out to the front lines of the conflict at the Upper Florentine Valley where a dozen or so eco-sentinels were stationed at a blockade. To prevent Forestry Tasmania from simply arresting everyone and bulldozing away their camps and obstacles, the activists rigged cables up to everything, connecting all structures, gravel impediments to tree-sits manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that any sort of

intervention would be an effective act of murder.

The escalation of more elaborate methods by the Loraxes for self sacrifice for the sake of the forests is evidence for the duration of the conflict. They have people sleeping in cars blocking the logging track with their arms manacled to cement blocks embedded into the earth beneath, so that to move the vehicles without dismembering anyone, loggers must first disassemble the autos piece by piece.

And to prevent forestry from bringing in cherry-pickers to pull the “possums,” as the tree-sitters are called, from their 50-meter perches, the greenies dug some sort of tunnel under the road in which somebody resides full-time that is primed to collapse causing a gruesome death by squishing should any of Forestry’s fleet of heavy machinery venture across the road above.

Anyway, I was mighty impressed with all their courage and determination, but I’m not allowed to post any photos of the warriors online to protect their identity. For similar reasons they all go by groovy superhero pseudonyms like “skunk,” “quoll,” or “bones.” If you want to cheer them on or join the fight check out their website: www.stillwildstillthreatened.com

I continued my whirlwind eco-tour by cruising up the road to Lake Pedder, an artificial body created by the

construction of several massive dams that generate loads of hydroelectric power for the state.

Then straight after drove through the Franklin River National Park, a reserve created in a successful battle to prevent the damming of the river that was slated to meet a similar fate. The saving of the Franklin River was the first campaign of the Wilderness Society led in part by Senator Bob Brown who went on to found the Australian Green Party.

It was pretty cloudy that day. You could even see the clouds forming down below from this elevation. No rain though, which was lucky given the area receives 2 to 3 meters of it per year.

I also got to see some of the biggest trees in the world in the Styx Valley. Without the efforts of TWS they would be nothing but lumber and paper pulp.

I followed a map I got from TWS campaign center in Hobart, but it apparently landed me in some sort of active logging zone off limits to the public. A Forestry Tasmania official promptly escorted me back to the highway. I took some pictures of some of the awful clear-felled, still-smoldering remains of what used to be old growth rainforest, but none of them came out that well as I was snapping them furtively over my shoulder out the window while doing 90 km/hr down a winding gravel road.

I made it out to the west coast and combed the beach for an afternoon. On the way two towns: 1) Strahan, Tassie’s “tourist mecca” contained nobody under the age of 65. 2) Queenstown, the busted remains of a mining town surrounded by a desolate moonscape wrought such by acid rain and heavy metal contamination.

On my way back southeast to Hobart I woke up to this:

…and then on the Bruny Island, just 40 minutes drive and a short ferry ride from Hobart, but essentially the end of the earth.

I ran into a bit of a kindred spirit in a bloke from Queensland named “Pat.” No he wasn’t into birds, but he was into a bit of plants and trees, and was, like me, sleeping in his car, traveling alone and keen to explore the island’s natural wonders while spending as little money as possible.

We complemented each other well with, me pointing out and identifying anything with feathers, while he kept encouraging me to try different edible plants and berries.

We parted ways today in Hobart when he took off for the Tasmanian Peninsula, while I’ve got to fly back to the mainland. I have to say I’m a bit jealous. A week is far too short to spend on this island. It looks so small on maps, but I hardly had a chance to see half of half of it.

I’ve learned though that with traveling that no matter how long you plan to stay in a good place, it’s never long enough.

This is probably my longest post, yet it could have easily been quite a bit longer. Ironically my parents are en route to Sydney at the moment, so nobody will probably read it anyway. Ha!

To be honest, not a whole lot worth mentioning has occurred over the past 10 days. So you might as well go back to watching the NCAA tournament…just kidding! I successfully turned 24, returned to Australia, and then flew down to Tasmania to check out some of those big trees and animals I’ve been working so hard to protect. Not many photos to show for all that, so it will be a quick entry anyway.



I ended up spending my birthday in Wellington with a couple of my friends I met while working at a resort back in the US: ‘Carl’ who I introduced a few posts back and a fellow American who requested an especially elaborate pseudonym that I cannot recall, so we’ll just call him ‘Grievous Vasquez.’

Here we are with several of ‘Carl’s’ mates carrying what sums to a shocking number of beverages through New Zealand’s capital city.

I managed to score a free ticket to Wellington’s massive waterfront music festival called Homegrown. You may not quite be able to recognize them (or be able to have ever heard of them before) but in the background there is no other than New Zealand’s premier drum and bass act, State of Mind.

I know how mighty impressed and jealous you are.


The days since haven’t really inspired my photographic muse. You all know what an airplane looks like and I’ve already spent better than 3 months in Sydney. I will say that Emirates is the best airline I’ve ever flown, just eclipsing my experience with KLM.

Also I woke up at 3 am the other day to catch the first round of the NCAA tournament with an American friend and basketball fan with whom I went to high school and who happens to be studying abroad at UNSW. For some reason ESPN stopped covering the action after 5 hours in favor of showing reruns of world’s strongest man, which means I missed seeing Duke. Anyway, my bracket is now busted with Wake’s pathetic first round loss.

I just arrived in Hobart a few hours ago so no Tassie pics yet, but stay tuned… I’m going to some Wilderness Society protest tomorrow morning and will hopefully meet some nature-lovers keen to explore a bit of the bush with me.

too many scenic vistas

Wow. I’ve been so busy riding my thumb around the south island I haven’t gotten around to posting any pictures or stories in quite awhile. I left off just before Queenstown:

Gorgeous place and though it is a bit overrun by tourists, it has the only disc golf course I have encountered thus far in the country. I would have happily stuck around to play it, but with my tight schedule I had to get a move on. In fact that has been a bit of a theme for the south island—so many places that make me want to stick around for a week or two, but with only a month in the country it just isn’t possible to take things that slow. So I woke up at the crack the next morning to catch a tour bus to one of the most splendid sights on the planet, Milford Sound.

It’s really tough to capture the shear scale of the place. With cliffs jutting vertically up from the fiord 1,500 meters and capped by the occasional glacier, it sure is magnificent. It is also one of the wettest places on earth and I lucked out with the weather. It gets so much rainfall, 10 to 20 meters of fresh water rides atop the salty ocean water below, which creates a very unusual marine ecosystem.

Next stop on the whirlwind Thumbelina express: Stewart Island. But not before a stop off in my town.

Funny I must have founded it prehumously.

But on to Stewart Island...it is a pretty unique place. It rains there an average of 15 times per day and stops raining just as frequently.

These flightless birds called Wekas roam the island and don’t have any fear of people.

This one really wanted to eat whatever was in my bag and stuck his/her head entirely inside it. Another tried to jump in my lap as I was trying to make myself a peanut butter sandwich!

More fascinating than the bird life is that of the locals. I happened to be present for the live band Saturday night.

That’s right. A guitar, a one-string broom-handle bass, a washboard and a tambourine—the classical Stewart Island quartet. After they completed their repertoire of about 5 songs (for most of which the complete lyrics eluded them) they just went back to the top and repeated their set. Of course the gumboot clad fishermen scarcely seemed to notice and seldom managed a sip of Speights without spilling an equivalent portion on the carpet.

Back across to the mainland and planet Earth, I hitched to Dunedin, sister city of Edinburgh, Scotland, and New Zealand’s biggest college town. I rented a car so I could go see Otago Point and some of the Catlans National Park.

Unfortunately I forgot to recharge my camera the night before so this is the only shot I got of the beautiful scenery.

Don’t try to hitchhike in a hailstorm. It just isn’t worth it. Catch a bus. After about 5 hours of hiding out in cafés and of short rides with very friendly farmers going to the next town, I actually got picked up by a commercial bus. The driver charged me $20, but it was still a $10 discount off what I would have paid if I had done the smart thing: checked the weather and booked online.

This morning I signed up for a car relocation at one of the rental places, which is basically a $19 one-day rental. Of course it limited me to a straight shot form Christchurch to Picton, but allowed me to explore Kaikoura by car in between.

Yes another incredibly scenic place. I know you’re getting as bored of dramatic sea-scapes and mountains as I am. One of the big draws of Kaikoura is its close proximity to an extremely deep ocean canyon that attracts a vast array of rare sea birds, whales and dolphins. Unfortunately the water was far too rough to go out on a boat, so I explored the rocky coast and gazed at thousands of sea-birds too far away for me to identify.

There were loads of fur seals crashed out of the rocks everywhere. They always look like they're hungover from a huge night out.

I was going to try to go to farewell spit tomorrow, but I think it’s a bit too far for the time I have left, so I’ll probably just catch the ferry back to Wellington tomorrow. That will get me back to Hawkes Bay well in time for my 24^th. Friday the 13^th...yikes!

Why pay for bus tickets?

So hitchhiking in New Zealand is a really easy and cheap way to get around so far. It did take four separate rides to get to Murchison for the kayak festival. A local logger, an ex-pat hippie, a New Zealand Air pilot and a fellow American traveler made up my relay team.

At "Bullerfest" they set up a massive 25-foot ramp out of plywood and scaffolding, lubed it up with cooking oil and dish soap, aimed it at the Buller River and sent off a slew of crazy fools in kayaks for a big air competition. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes an official X-games event. Heck they’ve already got a pair of color commentators and sent a drunk and naked local off the ramp who had never before kayaked.

Anyway, I met this really nice guy there who gave me a life down to Franz Josef. I found out he’s a glacier trek guide and not only did he let me stay at his flat, but he also hooked me up with a free full-day glacier tour.

I was pretty impressed with our leader, this Swiss girl who basically carved the group a set of stairs up, down and around the crevasses with a pick axe. Here’s me with her axe at the high point of our hike.

That night I went out on a Kiwi tour and after an hour of waiting in silence in the woods, a cheeky little snuffling wingless specimen, one out of the last 300 of its kind left in the world, probed the nostrils on the end of its bill into the ground 3 feet in front of me before hustling off into the bush.

No pictures allowed unfortunately.

The next morning I caught a ride down the gorgeous west coast with the ocean on one side and the Southern Alps on the other.

Those tiny dots down on the beach at Knight’s Point are fur seals. Unfortunately they weren't the rare Fjordland Crested Penguins that sometimes come ashore this time of year to molt.

It wouldn’t be a post without a bird pic.

This one’s an alpine parrot called a Kea. They supposedly have the intelligence of a 3-year-old and are known for stealing food from backpacks, dropping cameras off cliffs and peeling rubber seals from car windshields. Fortunately this one just came to check out our glacier hiking group.

I’m in Wanaka in the moment which is maybe a bit like Switzerland, not that I’ve really spent much time there. I like the feel of the place and am tempted to stick around a bit, but got to keep moving since I’ve got lots left to see and less than two weeks to fit it all in. The next target is Milford Sound, where cameras run out of film and poets run out of words.

Here’s me and my most recent ride, an Aussie surveyor on holiday from Abu Dabi, where we stopped along the Haast pass on the way to Wanaka. Hope the next one is this friendly!

Birds and Boats

A quick review: I’m into birds. Unfortunately most of New Zealand’s terrestrial birds were flightless or otherwise hopelessly ill-adapted to predators. The vast majority went extinct when people brought over dogs, rats, stoats and the like 1,000 or so years ago. A few exceptions exist on smaller islands and drastic efforts have been put forth to try to save some of the more critically endangered species (see ‘ejaculation helmet’ from the last entry).

Here’s a cute little parrot called a Kakarito. I found loads of them on Matiu/Somes Island a small island in Wellington sound.

I took a break from exploring and birding to shoot down some enemy aircrafts from the one the island’s four never-used anti-air turret bunkers form WWII.

This isn’t just a fantastic example of my photography skills, it’s also a Saddlebird, a species that hasn’t bred on the mainland for centuries until it was recently reintroduced into a ‘mainland island,’ basically a large reserve surrounded by a massive ‘vermin fence’ and packed with special feeders and everything these fragile unafraid rarities could possibly need to survive and reproduce.

Take this guy, a New Zealand Robin. He will practically jump underneath your boots as you’re walking hopefully you’ll startle up some insects for him to munch on. Now as say a feral cat this throws the entire stalking strategy out the window. To eat one of the these guys all you would need to do is turn over a few leaves and shake a few tree branches, that is if you can find one!

I saw loads of pelagic birds on the ferry between the north and south islands, but I didn’t take any pictures (they would have just looked like clouds and ocean) so who cares!

The Marlborough Sound at the northeastern tip of the South Island is quite gorgeous. And nearly as soon as I got off one ferry, I got on another out to the Queen Charlotte Track to hike (or “tramp” as they call it here) through some amazing lush vegetation with some fantastic views of the sound.

My Camera doesn’t really do much justice to the gorgeous placid turquoise water or the 20 foot tall tree ferns, but I found an old oil drum that made a decent ledge so I could include myself in a picture. Look how excited I am. Go 10 second timer!

After a night camping out in the bush it was on to Nelson where I spent last night. As soon as I get this post up, I’ll stick my thumb out to try and hitch a ride to this whitewater kayaking festival in Murchison.

Mean times in Hawkes Bay

So now that I am actually on the move and traveling and touring like a traveler and tourist should, I’m going to try to post more pictures and fewer words to make things a bit more readable and entertaining. I’ll start here:

No, I didn’t go through a wormhole back in time. I thought so at first too, but it’s just art deco weekend in Napier. All kinds of goofy-looking folks and ‘mean’-looking cars filled the town:
I’m not sure if that’s a model T Ford, but there were definitely quite a few of them putting around.

By the way if you’re in your late teens (which, let’s face it includes a good chunk of the early 20s now-a-days) and living in Hawkes Bay, then every other sentence spoken has to include either the word ‘mean’ (used in place of ‘great,’ ‘awesome,’ or when there’s no other way to describe an especially delicious pie) or ‘hard’ (an emphatic affirmative that replaces a valley girl/surfer dude’s ‘totally,’ or the ‘for sho’ of ebonics).

You have to talk this kind of lingo (and own several thousand dollars worth of equipment) if you expect to land a gig DJing at the prestigious Diva Bar in Havelock North.
The key to a good set is the chalk marquee.
Did I mention it was art deco weekend?

But now I’m in Wellington. It’s quite scenic despite the lack of 1930s style. Here’s the view from the top of the cable car track just in front of the botanical gardens.
The museum here is amazing. My favorite exhibit was about the rescue efforts of concerned biologists desperately trying to save a critically endangered species of flightless parrot:
Probably the second most significant item on display after the ejaculation helmet:
The only colossal squid on display in the world. It’s not full grown, so only 4 meters long, but would still make some ‘mean’ calamari if it weren’t pumped full of chemical preservatives. Got a few boat trips planned over the next couple days that should be opportune for seeing some ‘mean’ pelagic birds. ‘Hard!’

In New Zealand's fruit bowl

After a brief stay in Auckland I caught a bus down to Hawkes Bay to visit my friend ‘Carl’ who I met back stateside. ‘Carl’s’ family has really opened their arms for me with a free bed and delicious dinners consisting mostly of the fresh produce grown in their back garden--yum! This part of New Zealand is known as ‘the fruit bowl’ and is packed with apple orchards and vineyards. ‘Carl’s’ backyard contains 41 varieties of fruit and nut trees/shrubs alone, not to mention a full vegetable garden, three chickens and a small aviary of exotic parakeets and finches.

The last couple mornings I have dropped ‘carl’ off at his tractor-driving job at a local vineyard and gone off to explore. The volcanic soil, a product of abundant volcanism arising from the nearby Pacific-Australian tectonic plate boundary, makes Hawkes Bay a prime area for agriculture and thus not much in the way of wilderness has been preserved barring a few exceptions.

Of course I have pretty much scoped all of them out over the last couple days: a small scenic reserve called White Pines Bush lies just a few dozen kms inland and shows just how lush the native vegetation was before the land was thoroughly cultivated. It’s a tiny rainforest oasis with trickling streams, massive tree-ferns and towering trees among a wider landscape of steep unnatural pastureland and tree plantations.

Further up into the mountains lies Lake Tuitira, which is a large deep lake home to New Zealand’s endemic grebe and ducks. It was quite gorgeous on the day I visited:

Just beside the rather large and sprawling beach town of Napier is the Ahuriri Estuary, an important habitat for local and migratory bird populations. I got to see a colony of about 157 Bar-tailed Godwits overwintering. In the next couple months they will make a 12,000 kilometer flight back to their breeding grounds in the Alaskan arctic, a trek that earns them the distinction of being the world’s farthest traveling migratory bird species.

In 1931 a large earthquake leveled Napier and it was rebuilt completely in Art Deco style architecture that was popular at the time, which makes it quite a unique and cute town. This weekend is art deco weekend, which means that Kiwis flock in from all over the country to showcase their relic 1930s automobiles.

I’ll stick around for the festivities and to see ‘Carl’ DJ with one of his mates at a local bar and then head down to Wellington after the weekend and then onward across the ferry to the south island where the truly stunning scenery is supposed to ubiquitous.

I’m hoping to catch up with ‘Carl’s’ brother, ‘Clive’ down in the south island in Murcheson, the whitewater capital of New Zealand. ‘Clive’ is a world-class whitewater kayaker and documentarian. Extreme kayaking has taken him all over the world and he has used his videos to raise money for charities in Africa that fight malaria and in Nepal that train women to be river guides. Another one of his videos earned him a year’s supply of Red Bull. Anyway, it seems like a fantastic opportunity to experience first hand the heart of one of New Zealand’s trademark extreme sports. Can’t wait!