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Hello everyone,
This will be my last e-mail of this trip and only "the year in review" remains for 1998. Watch for more travel e-mail to come in late 1999 and early 2000 from the Middle East. (Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Turkey)
I have just left New Zealand and it's a fantastic country. It's a lot like British Columbia, except a little bit more "rural". I have to say that its beauty surpasses that of Australia, although Australia is still a great place.
NZ is a relatively small country to travel, and I thought I'd only have time for the North Island, but I've also managed to get to the South Island for about 9 days.
NZ sits on the edge of the Pacific and Indian/Australian plates so you get a lot of geothermal activity. The first spot we stopped was a place called "hot water beach". Ground water is heated under the crust and rises up to this beach. When you dig a hole the water seeps out and you have a little hot tub on the beach.
Next was a geothermal area called Rotorua (lots of native Maori place names in NZ) with lots of geysers and bubbling mud pots and sulfur spas. I did a tour of the geothermal areas, saw a Maori cultural show and went to a "Luge" park. The Luge park is a mountain that they've built cement tracks down and you ride these wagon-like "Luges" down the mountain. Good fun and lots of speed, crashing and air-time.
Next we stopped at Lake Taupo, a huge volcanic crater lake, where we trekked around an area called the Tongiraro circuit which had fantastic views of "Blue lakes" and the "Emerald lakes". They were all different shades of blue and green. We also climbed a volcanic peak along the way that was 2300m tall and had superb views of the whole surreal landscape, including the lakes.
At Waitomo, a place with lots of caves, we went "Black water rafting". It's really just caving through under water rivers, so you need an inner-tube to float down. We saw loads of the usual cave stuff (like stalagmites) and they had lots of glow-worms, which made the cave-top look like a star-lit night sky.
After a 3 hour ferry from Wellington to the South Island we went to a guesthouse called "The Lazy Fish", which was only accessible by water. It is located on the Queen Charlotte Sounds, which are as close to paradise and you can get (minus the pesky sand-flies). Coves and bays abound with lovely beaches and the Lazy Fish had canoes, a wind-surfer and penguins that lived under the dock. We ended up spending 4 days (the original plan was 1day) windsurfing, canoeing around the sounds and doing a portion of the Queen Charlotte Sound trek.
After the Lazy Fish, we went to Nelson and did a trek on the Abel Tasman National Park. It was another amazing walk along the coastline.
The last place I stopped on the South Island was the Franz-Josef Glacier. It's extremely unique because of its location at about 40 degrees south of the equator, and elevation of only 250 meters! It would be like having a glacier just North of San Francisco on the coast, if it was in the Northern Hemisphere. They get 8 meters of rainfall each year, (cities like Sydney and Auckland get less than 1m per year) which falls as snow up on the Southern Alps. Then, the snow compresses to ice and then moves down the valley at a rate of 1.5 meters per day, which allows the glacier to get so low before it melts.
While I was at Franz-Josef, I did a full-day guided walk up the glacier. It was perfect weather and we climbed through seracs and a place called The Pinnacles, an area of huge ice pillars. Since the glacier moves so much, the trail has to be re-cut every day, and our guide was basically building the trail as we went. It was loads of fun.
Anyway, that's about it for New Zealand. A great place, and well worth a look.
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