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Then at about 3 am, the rain started. It was raining pretty hard as we packed up our things and left at 7:45 am to cross the Awaroa Inlet (it can only be crossed within two hours of low tide, which was at about 7 am). We got to Totaranui at 10 am and dried out for a while in the trampers' day room (where most people start or end their walks). Then at 11:45 am we started out again; the skies had cleared and it looked like the weather might be ok. We were still fairly wet, and it started drizzling, but a few hours later, as we were around Anapai Bay, it started really coming down. There's an unprotected stretch of beach just south of Mutton Cove, and that was awful. We ended up huddling under plastic at Mutton Cove around 2 pm, trying to decide what to do. Camping was out of the question, returning to Totaranui was a long way to go for the same conditions, so we decided to walk the hour or so to Whariwharangi Hut and stay in relative comfort. And here we are. It's 1 pm the next day, our things are slowly getting dry, and the weather still hasn't made up its mind whether to be sunny or rainy.

But back to Kaikoura... We did have crayfish for dinner, a major splurge and very good! Our most expensive meal yet except for the hangi, but only US $54 including desserts and coffee. And we BYO'd 2 it for the first time - the same Riesling that we bought for $8 was available for $19 on the wine list - and the table two away from ours was drinking it. (Although of course they might have "bottle shopped" it too.) BYOs and cheap ($1 per) corkage are a great idea. It reminds me of a BYO restaurant we went to in Casper, Wyoming a few years ago.

Then the next morning we went whale watching. We got up early (well, 6:27 am, but since we were supposed to meet at 6:30 am it was almost too late! Fortunately our campground was right across the railroad tracks from the train station.) and got taken to the boats. There's a large boat, seating about 20 - 25, and small boats for 8 - 12. They stressed the importance of not having back or heart problems or being pregnant, especially on the small boat. To add to the anticipation, we had met a bunch of people the previous day (as we got picked up by the "swim with the seals" bus on our walk home from the seal colony) who had gone whale watching on the large boat (supposedly smoother) and spent half the trip looking at the inside of a bucket!.. Well, we got sandwiched into our small boat and went for a ride. It was certainly fast and bumpy (fastest boat I've ever been on) but nothing to get sick over! (But if you're ever in Kaikoura and want to induce labor...). Then we saw the whales! We ended up seeing three of them - male sperm whales, surfacing to breathe during their feeding. The females have 30% less blubber so they stay up north where it's warmer in this upside down hemisphere. They're huge animals; although we got quite close (20 feet), it's still hard to imagine how large they must seem under the surface. We could see them blowing through the blowholes, then the dive - just like the pictures or Talbot prints (we'll have to get one when we get back; hopefully shot in Kaikoura), the wave of the massive tail fluke before diving back down into the depths of the ocean. While we were heading back to shore, we ran into a group of about five pilot whales (porpoise family actually, and that's what they seemed like). They were great, leaping out of the water in unison, and playing around the boat. Unlike the sperm whales, though, they kept moving pretty fast, so it was harder to find them after they would dive down for a while. After these adventures, we headed back to shore, where they announced they were canceling the small boats for the rest of the day because the sea was too rough. Lucky us!

After a couple days of R&R and buying some food & supplies for our trip, we began our walk in the Abel Tasman National Park. We took a bus to Kaiteriteri, at the southern end of the park. Then a short free boat ride to Tin Line Bay, about 30 minutes walk from Marahau, where the coastal track begins. We walked four hours to Torrent Bay campground (nonstop and without even water or snacks thanks to Shikha the mad demon slave driver who wouldn't let us stop for lunch!), through amazingly varied terrain ranging from tropical rainforest (wet, dark, thousands of huge ferns and some great bird songs) to dry alpine forest to coastline and beach. The terrain changes were stunningly fast, and somehow even the sounds of the ocean would be hidden until we rounded a corner and heard and saw the waves crashing down on the rocks and a beautiful beach. We arrived at Torrent Bay around 2:30 pm, set up camp, dipped our feet in the water just 20 feet from our tent, put on bug stuff to try to fend off the hordes of sandflies, and took a nap. When we woke up an hour and a half later, the water was gone! We had heard about the inlets on the track that can only be crossed at low tide (this had determined that we would walk S-N rather than N-S), but hadn't really given too much thought to what these huge areas of part-time water would look like. This beach had looked like any other when we arrived, and now it was gone! The next high tide was around 1 am, and although we didn't see the water filling up, we could heard the waves lapping at the shore sometime in the middle of the night as we slept. In the morning, it was low tide again and the water was gone. When we arrived at Torrent Bay, we were understandably exhausted and sore. My pack weighed over 40 pounds leaving California, and since then we acquired a stove, fuel, tarp, and lots of food. We did leave a bunch of stuff back in Nelson, but the pack was still close to 40 pounds and made the hike much more of a challenge. We enjoyed dinner (freeze dried chicken paprikash and fresh baby potatoes with mustard) that night for a few reasons: it was good and we were hungry, and it meant that much less weight to carry.

I told Shikha that would be our longest stretch of nonstop walking. Well it was, but the second day was much longer than the first. We were on the road at 8:20 am, stopped for a quick breakfast an hour later, and kept going (with a lunch break and a few snacks) until we collapsed outside the Awaroa Hut around 6:00 pm. We had originally contemplated stopping at a campground a few hours south of Awaroa, but since the section just north of Awaroa was tidal and could only be crossed around low tide (8 am or 8 pm, roughly), that would have meant getting packed up and ready early in the morning in the dark and making sure we had the two hours on the road to Awaroa by 8 am, or risking losing a day. So, we trudged on, and finally set up camp in the campground just outside of Awaroa. That was the "splurge" night (really lighten our packs!) and the last truly nice weather we've had since then until today (plus we saw an owl). It's now March 21, we survived the walk, and I'm writing this on the InterCity 3 bus en route to Franz Joseph Glacier. The rain didn't stop completely until later in the afternoon at Whariwharangi so we just sat around the hut, chatted, and ate. In the evening the opossums came out (and ended up scaring a few German campers inside at about midnight, where they slept on the floor with the mice). Shikha and I saw a few black ones and one brown, and I saw a few others who didn't feel they needed to move out of my path when I went to the ablution area at night. They certainly didn't look like I imagined, though - big, cat-like, furry creatures with great big bushy black tails and infrared eyes at night! On the trip, we also saw a few weka (woodhen), maybe a kiwi, an owl, a bunch of swamphens, some California quail, and many other birds, insects, and too many sand flies to count! Plus many beech trees, tree ferns, with their koru, and lots of others.

We stopped today in Punakaiki at the Pancake Rocks, which have been carved out of limestone by ocean and wind erosion so they look like giant stacks of pancakes. There were also lots of nikau palms in the area. Also, on the way back from Abel Tasman, our grumpy bus driver stopped and picked about a dozen banana passionfruit for his lady friend.

March 22 - The Glaciers

March 23

March 27 - Milford Sound

March 28

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We took the Doubtful Sound long trip, which started with a boat ride on Lake Manapouri. The lake has about 50 islands, most of which rise almost vertically out of the lake and are covered with dense vegetation clinging to the rocks and each other. This region gets about 120 inches of rain each year (compared to Milford, which gets 280!), and an interesting phenomenon is tree avalanches. The moss which is the first to grow on the rocks can absorb a fair amount of water, but once it gets saturated, water just falls off it, and occasionally if there's enough water a tree will fall. The roots are all interwoven, so this usually starts a chain reaction with everything falling off the rocks and stripping them bare. We saw quite a few examples of this - they'll be back to normal in 100 years, though. The next stop was the big hydroelectric power plant. This was a major engineering feat (by Bechtel); we drove down a 2 km spiral tunnel to take a look. The plant produces 590 mW of power, 80% of which goes to an aluminium (sic) smelter. Then a drive over the pass to Doubtful Sound, complete with instruction on which plant not to eat unless you have a 30 minute death wish. (Said plant is all over, by the way...). Doubtful Sound was so named by the ubiquitous (and often wrong) Captain Cook, who was doubtful that its winds would be sufficient to blow his boat back to sea. It's also a fiord, not a sound (as are all the "sounds" in Fiordland). The difference is that fiords are glacier-carved valleys back-filled with water from the sea, while sounds were created by rivers. We traveled along the fiord and its arms until we reached the Tasman Sea, where one of the islands is home to a colony of New Zealand fur seals. They were fun to watch, sunning themselves, playing in the water, and trying to climb up the steep walls onto the island, but by far the highlight of the trip was the dolphins. On our trip back, we ran into a pod of about a dozen bottlenose dolphins. They played around the boat for quite a while, swimming right under the surface just next to the boat, then jumping out of the water, or swimming in the boat's wake then jumping out when we were sure they must have fallen behind. They grow to over 13 feet long, and their speed, acrobatics, and the fun they seem to have with their boat are pretty amazing. We also saw two Fiordland crested penguins, but they were so far away they looked like ducks. Penguins are a good defense against sandflies (theoretically, at least) since the flies prefer penguin blood to that of humans. Incidentally, it's the females that cause problems - they need blood to assist their eggs to mature! Yesterday we came to Milford from Te Anau. Another beautiful day after getting out of the dense fog in Te Anau - the day of our Doubtful Sound trip the temperature was 28 C (83 F) in Milford, which was the hottest place in New Zealand!

The road was pretty rough in places, and there were a number of stretches that were wiped out by the floods in January and are still being repaired. Although Milford receives 280 inches of rain per year it actually has fewer days of rain than Auckland, so when it rains it dumps. In a 24 hour period in January it dropped about 18 inches, most of which came in the first six hours! No trace of that in the last few days, though.

March 29

Did the Milford Friendship Cruise yesterday. Milford Sound is much smaller than Doubtful Sound, but the walls rising out of the water are more dramatic. Mitre Peak rises a mile straight up, and goes 1000 feet straight under. A few impressive permanent water falls (Bowen and Stirling), and after a heavy rain they and the temporary ones must be incredible. Didn't see any dolphins this time, but lots of NZ fur seals, and with the rocks so steep (except for small outcroppings they were lying on) we could get really close. We went out to the Tasman Sea one last time and some people fished for a while. Caught a needle shark (!) about 18 inches long, two blue cod about a foot long and pretty thick, and a few other smaller miscellaneous ones. Although it was foggy up high most of the day, by the time we got back to the harbor it started to clear and we got a great view of Mitre Peak. Then, door-to-door bus service to Queenstown, with a stop to pick up our luggage in the Lodge. We had thought about staying two nights in Milford (to replace the night we had wanted to stay in Doubtful Sound), but the sandflies, which were awful awful awful awful as were putting our tent away, and the lack of walks made us change our minds. So we'll head to Christchurch tomorrow and have a day to explore there.

April 1 - Christchurch

And this was all after we had spent a most enjoyable noon hour listening to a concert in Cathedral Square and people watching: the fat drunk guy in a bicycle helmet who was dancing in slow motion with his hands in his pockets who then went on three futile searches for more beer for his two 2 litre bottles; the wild woman who was dancing with him, drinking his beer, raving at the band and audience (the band played You're So Vain for her) and then going after the other old drunk bicyclist; the street violinist who acted as if he were playing (in the middle of the concert) in order to get people to pay him money to go away; the keyboard player in the band who acted as if he were playing but wasn't - his parts were recorded; and of course the folks with the pierced eyebrows and lips...

We're now at Arthur's Pass, the second highest train station in NZ (not sure what the highest is), after taking the TranzAlpine Express train here this morning. The train ride was a disappointment - nice scenery, bridges and rivers, but nothing as spectacular as we had expected. In comparison, the bus from Queenstown to Christchurch stopped at Mt. Cook, which is very impressive - hopefully the panorama pictures will turn out - and it was just lucky coincidence that we decided to take that route. We did take a nice 1 ½ hour nature walk today; we're doing it again tomorrow with a DOC guide to talk about Maori history.

April 3 - Arthur's Pass

This was all after we had enjoyed the Arthur's Pass Easter potluck up at the tiny community centre the previous night. There were signs posted all over the town (well, the cafe, store, and hostel) inviting anyone who was in the area to take some food and have a potluck dinner. So we did. We only had a can of beans we were planning to have for dinner, along with some soup, but we took the beans with us, had a good time, and enjoyed a filling meal. It turned out that about half the folks there were only semi-locals, living in or around Christchurch but with weekend or holiday cabins in Arthur's Pass. We met a couple whose daughter is finishing up her PhD (in theoretical physics) at Stanford, which helped break the ice. Although the place was quite crowded, it wasn't as crowded as it sometimes gets because a lot of people were at the other big event of the evening - a rescue. Apparently a group of climbers had been on the ice and one of them fell into a crevasse, into a big cavern, through a waterfall (!), where he broke about half his teeth (!!), and then dropped about 25 meters, where he suffered major head injuries and was lucky to be alive. We had heard the helicopter landing and taking off a few times across the road from our campsite; the rescue party ended up spending the night down in the hole before they finally got the guy back up the same way he had fallen down. We heard about this in gruesome detail from Marlene, our Maori guide for the Bridal Veil walk we did the next morning. The walk was pretty neat, and we met with Marlene at the Visitor's Centre for an hour the next afternoon where she showed us some of the traditional materials (flax, wood, bull kelp, pounamu 5 ) used by her ancestors. She also talked about the old practices of trading with other families, and ensuring that different places were visited each year so animals and plants would be given time to repopulate before they were visited again; all practices that were no longer possible when the Pakeha arrived and introduced the concept of land ownership and effectively trashed their nomadic lifestyle.

Then back onto the train to Christchurch, where in the wee hours of the morning we hopped onto the shuttle bus, into the plane, and arrived a few hours later where we are now, in Oz.