Then the photos started rolling in....

From Mae, Titled WE LOVE POTATOES, this shot demonstrates an AOT traveler getting in touch with his Irish on St Patricks in Greymouth.

This could almost be a modern Bruegel painting! Great shot Mae!

Learning and Discovery

Pacific People

New Zealand is a pacific island nation. Auckland city has the llargest Polynesian population of the South Pacific.

Internet Blues

Yes, it's true! We have the worst Internet in the world! But there is a reason for it as you have already discovered on your way here! 

New Zealand is quite simply at the end of the line! The arteries of the internet run through undersea cables through the world’s oceans. New Zealand, being an under populated country far from the larger continents, gets most of its internet from Australia, who gets its internet via Asia. Essentially, New Zealand is the end of the internet line.

Frank Josef Public Conveinances

Learning how to operate the automatic toilets was voted a Learning and Discovery Experience. No one realised that the building was sited on a fault line until later!

How to be a chief

Not an easy challenge but Rangatira Rob took on the mantle with aplomb and was voted the best whaikorero and the ugliest pukana in 11 years! 

Kiwis korero Maori

This became a teaching experience as the Group encouraged kiwis to say Kia Ora to us! 

Apple Pies

We discovered the secret ingredient of Pete's Apple Pies and learned more about the life and times of the deer industry in New Zealand.

The Worlds Second Fastest Indian

Shed Men are the backbone of the Kiwi Do It Yourself philosophy. Most red blooded Kiwi males are kept in sheds in their backyard. 

Here the Kiwi Male rules supreme. He fixes things and invents things. 

In Reefton we met a shed man supreme who lives in a house he bought for $275.00. This guy raced against the worlds fastest Indian, Burt Munroe whose speed record at Bonneville still stands.

Welcome to the Worlds Coolest little Capital City!

 New Zealand's capital city - home to Parliament, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa, a thriving film industry, and heaps of other icons of cool. Including wind scultpures that line the foreshore! This is more than a nod in the direction of the great god of wind Tawhirimatea.

The earliest Maori name for Wellington is Te Upoko o te Ika a Maui - which means ‘the head of Maui's fish’ - stemming from the Maori legend that polynesian navigator Maui fished up the North Island. Early tribes include Ngāi Tara, Rangitāne and Ngāti Mamoe. Chief Te Rauparaha, of the Ngāti Toa people, invaded in the 1820s and took Kapiti Island. Later, Taranaki tribes including Te Āti Awa moved south and became Wellington’s tangata whenua(people of the land).

Sited in the middle of the country, Wellington was well placed for trade. In 1839 it was chosen as the first major planned settlement for British immigrants coming to New Zealand, and several ships arrived at Petone in 1840. A business district soon grew around the harbour, which became a busy port.

Settlers also cleared the forest and built townships at Petone, Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt.

In 1865 Wellington was made the country’s capital, replacing Auckland. This gave the city a secure future. The government built a new Parliament and other grand buildings, and businesses flourished. Roads and railways helped spread the population away from the cramped city.

Today Wellington is a thriving urban centre with many galleries, museums, theatres and festivals. Cafés, restaurants, bars, shops, cinemas and apartments keep the inner city lively. 

Small enough to be quirky, big enough to host the arts and busy enough to keep us amused, we eventually split into teams in order to explore the city fully and reported back over beers or breakfast.

Zealandia, a swathe of native bush only ten minutes from the centre city pick up where Dick and Elanor managed to spot two of New Zealands rarest birds (even more rare than the Kiwi), the Takahe.

City and Sea Musuem - one of the top 5 musuems in the world.

Parliament House Tour - the House is "sitting" so visitors were able to witness the debacle of the 'debating chamber' ("Our politicians talk a lot of rubbish too, said one of our group. But at least they wait til the other one has stopped talking before they start!")

Some of our group got to watch NZ's longest serving politician giving a press interview.

The rest of us ate at the Backbenchers and kept our eyes open for Back Biters (oops I mean politicans).

Punakaiki and Reefton

PUNAKAIKI
Composed of limestone that forms the cliffs and nearby valleys have been sculpted into pancake like layers by sea and wind. The remnants survive as narrow ridges and pillars, the softer layers are eroded out leaving harder layers looking like a stack of pancakes. Sea water has also eroded large caves beneath the limestone headland, fractures in the limestone connect the caves to the surface and when waves crash into the caves, air is compressed and erupts out of the blowhole along with salt water and spray. In rough weather thunderous booms and rumbles as the sea rushes in and out of the caves below.

This area of limestone is part of a sheet between 20 and 30 million years old that extends into the surrounding hills where it forms spectacular cliffs. Limestone is a sedimentary rock, consists mainly of tiny marine fossils. Highly soluble in rain water, rain water also highly acidic seeps into cracks in the limestone and erodes into caves and pocket with sinkholes. CASTIFICATION (after an area between Italy and Slovenia) large rivers disappear underground, hidden in this case by the thick rainforest of Paparoa National Park.

REEFTON

The town owes its origins to the discovery of gold bearing quartz reefs in the locality in the late 1860s when the gold rush fever hit the West Coast.
The town itself became established about 1870 and immediately became an entrepreneurial and prosperous place.
With mining came technology and innovation, and in August 1888 Reefton became the first place in New Zealand and the Southern Hemisphere to have a public supply of electricity, even before the fashionable suburbs of London and New York.

SATORIAL STYLE AT THE BEARDED MINERS HUT
Bringing history further to life are the Bearded Mining Company at the Miners Hut. This replica hut depicting 1860s style housing is made of native cedar slabs and set amongst native plantings right in the heart of town on Broadway.
Gavin, Peter and Geoff are 'in residence' all year, and welcome visitors in to learn how a miner lived in the 19th century when the promise of gold lured thousands of prospectors to the area.
Here we were treated to Billy Tea and scones for "smoko" or morning tea.

Gradually the little town of Reeftom reveals its story, via a few of the original inhabitants.

Pounamu An Oral geography

Every living thing in the Maori world view has a god watching over it and a spiritual being who embodies and protects the resource. In the case of pounamu the Atua (or god) of Pounamu is Ngahue, he appointed a taniwha (spiritual being) named Poutini to be the guardian of this resource.

Now Poutini was a bit of a mischief, his natural enemy was another taniwha called Whaiapu. This taniwha was the guardian spirit of sandstone, the only thing that could cut greenstone. These two often fought and chased each other around the islands known to us as Aotearoa. One day Whaiapu was chasing Poutini around the Bay of Plenty and Poutini took refuge on an island in that bay.

Whilst hiding there he spied a beautiful wahine (woman) named Waitaiki bathing in the sea, lust took over his sensibilities and he snatched the woman and ran away. Naturally this enraged her husband Tamaahua who jumped in his waaka and gave chase.

So Poutini was now being pursued by a taniwha and an enraged husband! He moved from place to place across the land and sea, stopping at night to light a campfire. Each place became known as a source of stone hardened by the flames of Poutini’s campfire (or possibly his lust for Waitaiki).

At the site of the original abduction, his fire left behind obsidian, in the Coromandel peninsula the stone left behind was basalt, this became the stone used for making adzes. Continuing the chase to Rangitoto, the stone left behind was argillite.

Eventually Poutini made his way down to the West Coast of the South Island. Near Punakaiki his fire left behind flint. As far south as Piopiotahi (Milford Sound) he travelled with his captive who shed tears when she arrived in that isolated place. Her tears turned into Bowenite, a glassy green stone that is highly prized for making jewellery.

Now Poutini had with him a wailing woman leaving stones of grief in her wake which gave clues to her husband who was still in hot pursuit. With the husband closing in on him, Poutini knew that the game was almost up but still he didn’t want to release Waitaiki.

When he reached the Arahura River, Poutini decided that if he could not have this woman then no one would and he turned her into greenstone, hiding her in the riverbed before slipping past his pursuers and swimming out to sea.

Then Tamaahua arrived and found his wife hidden in the river bed. He began reciting karakia (incantations) to restore her to her human life but to no avail.

Now the Arahura River is known to hold the finest greenstone and to this day Poutini swims up and down the coastline of the island known to Maori as Te Tai o Pounamu (the tides of Poutini) protecting his precious stone.

LINK : http://blog.authenticgreenstone.com/tracing-pounamu/

Hokitika - golden stories

The West Coast is no stranger to the literary arts, many of New Zealands novels and novelists have a connection here.

The most recent winner of the esteemed British literary event, the Mann Booker Prize was new Zealander Elanor Catton set her book The Luminaries in Hokitika.

Previous Booker Prize winner Keri Hulme and author of The Bone People lives and whitebaits on the coast. An eccentirc and outspoek character, she vaues her privacy and is not open for arndom visitors!
Even Janet Frame spent some time here, albiet in a mental home where she was being treated for 'depression' before her first book was published.

Bushman Pete, Possums, 1080 poison and apple pies

As we travel along the coast road of the wild west coast, our guide keeps reminding us that we are entering another world, a world where people are unique and weird sometimes but always interesting and usually with time to lean on a fence post and take the time to have a yarn with someone.

So we called in on Bushman Pete, a pioneer of the early deer hunting days. "Back in the day", when deer farming was a mere twinkle in the eye of the odd rural entrepreneur, the good old boys of kiwi hunting hauled their deer out of the most remote forests with a unique variety of contraptions.

Deer are an introduced species and considered a pest because they destroy the native forest, early attempts to control the population meant that Deer Culling was a Government paid job, hunters would be paid by the tail. Eventually markets in the East for venison meat meant that deer recovery grew first as a meat industry where wild deer were hunted and shot by helicopter, then eventually caught alive and introduced to farms.

Bushman Pete showed us a DVD of the history of the deer and venison industry in New Zealand before inviting us to try his special "apple pies".

We had previously heard about the destruction of the NZ forest and the risk to native birds (most of whom who do not fly and so cannot escape introduced predators). A solution of the government is to drop a poison known as 1080 into the forest as a broad sweeping solution.

Opinion is divided between conservationists about the effectiveness and safety of this method. Bushman Pete and his wife Justine are opposed to the 108 poison drop and were not shy to present their opinion but both suggested we watch this documentary, Poisoning Paradise.

Which they served with locally made possum pies as a learning and discovery experience!!
We took a look through his museum and met the cute looking kiwi possum before chatting with a couple of locals and heading on our way to Hokitika to look at the Pounamu, eat ice cream and visit the museum.