Thursday, March 22, 2012

Birds

Most of what I know about New Zealand, I learned from Douglas Adams' amazing lecture on the Kakapo. Certainly worth 15 minutes of your time if you haven't heard it before. Pt 1 Pt 2. It had me very excited to see some new birds on the island.

New Zealand did not disappoint. At first, all I could see were the big birds, the smaller birds hiding in the thick leaved forests. My early favourites were the Pukekos which like to hang out in farmers' fields.



Also peculiar are the spur-winged plovers, which look like they ought to be on the seashore, but instead are always hanging out with cows and sheep.



One species that's noticably missing from the island is crows. Consequently, road-kill lingers about far longer than in other countries. The most common road-kill appears to be stoats, possums, and hedge-hogs. Bird wise, the champion is definitely the silvereye, a bird with a total lack of ability to master road crossings. Other common road denizens include the kahu, the weka, and the tomtit.

Luckily I've managed to see all the road birds alive since then as well as New Zealand's native owl - the morepork, australasian shoverles, keas, bellbirds, tuas, fantails, oystercatchers, scaups, little shags, spotted shags, grey warblers, kereru, the new zealand falcon, reef herons, paradise ducks, and more. There seem to be birds everywhere. It seems my decision to take binoculars as one of my luxury items was weight well spent.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The meadow and the wasp

After a few luxurious rest days in Picton, staying at the palatial vacation home rented by our friends Hendrik, Eric, and Janelle, we headed down to Blenheim and across the country to Westport. Blenheim was a particularly nasty town, with no plant life within city limits, lots of shouting, scowling, and angry citizens, and little to recommend it. But soon after, we had some nice touring up a minor road through farmland and then up to the mountains of Nelson Lakes National Park. On our third night on the road, we stayed in the town of Owen River, which as far as I could discern, consisted solely of a single pub on an otherwise empty stretch of highway.

Behind the pub was a lovely meadow next to a river rapids with a shelter, hot showers, and toilets. Everything you could want from a campsite. Despite a moment of despair as we watched the only other tenants of the site wash their motorhome with a hose from the rain barrel that provided the water for the site, we soon settled in to a very lovely evening.

The site did have one drawback. The flowery grasslands attracted many wasps and giant bumblebees. Now as we all learned as children, if you don't bother a wasp, the wasp won't bother you. Perchance you've since questioned the truth of this statement. How does the wasp decide if you're bothering it? Does the wasp detect your emotions and feelings, and provided you maintain a calm posture, continue on it's way without interaction?

To investigate, after my morning shower, I put on my bike shorts without shaking them out. When I felt the wasp in my shorts, I immediately with good will and good intentions, sought to lower my shorts to allow the wasp to continue on its day without further disturbance. I regret to report that despite my positive feelings and my desire to set the wasp free, it reacted in a vengeful and hostile fashion stinging me in my groin. I must thus conclude that intentions notwithstanding, the merest minor disturbance of being trapped between spandex shorts and a thigh can cause a wasp to react in a most vigorous fashion.

Tomorrow, I'll be heading down the West Coast #6 highway to Greymouth. More updates as internet access permits.

This is my second post in a day. The first post is Pedaller's Paradise.

Pedaller's Paradise

* There will be no pictures in these blog posts. You'll have to pretend that it's a travel report from 2002 when digital photographs were rare. If you'd like to see pictures from the trip, see Meghan's blog at http://www.meggomyeggo.com/, or naturally teh internets

Having now cycled across the country widthwise ( Nelson - Picton - Blenheim - Westport ) it's time for a rest day and some blogging.

The best guidebook for New Zealand cycle touring is named Pedaller's Paradise. Well that sure sounds great. But then as the tour approached everyone kept mentioning how crazy the drivers are and how the roads have no shoulders. Which is it? Paradise or terrible roads?

Well, the answer of course is both. A typical road in New Zealand looks like this:




Whoops, of course that photo is outdated. The road has since been fully modernized and now looks like this:



You'll note that despite clearly being a one-way road, there were no stop lights, stop signs, or other controls to navigate this section. Well clearly I've picked a particularly bad example for humour's sake. A more typical section of road would look like this:



I know in Canada the dotted white line would mean that both lanes are headed in the same direction, but in New Zealand this is a two-way road. Almost all the roads we've been on have been like this; two lanes, no shoulder.

So, you might ask, given that there's no shoulder and only one lane in each direction, how can this be a wonderful place to cycle tour? The answer comes from the extremely low traffic counts. Let's have a look at the official government of New Zealand road count statistics. Or rather, let me pick out some key data points. On the section of Highway 6 where the first two photos were taken, the government counts an average daily traffic rate of 1000 vehicles per day in both directions. So in the course of a day, on average 500 vehicles will pass you. If we assume the majority of traffic is in the daylight hours, that's 40 vehicles per hour. Even better, traffic clumps behind slow moving vehicles. So you ride for 10 minutes with no traffic, then get passed by a stream of 2-6 cars, and then ride onward on a car-free road. Much of the cycling has truly been tremendous.

The first day of cycling however, was not tremendous. In retrospect, our first day cycling from Nelson to Pelorus Bridge was on one of the scariest stretches of road on the South Island. In the area around Nelson, New Zealand's beautiful old growth forests, a mix of hardwoods, tree-ferns, softwoods, and podocarps, have been replaced by perfect rows of commercial pines. Transporting those harvested pines to Nelson over the Wangamoa pass are logging trucks in a frightful hurry. The road is very twisty with terrible sight lines and no shoulders. All traffic that is not a logging truck is terrified of rounding a corner and meeting a speeding logging truck, so vehicles pass extremely close to you. Traffic is also much heavier near the city of Nelson. All in all, it was a pretty spooky day. Though I put on a brave face and cheerfully declared that I liked cycle touring and New Zealand, in my heart I thought I may have signed up for a terrifying death race. Luckily, since that first day, traffic volumes have severely declined, drivers are willing to give much more space when passing, and sight lines have improved. The stretch between Blenheim and Kawatiri Junction had a traffic count of 360 vehicles per day in both directions. Cycling bliss.