Winter in a Land Down Under

Three hours after getting home from Paul’s concert, I woke up to catch a plane to Christchurch, NZ. It’s quite a bit colder here than it was in Sydney because it’s further south. It’s also one of the coldest wintersLuckily, there was a sale at a store on Manly beach that was going out of business and I picked up a Thinsulate hat for A$3, Thinsulate gloves for A$3 and some fuzzy socks for A$2. Easily 3 of the best buys in my entire life because I’ve used them just about every day here.

It’s not really freezing cold in New Zealand, unless you go looking for it. The average high is in the double digits Celsius and the lows at night are just above freezing. There’s no snow on the Canterbury Plane, which is huge and flat. Then suddenly off in the distance, the mountains, the Southern Alps, go straight up, and there’s plenty of snow out there. Since the plane is so flat, you can see the mountain range from the city on a clear day even though it’s a good 100km away or so.

Christchurch is a small city on the southern island of New Zealand. There are only about 500,000 people and it’s the 2nd biggest city in the country. I only spent 1 afternoon in the city, and I went to the Caterbury Museum, The Cathedral, and Rutherford’s Den. For those who don’t know, Ernest Rutherford is the famous Kiwi Scientist who did the gold foil experiment and proved that atoms have a nucleus by shooting alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold and detecting that the alpha particles didn’t go straight through, but came out at all angles. Therefore the atomic nucleus was deflecting the particles. Rutherford’s Den was great! We walked to the old Canterbury University and we were literally visited by Rutherford’s ghost. Then we got to sit in on one of his chemistry lectures where they were talking about how different atoms have different numbers of “hands” and how some atoms like to hold other atom’s hands and how some atoms hold their own hands, but how they don’t like that very much. I think this whole personification given to things that have no feelings (that we know of) is why I studied so much chemistry. Even in my highs school education, I was told that the noble gases were “happy” by themselves, but all the other atoms weren’t. Chemistry is a science we came to understand through personification, giving inanimate abstract objects some character to make them less abstract. Rutherford’s Den is definitely worth a visit or 2!

I only spent 1 day in the city of Christchurch. I’m really lucky that Kris and Doug Matson have a car because I got to explore a good amount of the east coast of the south island (we couldn’t get to the west because the roads were closed due to snow).

On my first day in NZ, we headed north to explore the tide pools in Kaikoura. Here you can walk on a shelf of rock at low tide, see the sea lions, and birds, and other sea life. But at high tide, this shelf is under water. There’s another shelf about 60 meters higher that you can walk along and view the tide pools from above.

After walking along the tide pools, we went on a short hike in the woods on Mt. Fyffe. We hiked about halfway up this mountain. The brush was amazing. I made a comment about how we’re lucky that it’s winter and that there are no biting bugs, but apparently there are no biting bugs in the summer either. Kris told me that biting bugs just never evolved here.

On day 2 in New Zealand, we purposefully went in search of the cold weather. I needed to be able to say that I’ve been skiing in August. I put on every layer of long sleeve/long pants clothing I brought with me plus a layer on top and bottom that I borrowed from Kris and headed to Mt. Hutt with Kris and Doug. The base lodge was located at just over 2000 meters… that meters, not feet! The summit elevation was about 2700 meters. We actually saw a helicopter flying a good 500 meters below us. All the skiing was above tree line. There were trails, but you wouldn’t know it. From just about everywhere on the mountain you could see out to the ocean. The views were spectacular. The views alone were worth the cold weather. The snow was really nice too. We had 8 cm of new powder, and because there were no trails, you could find un-skied snow even at the end of the day.

As if skiing wasn’t cold enough, we spent day three driving as far south as we could in one day, past the 45th
parallel, to the town of Oumaru to look for penguins. There are 2 types of penguins in Oumaru, the yellow eyed penguins (YEPs), and the blue penguins. The yellow eyed penguins are very rare and shy. There are only about 2000 of them in the world. They tend to come on shore any time between 3-5PM and also at 7AM. They waddle up onto shore and then climb into the brush where they nest and lay eggs. Yesterday, the YEPs were late. Again, I needed every layer of clothing available to me. Since they’re shy, we needed to stand at the top of a hill, and we stood there for 1.5 hours in the strong wind, occasional freezing shower and cold. Eventually we saw 1 little penguin waddle it’s way onto shore. I got a picture of him, can you see that little black and white spot near the brush?

It was cold, we saw 1 penguin, we knew there’d be more, but we left anyway to warm up at a pub before making our way over to the Blue Penguin viewing area. The blues are a little less shy and show up after 6PM. Their arrival on shore has been commercialized. There’s an amphitheatre and interpreters that tell you a little about the animals. The area is lit with orange light because penguins can’t see orange. This was a neat factoid. There were 32 blue penguins that came in before we left because it was dark and we had a 3 hour drive in front of us. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures here either (or bring dogs, because “dogs eat penguins… don’t think your dog won’t because he will”), so I gave in a bought the post cards.

This was great, but I’m ready for some summer. Today I go from the freezer to the fryer. I’m headed to Bangkok in a few hours. Hold on to your seats because I’m going from 0 to 35 in 13.5 hours.