More shaking going on

Christchurch had another earthquake yesterday.  Actually two.  Son Bob called us last night to let us know they were OK; the only physical damage of consequence was their Apple computer crashed to the floor.  he had told me earlier that the seismologists were predicting a couple more as the fault line completes its adjustments.  He is hoping these quakes yesterday were the ones anticipated.  Everyone is on edge there and would like it if the earth would get its work done.


Christchurch earthquake


I am going to try to continue my report on our trip to New Zealand, which was wonderful, but the tragedy of the quakes has taken some of the joy out of it.  Bear with me. 

Earthquakes

Over the life of our planet the construct and shape of its surface has changed repeatedly.  But this has been no passive activity; it has been accompanied by volcanic eruptions, floods and massive shifting of continental plates.  As the plates are forced together, the earth trembles and shakes and mountain ranges are formed, chasms are opened, whole oceans move and continents are born. These processes began at the beginning of time and continue today.


When I was an undergraduate in 1965, the nascent theory of continental drift was being argued with the evidence mounting in its cause.  The whole idea of continents moving about had reached introductory geology classes. What a fascinating idea!  Over the following half century it has moved from theory to established fact as geologists traced the geological time line in very disparate continents separated now by huge oceans of water. 


These massive plates of land continue to move, to form mountains, to slide down under the sea.  But not without complaint.  Inertia and friction resist movement and thus they occur in sudden jolts -like trying to move heavy furniture.  These jolts are what we call earthquakes.


Typically, earthquakes occur along the edges of the continental plates, along  fault lines (we have all heard of the San Andreas fault in California).  In new Zealand, the Pacific plate is sliding southward along the Australian plate with the fault line running along the mountainous west coast of South Island.  As you look northward, the fault line extends through Wellington and continues to the center of North Island.  There are over 14,000 earthquakes in New Zealand per year although only about 200 are strong enough to be felt. New Zealand is sometimes called  the Shaky Islands.


However, the final chapter on seismic activity in New Zealand had not yet been written.  A previously unknown fault has been described and named the Greendale fault, which runs on an east-west line west of Christchurch and is the location of much of the activity over the past several months.


The size of an earthquake, while significant in its damaging force, is not the sole determining factor.  Like real estate, it is "location, location, location".  The 2010 Haiti quake was 7.0 M, 1989 the San Francisco, 7.1 M, the current Christchurch quake only 6.3 M on the Richter scale but the property damages estimated at US$12 billion the highest from a natural disaster since Hurricane Ike in 2008.


Certainly the loss of life is low when compared to a disaster like Haiti, but much of that can be attributed to awareness and preparedness and a wealthier economy.  The losses to the economy do no, however, stop at current property losses.  The economy depends heavily on tourism and many of the seriously damaged buildings in the city are the old historic buildings that attract tourists, like the cathedral, and it is questionable if they can be restored.  And, of course, 5000 earthquakes (201 of the over magnitude of 4.0) in the last six months isn't exactly a big draw for tourists.


Christchurch cathedral before quake:

Christchurch cathedral after quake Feb 22, 2011:

Looking around Oamaru

December 27 was our first full day in Oamaru.  With the excitement of the penguin colony still in our heads, we gathered for breakfast in the hostel and then Bob, Alison and the kids set off on a bicycle tour of the area while Lolly and I set off on foot to explore the back corners of this little city.

Only a few short blocks from our door, the main business corridor stretched along Thames Street, State Hi-way 1, the main highway leading through town.  Things were more lively along the row of shops and businesses than one expect considering Kiwis were still celebrating the Christmas holiday. We poked along, stepping into shops that caught our fancy, window shopping and people watching.  Our stroll south toward the old historic district was interrupted was interrupted when we stepped into a coffee-house to enjoy a flat white (a coffee with milk added with a tantalizingly flourish).  Granted there were several customers there but the barista managed to stretch out preparing the coffee for 25 minutes!  How I craved the quick "pump and serve" at Kwiktrip back home.  The expression, "Grab a cup of coffee" does not occur much in new Zealand.

After we sipped our coffee, we moved back onto the street and continued our journey.  Many of the building on the active street were also constructed of the creamy white Oamaru limestone: a few banks, the old post office.  Some had been government buildings or banks and now found themselves reclaimed as restaurants,dress shops and other less authoritarian enterprises.  Many of the limestone relics had had their exteriors cleaned and presented a very bright presence; some, I could tell, had actually been painted, more often than not, a more yellow hue than the original stone would cherish.

Whimsical sculpture

The tourist office was housed in a limestone antiquity at the far end of the street. A couple very eccentric, whimsical sculptures stood in the center of the street giving cause to a chuckle or a smile to the passerby.

Hand crafted furniture store in Historic District

A short walk around the corner and we were in front of the Criterion Hotel at Harbour and Tyne.  The narrow streets in the historic district still had an eeriness about them, but it was somewhat damped by the presence of bustling tradesmen and shoppers coasting in and out of several shops along the street.  Several of the storefronts were occupied by craftsmen and artists as combination shops or studios and retail outlets for their wares. There were painters, jewelry makers, sculptors.  We stopped in a furniture shop where the pieces were all handcrafted and chatted with the owner for awhile.  We learned that at one time not long ago, his business stretched down the street filling several of the spaces that now were vacant.  Imports from Asia hastened the demise of the fine furniture business. Too frequent a sad tale.  His furniture was the kind that would pass down through generations in a family.  I really liked many of the items he had and none were particularly exorbitant - a handsome sea chest crafted of a native wood was priced at NZ$500.


We lazily moved along the street enjoying the architecture and the goods on display.  Around the end of the street the open doors of an antique velocipede shop beckoned us in. 

Radio Museum

We chatted and joked with the owner and continued on our way.  As lunch time neared we headed back up the street intent on finding a place to eat.  On the way we discovered a small radio station and museum and, curious, peeked in.  The foyer and interior room was stacked from floor to ceiling with old radios, gramophones, phonographs and all other sorts of paraphernalia associated with radio or recording. At the rear of the main room a small radio studio was separated off with a glass window through which we saw a thin, bearded elderly gent talking lively into a microphone -broadcasting to the community.  While we were looking around, he finished his "gig" and came out of his studio and engaged us in conversation.  

As we talked, the name of Janet Frame came up. I had mentioned my impression that the Historic District had an eerie, spooky aura about it.  She had made a similar observation and she should know as she was, except for some travels abroad, a lifelong resident of Oamaru and perhaps New Zealand's most celebrated author.  Before traveling to New Zealand, we had researched books and movies associated with the country and found An Angel at My Table based on an autobiography about her life.  We watched it and became at least curious if not enamored this woman. As our conversation progressed, we learned that this gentleman was also the curator of the Janet Frame house and was headed there after lunch.  We assured him we would be there that afternoon and bade our goodbyes.


We found an interesting restaurant, the Star and Garter -one of New Zealand's oldest restaurants, around the corner on Itchen Street.  Lolly and I both had tasty grilled sandwiches with a ginger beer.  We called Bob on the cell to see if they were ready to join us, but they had already found a place uptown to quell the ferocious appetites generated by a couple hours of cycling.  We headed back up the main street after lunch and met up with them already finishing their lunch at Fat Sally's.  Lolly told Alison about a bead shop we had stopped in, so she opted for going there to have a look-around and bob headed back to the hostel with the kids.  Lolly and I made our way up the street into the residential area and Janet Frame's house.

Oamaru has a Rep Theatre

The Criterion Hotel

Some of the many shops along Harbour Street.

Overly decorated car

Called the Stable, but no horses evident

The Bike Shop

Entrance to Sculptor's shop on Tyne Street

The Bead Shop

Used-book store 

Bob and Alison in restuarant

On the road to Oamaru

We left Christchurch on boxing day (Dec. 26) getting urged on our way with a small 5.1 earthquake.  I misjudged  how long it would take to get there and expected we would be there for lunch.  Around noon everyone was getting hungry so we stopped to dine alfresco at a roadside park.

We finally arrived at the Red Kettle Hostel mid-afternoon.  We were the only guests coming in because it was closed for Boxing Day so we had the whole place to ourselves. I liked the hostel well enough.  The beds were comfortable and there was a spacious common room which we had to ourselves the first night.

The entrance to our hostel was very welcoming

The Criterion Hotel stood on the principal corner of the historic district

Things were very quiet in Oamaru as it was still a holiday and would be for two more days.  Alison took the kids to a well-equipped playground just down the street from our lodgings and Bob, Lolly and I went on a short expedition to look at the town.  We drove down to the historic district where the tourism office was (open) and got the information of penguins.  Then we took a little round through the Old Historic District.  We drove slowly down a narrow street flanked on each side by tall white limestone buildings.  Not a soul was to be seen!  It had a spooky, otherworldly feel to it like an abandoned set from a movie back lot.  I could almost hear the ghosts of  stonecutters and miners arguing with sailors and whalers fresh from the sea.  We stopped at the old Criterion Hotel on the corner and went into the saloon to have a beer.  It was built in 1877 and operated as a hotel until 1906, when, with Prohibition grasping the world by its dry throat, it became a temperance hotel. The ground floor was used mostly for a confectionary and soft drink shop (how sad!).  It then went into years of decline, finally being salvaged in 1987 because of its historic value.


 A few "regulars" were nestled in the corner near the door discussing local politics.  A classic wooden bar with tall wooden cabinetry at the rear housing half empty bottles of Scotch and gin sparsely occupying the shelves.  We ordered three beers (Speight's?), which were drawn from one of the tall brass spigots along its edge by a tall gray-haired barman with his sleeves rolled half up his arm and wide suspenders holding up his droopy wrinkled trousers.  We took our beers and sat at one of the three tables queued up along the windows facing the less than busy street.

Our room had a bunk bed and a single

In addition to housing the saloon, the Criterion is also a B&B, although I will say, the common rooms were not very appealing.  They had an old and musty feel about them like the ghosts met there often for tea.  We gawked around the various public rooms after we finished our beer and headed back to the Red Kettle to make supper and get out to see the penguins.

The little blues

We arrived at the Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony  about half past eight and sat in bleachers under a high roof with yellow lights barely beginning to show their existence in the darkening sky.  The sea in front of us slowly turned from emerald green to indigo and the sun moved closer to the horizon.


Out in the water a frothy irregular circle could be seen, slowly approaching the rocky shore.  As it got closer this circle proved to be a group of the small blue penguins, a raft of penguins. The waves lifted loudly and menacingly and crashed on the rugged boulders at water's edge.  Suddenly the froth was filled with small figures and it crashed ashore and about two dozen little birds bolted from the wave before it subsided and sucked back into the blackening sea.


For several minutes they remained out of view, hidden by the large rock, but then they began to advance up the incline of the beach, stopping in small conversational groups, heads wobbling and wings flapping, discussing the work of the day.  They preened their feathers to free them of sea water and occasionally gave their heads a sharp snap to shake the salt out of their eyes (they excrete the excess salt accumulated in sea water through their tear ducts).  


After a few minutes of this "visiting" as a group they waddled up the rocky slope to what looked like a roadway for vehicles to access the nesting area and monitor nest boxes.  There they crowded closer and closer together at road's edge, pushing and shoving but not venturing a step farther.  Suddenly they all made a dash across the road like the school crossing guard had just given them the go ahead and filed into a v-shaped pen pointing out from the fence protecting the nesting area.  A study meter-high fence separated the nesting area from the beach proper to limit access of predators.  Small portals are spaced several meters apart along the bottom along this fence through which the little blues can dodge onto the nesting area.  They waste little time from when they crowd into the V-pen and dive through  the portal into the nesting area.  They looked like commuters getting off the evening train and making a dash for their own homes.  Each little bird flew on their tiny feet, sometimes scooting several feet in a belly flop, off in the direction of its own nest.  Upon arriving they would duck inside and there was a lot of squawking going on all over the shrubby hillside.


After a few minutes a bird would emerge and look around at the raucous activities surrounding it and join in the general clamor of the colony.  Was it even the same bird?


This dive from the sea, march up the beach and charge through the fence continued for nearly an hour.  Over two hundred birds eventually made it home that night, perhaps with dinner.


The orange lights were invisible to the penguins so we could watch them unimpeded.  Some come up outside the controlled nesting area and travel in the dark to their unprotected nests.  There were several on the roadway as we returned to our cars in the dark parking lot.  

Earlier in the evening we had gone to another beach to see Yellow-eye Penguins.  That was a real "Where's Waldo" enterprise.  After some confusing turns we finally arrived at the beach where the Hoiho nest.  Quite a crowd of tourists had accumulated on the cliff overlooking the beach area.  Below we could see nothing but barren beach being pummeled by foamy surf. An entourage of views were hunkered in a blind (awfully big, crowded and noisy to deserve the name) at the north end of the narrow trail running along the top.

The young bird in the nest was more photogenic than the adult

Finally, far below a plump, black figure rolled out of the surf and headed for the cliff side. The little bird scrambled up the rocky embankment with great and impressive agility.  I could imagine such speed and assuredness from a goat or perhaps even a seasoned stock dog, but could not imagine myself even trying to scale it and yet here was this little yellow-eye with virtually no legs at all scampering up to its nest.

Once we could see a nest and the accompanying young, we started to scan the bank for others.  Sure enough, we spotted several other nests amid the brush and grass.  I believe these little fellows are endangered and seeing a large flock of them like you might see on a TV nature show is not to be expected anymore.  After successfully coping with seals and whales in the open waters of the Pacific and South Sea for millennia, they have not fared well with man and the land mammals introduced in the last century and a half.


We watched the birds for a while -the adults were want to just crash after some hasty feeding of the young- and since it was drawing near to the time that the little Blue Penguins would be coming in on another beach, we left and hurried back to the center.


Our first day in Oamaru was coming to a very rewarding and memorable ending.

Our road trip itinerary -Dec. 26 - Jan. 4

Our first few weeks in New Zealand were spent in Christchurch with family.  On Boxing Day (December 26 for you philistines who don't know what that is) we packed up two cars and headed south along the eastern side of the South Island.


Our overall plan was to spend two nights at each destination, thus giving us at least one full day to explore locally.  In hind sight there was no place we stopped that we wouldn't have like to spend more time.  We encountered a lot of travelers who were spending one night and moving on.  I am not sure what their goal was unless they simply had a checklist to mark off they had "been" there.


While early in the planning process we had talked about camping, we instead opted to get lodging at hostels (or backpackers accommodations as many are called) where we could prepare our own meals whenever we wished and sleep in actual beds. Except for the lodging at the Holiday Park already mentioned, we were very pleased with our experience. 

Red Kettle Hostel, Oamaru

On December 26 we drove to Oamaru and stayed at the Red Kettle Hostel.  It has been around for some years as we met a bookseller in town that had stayed there 23 years ago.


On the morning of the 28th we hit the road after breakfast and headed south again. We had planned to stop to see the Moeraki Boulders 40kms south of Oamaru, but it had started to rain which along with having to forge a stream on the foot trail damped our enthusiasm for actually fetting close enough to say we had been there.


Our next destination was a backpackers, McFarmers on the Otaga Peninsula just next to Dunedin.  We stopped en route at a cheese factory where we sampled cheeses and bought
 a few to enjoy later on.  As it was still raining, we stopped in Dunedin and visited 

McFarmer's Backpackers, Portabello

Otago Museum and Discovery World located on the university campus.  By mid-afternoon the rain had given up trying to annoy us and we headed out the winding coastal road to McFarmer's.  In a gorgeous location, we had the entire cottage to ourselves.  While there we had easy access to the nature attractions on the peninsula, but only touched Dunedin on our way out on Dec. 30.

We continued south to the Catlins, an area of great natural beauty and a long history of Maori settlement and early European whalers, and our next stop in Owaka.  For a tiny settlement of 400 souls it had the biggest hostel yet, the YHA Catlins Coast, situated in an old hospital (Lolly insisted it was a retired insane asylum!).

YHA Catlins Coast, Owaka

We spent New Year's Eve here on the beach with rolling, roaring ocean, gulls trying to be heard above the roar and snow white cliffs extending out into the sea and changing color from white to creamy yellow to red as the sun set behind us.

In the morning we breakfasted and headed inland passing through Queenston on our way to Glenorchy.

Our "digs" in Glenorchy

Queenston was a zoo!  It is perhaps the most popular tourist destination on South Island.  I also get the impression that, except for us,  few of the crowds of people promenading the walks and greens in the town's center were over 30.  I was happy to press on to Glenorchy where we anticipated fewer hungover  (it was New Year's Day!) young people.  Of course, that proved to be only partially true an the Holiday Park we had booked was very crowded and I surmised many were still celebrating the turn of the calendar page.

Kinloch Lodge

We desperately searched for alternative lodging and moved the next morning to Kinloch, where we had, for my tastes, the most delightful bed-down of the trip, Kinloch Lodge.  I could easily spent a week there just sitting and enjoying the scenery and ambiance of the place.  Being, as the owner told Bob and I, in a rain forest, it did rain.  Lots and all night.  But it cleared up again in the morning and we decided to do some hiking on our way out.


We headed north to Lake Tekapo, stopping at one of the Bunging Jumping enterprises on our way.  We only watched!  I am still puzzled by the extreme sports mindset.  People come from all over the world to take in the extraordinary raw beauty of this country, at great expense I might add, and seem to be more heel bent on ignoring it all so they can have these adrenal thrills jumping off a bridge or para-sailing down a cliff of kayaking off a waterfall.  I don't get it.  Also, there is an economic conundrum: our train and ferry ride from Christchurch to Wellington, which took a full day each way and covered very scenic countryside dotted with vineyards and along a marvelous coastline, cost NZ$198.  A jump off  the bridge, lasting only seconds, costs NZ$180.  Go figure.

Backpackers Inn (main building) in Tekapo.

At Tekapo we signed in to Tailor Made Backpackers for an enjoyable evening.  Lolly and I walked down to the beach that evening and looked across the lake at the mountains in the northeast.  As the sun slide down toward the horizon, we turned to witness one of the most spectacular sunsets either of us have ever seen.A long billowing blanket of low lying clouds stretched toward us.  The sun's rays reflected off the bottoms of these clouds yielding an array of creamy yellows, rosy reds and violet-purples against a darkening sky.


In the morning we ate, packed up and went to the hot springs there at the edge of town.  The springs or spa have three pools, each with a different temperature of water.  The warmest was only 99F, so not like, say, Banff Springs which is almost uncomfortably hot, but very nice, nonetheless.  The view from the spa was an added benefit: the lake and mountains shining brightly in the morning light.After soaking for over an hour we dragged our limp bodies out of the water and made for the beach-side park that sprawls along the hind side of the town proper where we constructed a lunch.


Back on the road, we motored our way back to Christchurch and the Bower house in Sumner.


This is an overview of our trip and I plan to tell about each stop in a little more detail, so be patient and come back again.