Today, the weather was glorious. After breakfast and loading up our luggage, we headed off down route 6 through beautiful alpine scenery with excellent views of the alps. Cold, but downhill and easy, with beautiful scenery.
At one point, we came suddenly out at the beach. It was rather hard to reconcile the snowy alps we'd just been looking at and the nice warm beach. Truly a land of contrasts.
The total ride was about 90 km with very little climbing and a fair bit of descending. Finally, it was payback time, especially with the weather. Coldest temps we saw were 46 in the morning, and highest were in the 70's in the afternoon.
Upon reaching our lodging, the Lake Moeraki Wilderness Lodge, we were given a choice of a number of self-guided walks, as well as two evening guided walks. We chose to wash clothes and nap before the guided walks. The first walk, before dinner, took us through one of the few never-logged floodplain rainforests left in New Zealand. There were several splendid examples of kahikatea trees, very slow growing, ancient trees that used to be widespread in New Zealand, but now have been reduced about 98% by being cleared to create farmland. Note the huge number of other species clinging to them, including the vine-like ratas (those red-flowered trees we've been seeing all over New Zealand). This kahikatea is probably between 800 and 1000 years old (and you're only seeing a very small section of it. Autostitch really does not do a good job of stitching together vertical panoramas, which isn't surprising, since the magnfication is so different as you go up).
The Maoris called these something like food basket trees (in Maori, of course) because they supported such a huge variety of life in addition to their own fruit, which the Maoris climbed 120 feet or more to harvest. They also set traps for wood pigeons (the ones with the frilly pantaloons we saw yesterday at Lake Matheson). These kahikateas are so slow growing that this little seedling, only about knee-high, is about 10 years old.
The other example of ancient tree was the rimu trees, also covered in rata vines. These are the other major canopy trees in the forest and, unlike the kahikateas, are highly prized for lumber.
And this is a rimu seedling. There was something really charming about getting to see both the elders and the youngest examples side by side. This little guy is really wonderful to stroke, and our guide says it's the most pampered rimu in New Zealand since he pats it every time he goes by.
The highlight of the walk was the eel feeding. When we had reached the rimu, our guide excused himself for a moment and slipped off with the bag he had been carrying. A few moments later he was back and gave us the explanation about the rimus. Then we made our way down to the riverside. It turns out that he had put some strips of raw meat into the river in a little place designed to allow the water to flow through but keep the meat there. The smell of the meat travels downstream, and pretty soon the eels start coming to find it. He said the Maoris used to bring their dead to the riverside to be cleaned. So they never eat the big eels, only the little ones.
Just now, starting at 10:30 p.m. (just getting dark enough), we went for a star and glow worm walk. About 5000 stars of the Milky Way are visible here, while only about 1500 are visible in the northern hemsphere. Finally, David got to see the Southern Cross. And, of course, familiar constellations like Orion are upside down. The glow worms are little larval worms that hang by little threads from clay banks (often in caves, but in this case just an old landslide at the edge of the road). They are sticky and glow to attract insects, which they eat. En masse they form dozens of twinkling Christmas tree lights among the foliage. After about 9 months in their larval form, they become little gnatty insects that live for three days, mate, lay their eggs on a bank and then die.
In addition to celestial and terrestrial stars, we saw several satellites, including the space station, pass overhead. And when we were quiet enough, we could hear the little morepork owls across the lake crying "more pork," "more pork."
No comments:
Post a Comment