Says it all about the things I did there.
Pancake Rocks.
Jan Eric and I on the Franz Joseph glacier.
Rough as guts and waterfalls being blown up hill.
The shell after polishing.
It is a beautiful country with geography not dissimilar from British Columbia.
The temperature is similar as well, as it is temperate, wet and very changeable.
For a small country it has a large number of climatic zones, from lush rain forests to deserts.
It is the adrenaline capital of the world. They invented bungee jumping.
It is a very tourist friendly country with all manner of activities to do and beautiful places to see.
Many people come here for the outdoor adventure tourism, hiking, biking, kayaking, white water rafting, but also the adrenaline activities of bungee, canyon jumping, skydiving, paragliding, etc.
The people are very friendly and go out of their way to help you.
They have a wonderful way with the language. Not only is their accent appealing they have interesting and colourful idioms and terms: 'trim' milk, heaps, chucking down, rough as guts, sweet as, jandals (sandals), Macca's (McDonalds), not even (no way), bathers or swimmers (swimsuit), and others I have already forgotten.
They have many single lane bridges on their roads and highways and the lane is marked as to which lane has right of way. It does not seem to delay traffic too much as there never seems to be a lot on the road.
The New Zealand people seem to have an appreciation and respect towards the Maori and their culture. A great many of their towns, roads and areas have Maori names: Kaikoura, Akaroa, Peketa, Te Anau, Rotorua, etc.
There are lots of signs all over the country with the Maori word for New Zealand, Aotearoa, which means: land of the long white cloud. The two names are embraced by most people and both appear in the national anthem.
Many other places are named after the Europeans who explored this area, not the least of which is Mt. Cook, named after James Cook the explorer, or places they came from, like Dunedin, Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, etc.
They are cricket and rugby crazy with the All Blacks being the dominant rugby team complete with Maori chants and threatening facial expressions and gestures.
I came expecting to see millions of sheep, but there seemed to be less than I expected and just as many cattle, both beef and dairy.
They have a beautiful shelf fish, paua, whose shell is very similar to abalone. They use it to make beautiful jewelry and ornaments.
Despite their proximity New Zealand and Australia have little in common. They are on different continental plates and were never attached. Therefore their flora and fauna are very different. There are no kangaroos or other marsupials in New Zealand.
Before the arrival of humans, less than 900 years ago, the country was completely free of mammals, except those that could swim there (seals, sea lions and off shore the whales) or fly there (bats). This meant that all the ecological niches occupied by mammals were occupied by either insects or birds, leading to an unusually large number of flightless birds, including the kiwi, weka, moa (extinct now but as large as an ostrich) and kakapo (a very intelligent, large, flightless, nocturnal, ground dwelling parrot). Because of the lack of predators even the bats spend most of their time on the ground.
All of this made the animals very vulnerable to man and the mammals they brought: rats, stoats, foxes, and the Australian possum, all of which were able to easily prey on the indigenous animals.
New Zealand shares none of the multitude of poisonous animals that inhabit Australia.
The Lord of the Rings triology and the Hobbit movies were all shot in New Zealand and they have made another tourist business out of that. A couple of our group members visited a number of shooting locations including Hobbitown and Mount Doom.
New Zealand lies on a major fault line and this accounts for its geologic history because the island has many volcanoes, active and dormant and suffers a lot of earthquakes including the ones in Christchurch in 2011 and 2012.
It was sad to see the devastation of Christchurch and to hear about the lack of funds they have and the funds needed to rebuild the infrastructure. It was also daunting to imagine the loss of property values caused by them. And being the last place we visited it kind of ended the trip on a sad note, although I did enjoy my last few days wandering around exploring.
Great country, great people.
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