The wild west beckoned yesterday. Not America’s, but rather New Zealand’s.

I drove the width of the South Island from Golden Bay in the northeast to Westport in the east in about eight or nine hours. Most of the journey took me through a beautiful scene of verdant forest. Green was everywhere, not only in the trees but more grass that I ever saw before. The grass came right up to the road itself.

While beautiful, this scene doesn’t lend itself to spectacular photography. However, sunrise on Golden Bay and sunset at Tauranga Bay did.

Golden Bay in the Morning

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Yesterday was the sort of day that drew me to New Zealand. I took a seven-hour tour of the nature preserve at Farewell Spit. This is the far north end of the South Island, exactly as far south of the equator as Boulder is north.

Tour Bus at Cape Farewell

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Captain Cook named the cape when he left New Zealand in 1770. The cape itself is this split rock:

Cape Farewell

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Graeme returned to his home in Christchurch at noon Saturday. This had been the plan from the beginning of our trip to the north of the South Island of New Zealand. He took a train that follows a scenic route along the east coast of the island.

In the several days that we traveled together, Graeme was a wonderful companion and instructor. He taught me everything that I need to know to run his camper van and was also a knowledgeable and informative tour guide to his country.

But now he has left me alone in his camper van. This meant that I had to drive it, something that I had mostly avoided during the past few days that we were together.

Everybody warned me that driving on the left side would be the hard part. But it hasn’t been hard for me, especially because I had that experience when I lived four years in Kenya and Malawi.

What is hard is driving a big vehicle with a manual transmission. The camper van is bigger and heavier than my Toyota Highlander SUV, which has an operator-friendly automatic transmission. Graeme’s Mercedes Sprinter camper van is about the size of the biggest SUVs, like a Suburban.

This camper van is fully equipped except for the lack of an automatic transmission and air conditioning. New Zealand rarely needs the later, although for a few hours on Saturday afternoon back at the campground I appreciated having a picnic table in the shade.

This self-contained camper van even allows what they call “freedom camping” here. This is where you pull over to a flat spot beside a road. I haven’t done that yet, mainly because I appreciate the wi-fi in the campgrounds.

This van has electricity (when we hook it up to a power outlet in a campground), including a built-in electric heater, a sink and drinking water, a stove, a grill, and a microwave oven, a refrigerator, a toilet, a very small shower, closets, large windows and curtains, and foam couches convertible at night to two twin beds (when Graeme was here) or a large queen bed for one by using the backrests to fill in the gap between them. Everything a boy could want!

On Saturday afternoon after Graeme left I took a catamaran cruise for four hours from Picton through Queen Charlotte Sound on the Endeavor Express. This was a perfect day for an ocean cruise — no wind, much sun, and in fact not a cloud in the sky.

Traveling alone, I wasn’t lonely, because I met many people on the ship, as single travelers often do. The Endeavor Express serves backpackers who are hiking part of the Queen Charlotte track, vacationers in resorts along the sound, and people who live in cabins there.

A Good Place for a Hermit to Live

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Graeme and I left Kaikoura yesterday morning under heavy overcast skies. It had rained in the night. New Zealand’s weather is reputed to be quite changeable, and this country is living up to expectations in this and in all other ways.

But since the morning was dreary, we cancelled our plans for a helicopter flight over the Kaikoura Peninsula and continued our drive north. Changing again, the weather cleared by noon and we had clear skies when we stopped at a landmark roadside restaurant directly on the South Pacific Ocean called “The Store at Kekerengu.” This delightful restaurant reminded me strongly of the Nepenthe Restaurant on the Big Sur Coast. For my lunch I chose what the Kiwis call a crayfish and I call a lobster.

Feasting on Lobster

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Yesterday Graeme and I proceeded further north from the small resort at Hamner Springs to the slightly larger resort of Kaikoura. We drove through pastoral valleys and then down to the South Pacific Ocean at Kaikoura, a center of the country’s fishery and seafood industry.

Before we left Hamner Springs we took the obligatory soaks in the hot pools that are the reason for the town’s existence. The facility includes 15 pools of various sizes and types — everything from quite hot sulfurous water to cool swimming pools. Graeme and I went in four of the hot pools.

One of the Hamner Springs Pools

A Family that Bathes Together Stays Together

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Graeme and I took the camper van north yesterday from Christchurch to the delightful little resort town of Hamner Springs. They call this “New Zealand’s Alpine Ski Village.”

En route we drove through the Canterbury Plains where we saw thousands of New Zealand’s famous sheep. This country has about 40 million of these wooly creatures and only about 4 million people. About 10 percent of New Zealanders are Maori.

A Few of New Zealand's Sheep on the Canterbury Plains

We saw another domesticated animal when we stopped to get diesel for the camper van:

Dog

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After nearly 24 hours in flight and wait time I arrived yesterday morning in Christchurch, New Zealand. It’s summer here in the Southern Hemisphere, and I got a warm welcome indeed.

I left Ontario, California, on Sunday morning and got here on Tuesday morning after three flights that took me across the International Date Line.

In Ontario I visited my sister, her husband, and large family of her daughters and their families. I stayed with Curt and Julie, my niece I am closest to, particularly after she began to slow down and smell the flowers after a brain tumor scare a few years ago. Physically and emotionally she is better than ever, and we took a five-mile hike together in the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park. My niece Kathy hosted a get-together of the entire family, and 20 of us were able to meet (three family members had to work, one on a movie set and another who was on duty with the Los Angeles Fire Department). In fact, I met two brides and one fiancee of three of my grand-nephews for the first time.

After leaving Ontario I flew to San Francisco, where I caught the 13-hour Air New Zealand red-eye flight directly to the country’s biggest city, Auckland. The large Boeing 777 took almost 300 of us passengers across the Pacific Ocean.

Then I connected to a domestic flight to Christchurch, the only major city on the South Island, where I will vacation for more than a month. The South Island is New Zealand’s most scenic island, and Christchurch is where Graeme McIver lives.

Graeme is my host and new friend. And what a warm and welcoming host he is! Graeme is a very good friend of my best friend, John Dodson, who is currently the senior pastor of the United Methodist Church in Anchorage, Alaska. When I visited John there last summer we discussed my desire to visit New Zealand and he asked Graeme, a retired Methodist minister, to welcome me.

Graeme’s welcome was extraordinary. He is loaning me his Mercedes Sprinter camper van for the duration of my visit, providing me with both transportation and lodging.

Graeme and his Camper Van

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Yesterday Graeme met me at the airport with the camper van and drove me around beautiful Christchurch, a city of almost a million people. Then we had a delightful dinner and conversation with his frieyynd Robyn at her condo in town. Joining us were her teeen-age grandson Liam and two of the three exchange students from China, Japan, and Korea who are living with her now.

Last night I stayed in the camper van in a lovely campground. The summer, which had been wet here until a few days ago, is clear and warm. Now for a day or two Graeme and I will be traveling together in his camper van. While I am here I plan of taking several of New Zealand’s “great walks” or “tramps” as they call hiking in this country. What a delightful way to spend the winter, er summer.

My friend and new hiking and photography companion Sharon Jewell got me exciting about birding. Two days ago she introduced me to “the number one sport in America” when we went to Sawhill Ponds east of Boulder. She taught me to use my binoculars and to stop and look in the tall trees for shapes that don’t look like branches.

That day I saw my first great horned owl and American kestrel. The owl flew off as I was adjusting my camera and my shot of the kestrel was good enough to keep but not good enough to show.

Yesterday Sharon went to the Carolyn Holmberg Preserve, which is out in the prairie about 10 miles east of my apartment. She told me this morning that she had seen a pair of bald eagles there.

So this afternoon that’s where I went. I found them and took 65 photographs of one of them. What a thrill for me to see the national bird and symbol of the United States for the first time!

The eagle wasn’t lose. I estimated that it was well over 100 yards from me, and getting any closer was impossible. That forced me to essentially pull out all of the stops on my camera.

I used my 300mm prime lens and my new 1.4x teleconverter, making it a 420mm lens. Since my digital SLR camera’s image sensor is smaller than the full frame 35mm camera’s film area by a focal length multiplier of 1.6x, this means that the 420mm lens translates into a powerful telephoto lens of 672mm. I needed every bit of that power and even had to severely crop the image below:

My First Bald Eagle

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As much as I like this shot, it can’t compare with one that Sharon took at the Carolyn Holmberg Preserve a year ago. She kindly shared it with me and gave me permission to use it:

Sharon's Bald Eagle

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But I am only a beginning birder. I may improve.

If you didn’t believe that you could be cold and lonely in Boulder, take a look at this poor Canada goose.

Cold and Lonely on the Ice

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This poor bird walked across Tantra Lake just before sunset this evening when the temperature was already down to 24 degrees. The weatherman says the temperature will drop to 15 degrees tonight.

I took this shot in part because I wanted to see if high dynamic resolution or “HDR” would improve it. But shooting at 1/350th of second, I was too slow and Photomatix Pro couldn’t stop the movement of the bird’s legs among the three images I took. So I just used the one normal exposure image here.

Now, with a little experience I’m beginning to see some of HDR limitations. In addition needing to use a fast shutter speed for even slow-moving birds like this Canada Goose, I learned another limitation from eventually reading the owner’s manual, not to use flash.

Actually, this bird isn’t as lonely as it looks. About 100 birds congregated nearby around the limited open water of the lake. And the bird probably doesn’t feel the cold as much as we do. Good thing too, since it doesn’t have a warm apartment to retreat to like we do.

In Boulder we don’t dream about a white Christmas. We experience it.

A couple of days ago we got another five inches of snow. The temperature has stayed below freezing ever since then — it never went above 23 degrees today — so we still have a solid blanket of snow. Just what I needed to experience a snowshoe adventure near home on Christmas afternoon.

All I had to do was to grab my snowshoes from the SUV in my garage. After strapping them on, I walked a few snow-covered feet to a huge expanse of undeveloped land right next to the apartment complex where I live and made a three and one-half mile loop.

In the past few days I have been enjoying walks to neighborhood coffee shops one or two or three miles from my apartment. On my walks I have been listening to meditation tapes and in the shops I have been checking my email on my iPod Touch while warming up with a cup of coffee. But destination walks to coffee shops weren’t in the cards today, since they were all closed for the holiday.

At home I have only decaf, but I got my minimal dose of caffeine at a Christmas party for lunch today. That freed me up for the snowshoe expedition that took the rest of the afternoon.

The sun never came out all day. But sometimes a dull day can produce moody images, so I made sure to take my camera with me. I especially wanted to see if a new photographic technology called “high dynamic range” or HDR would made any difference under these difficult conditions. [Read more →]