There are no words to describe how beautiful this country is.  We spent several days on the North Island and saw some really diversified things.

Here are the palm forests of the Waimangu Geothermal Valley.  These palms grow to be very tall and the dead palm fronds cover the stem where the roots are found making their way from the top of the tree down into the ground.

The valley has geothermal features like geysers, boiling water, and mud flats.  The valley was created by an earthquake in 1904 and another in 1917.  Before the quake there was a place called Fryingpan Flats, terraced pools, and thermal springs.  After the earthquakes the flats became Fryingpan Lake under which the terraced pools are now found.  The lake is hotter than boiling water and supports a very little life, mostly single celled bacteria.

Fryingpan Lake

The famous silver leafed fern which is so popular in New Zealand art.

A pretty blue pool higher up on the slopes.  It has a small geyser which erupts sporadically.  It is also hot and dangerous.

A small fumerole which blows off steam constantly.  The geothermal activity is so near the surface that even walking off the path is dangerous.  The earth’s crust is so thin here that only a little weight will break it.

Another view of Fryingpan Lake.

Up next, our Maori experience.  This felt a little like going to the shows in Hawaii that the Mormons sponsor, but we ate a great meal, heard some great singing, and saw some traditional dancing.

Dinner was lamb, chicken, salads, and other stuff.  It was all cooked underground like a luau.

The Maori came fro the South Pacific about 1300 years ago.  They settled New Zealand where they conserved the land and animals so that everything was in balance.  When the English first arrived they were afraid of this fierce band of warriors and it was not until the 1800’s that they started taking Maori land for themselves.  After years of trying to deal peaceably with this problem, the maori took the government to court and won back the right to their own land.  The first tribe we met gave the bulk of the land back to the city of Auckland for a park for all to enjoy while the second tribe just wanted a public apology and acknowledgement of what was done to them.  Very interesting.

The dances and songs are all a part of teaching strength and coordination with various instruments used in war.  The wide eye-ness and tongue sticking out are simple attempts to scare off enemies.  It works!

Next up is a flight to the South Island and the Alps of New Zealand.

It isn’t impossible to use words to describe the beauty of this land.  Flying in, the pilot took an extra circuit around the sound so we could marvel at how incredibly beautiful it is here.  The views from our hotel are astonishing and we have all loved watching the moon rise.

Our jaunt to Milford Sound was a five hour bus ride through more incredible scenery.  And the cruise around the fjord was always changing with each and every turn.  There were waterfalls everywhere we looked and the snow capped peaks provided a constant dramatic background.

A fern palm in ThenChasm.

The Chasm and very interesting pockmarked rocks lining the gorge.

Milford Sound and one of the many waterfalls.

More waterfalls.

Milford Sound, really a fjord, was discovered by Captain James Cook by a fluke.  He had sailed by the mouth of the fjord twice and didn’t see more than a bay.  Then one day in a storm and seeking shelter, he sailed farther into this *bay* and voila, the wondrous fjord we enjoyed today.  It is surrounded by the mountains and was a challenge to get to from the land side.  In 1938 a a tunnel as built which is still in use today.  It is a one way, low tunnel but no one complains.  The road wasn’t paved until the 1950’s and again, everyone loves it.

Our trip home was under a full moon which lit up the snowy landscape and gave us pleasant dreams.

So when the pictures I took today download to my iPad, I’ll give you the rest of the story!

We made it!!  Wow!

We met with a Maori chief and we’re greeted in the traditional way. We learned the traditional Maori greeting, the hongie.

Then we experienced our Day of the Rainbow!

First, outside our hotel came a beautiful, clear rainbow which morphed into a double.

Then, on our drive to Rotorua came EIGHT more and here are pix of the ones I could snap,

This pretty much made the ride great!  But what came afterward made it truly wonderful!  Yay!  Made it to probably the most famous town in these parts.

Some of the places we saw were the meadow where Frodo ran down the hill to begin his great adventure, the Green Dragon in the distance beyond the double arched bridge, Bilbo and Frodo’s house with the steps and little bench, the blue door of the house belonging to the gardener, Sam’s house with the yellow door, and the green dragon carving over the bar in the Green Dragon.  What a fun day!!

We learned some of the secrets of the films.  The set was first built out of plywood and polystyrene but all dismantled after Lord of the Rings.  When The Hobbit came along Peter Jackson went into partnership with the farmer on whose land the film was set to build permanent buildings.  It took months and had huge cost overruns but they’re making money hand over fist now with an average 3500 people each day in the summers.  Now we’re going to have to watch all six films again to see if we can catch the things the guide told us about.

We will be seeing more of Middle Earth as we go along but I can tell you right here and now, New Zealand is as spectacular as I ever could have imagined!

NEEDING OUR 10,000 steps we left the pier, bought jewelry for the daughters, checked out a pair of Nikes I wanted but they cost $950, had lunch, and went to the museum.  Here we saw Lubyu, a 42,000 year old, one month old baby wooly mamouth!

She was found in Siberia where she had fallen into some water and drowned.  It was so sad but the people curating her got lots of info about her geneology and customs and care.

Surprise! Here is the skull of a wooly mamouth found in Wyoming by one of my professors, Dr. Mears, shortly before I began my years at the U of Wyoming!

The whole display of mamouths, mastodons, Asian and African elephants was really amazing.

Here is just one of the fantastic displays.  Not to harp on it too much but the elephant population world wide is steeply declining and this is due mostly to habitat reduction and poaching. PLEASE people.  Do we really need ALL the land and ivory?

Yes, we also saw dinosaurs, birds of the world, the 200 most special things the museum had to display, and so much more.  This fine facility is really a great addition to one of our favorite Antipodaean cities!

Tomorrow we leave for New Zealand, also referred to as Middle Earth!

This day was a free day for us to do what we wanted.  Yesterday on our Harbor tour we saw all these old boats so we wound our way to the Australia Maritime Museum.

First up was the battleship Vampire.  It served through then’70’s. Mark marveled over the guns and the wiring.  There must be a million miles of wires strung throughout this ship.

Next was the submarine, Onslow.  Okay, I know I’m not tall but it was a real tough slog to try to get up and down the hatches and through the water tight door portals.

This is the view inside up the conning tower.

Just a few gauges.

This is where they maintain the ballast.

Need something fixed?  Hang on a minute and I’ll grab my tools.

I’ll post pix from the Australia Museum on another post, but first!  Endeavor!  This is the ship Captain Cook sailed around the world in.  Glad I wasn’t in this one too as they had added a deck which meant I had to stoop to get from one end of the second deck to the other!

What can I say about this vibrant, modern, active city?  What a great place to wind up the Australia portion of our trip!

The iconic views of Sydney featuring the bridge and the opera house. Really, the core is very walkable as Mark and proved on our third day here by walking about 10 miles of it.

From a height above the city we saw where the Sydney Harbor meet the Tasman Sea.

The waves of Bondi Beach.

The Harbor Bridge.

Sydney Opera House.

Best tour of the day was a guided tour inside the opera house.  The sails are an absolute work of genius.  The guy who designed it had his plan adopted without any structural engineer input so when it came time to figure out how to build it a lot of thinking had to go on.  Finally the epiphany came and the guy worked it out using a sphere to cut the sails into sections.  The buttresses were then formed out of concrete and slipped together like Legos.

It took 17 years to build and of course there were cost over runs.  The designer got fired and never saw his finished building.

The tiles were all specially made and are actually beige-ish.  They made 250,000 extra tiles but have only used 5 so far!  Amazing.

It was dark when we finished the tour and we got to see a light laser show projected on the sails.  I posted some of this on Instagram.  But as we were leaving the bridge and city buildings lit up!  What a fantastic end to a fantastic day!

Once again into the breech.  On an ocean adventure with rain and high winds and a really touchy tummy.  Off we go to The Great Barrier Reef!

We made it in two and a half hours and plenty of watching the horizon.  We had our choice of a submersible, scuba diving, snorkeling, or a helicopter ride over the reef.  We had an hour briefing telling us about the reef and it’s current condition, the animals we might see, and a caution about tiny stinging jellyfish which produce a very bad toxin.  What did we choose?  The submersible!  Why?  We didn’t have to get wet, we didn’t have to fly, and we didn’t need to worry about getting swept away by the giant waves or get stung by these devilish jellyfish.

In our enclosed submersible we watched all sorts of colorful fish wander around below the ocean, or the Coral Sea, to be exact.  We saw a rare Green turtle and Nemo and a bunch of other fish.

The color of the glass in the boat affected the quality of our pictures, but of course there is a story about the coral.  Yes, we’ve done it again!  Pollution, climate change, and stressing the coral has produced a bleaching of it for the past two years.  Most of the color has been leeched out of about 90% of it.  But, over the last little bit, some color is returning. Hard to tell from this picture but there was actually some green and violet blue coral here.  Apparently this is a cycle but it has been speeded up because of our impact on the earth.  And the ozone layer is so thin in Australia that the sun fries people and bleaches the coral.

As we were returning in even worse conditions than those on the way out, one of the marine biologists on the trip collapsed.  She had gone into the water with no protective clothing and had gotten stung by one of the jellyfish.  She went into cardiac distress and the crew worked over her the whole way back.  Everybody was very worried and upset about this and today we were relieved to find out that she had to spend a couple days in hospital but would be okay.  Mark and I were very glad we opted to stay out of the water!

Next up was DAINTREE Tropical Rainforest.  Our lesson here was about the

interdependence of the plants and animals inhabiting the forest.  Above are orchids which find a host tree and live happily ever after.

This ball of leaves is made by weaver honey ants (can you see them crawling up the branch?).  They pull a leaf to another and then from the inside glue the leaves together.  This provides a nest for the ants which in turn protect the tree from some predatory insects which might harm it.

You have to look closely to see the two long pole like stems on the left.  One of them is bamboo and the other is Wait Awhile which eventually turns into rattan.  The Wait Awhile has big thorns which fall off if you wait awhile.  Hahaha.  Look really closely at the right picture and you will see a giant spider heading down to catch a fly.  It was probably as bigger than a sliver dollar!  Those palm leaves are part of the roof of the rainforest.  They are about 45 ft. in the air while the forest tops out at 90 ft.

These are called buttress roots and are found on the various gum trees in the forest.  The thing about this forest is that it is a really toxic place.  Touching plants or scratching the bark of trees can produce cyanide gas or strychnine. Believe me! We did not touch a thing!  And the best (not!!) thing about this place is that the apex predator is a python which hides in the treetops in basket ferns and drops out on its unsuspecting prey.  Whoopy!  The native aborigines kept the forest in balance forever before the Europeans arrived.  They knew how to catch the pythons, manage the rare cassowary, cultivate the rainforest so that harmony prevailed.  White folks thought they knew better and started cutting down the forest to plant fruit trees.  This changed the basic chemistry of the forest and allowed the flora and fauna to become unbalanced.  There is still a huge problem with feral pigs which dig up the forest and destroy plants and habitats.  Study is going on to try to figure out how to remedy all the problems from the past, but instead of just asking the natives, they are reinventing the wheel.  Oy vey!

Here is a pic of a cassowary now almost extinct.  A big part of the problem is because of drivers and some intrepid soul made the after version of the beware sign.

Next we took a boat ride up a lazy river to see the local inhabitants.  This crocodile was enormous!  And our last view of the area was the beach on the Coral Sea.  A really amazing area suffering along with so much of the world because we can’t get our heads out of our duffle bags and take care of it.  Geez!

Continuing with my surprise about the Outback, Uluru is not a huge rock rising from an arid red desert.  Take a look!

This desert hasn’t seen rain in three months.  What?  There are plants, trees, shrubs, and animals all through here.  This is not the desert I know!

But before we see The Rock again we have to take the ride from Alice to the one and only resort there.  Because our driver has to stop every two hours for half an hour we got to see “road trains,” semis pulling three to four trailers, camels, used by Afghans to build the telegraph lines, and more kangaroos.

This first little Joey was about as big as one of our cats.  The little grey one about three times his size.  And the baby camels – – we’ll what can you say about camels?

Uluru is the sacred mountain to the aboriginals.  There are secret stories about it passed down from father to son and mother to daughter.  Men and women have defined roles which they refer to as men’s business and women’s business. This business happens from birth to tribal initiation and on from there, giving each generation the information which helps them survive.  The stories we were allowed to hear about Uluru basically told how the scars on the rock got there in an epic battle between two forces in opposing tribes.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the side of the rock which had these scars.

There is another rock formation out here called Kata Tjuta.  It is several huge boulders tumbled together.  Again, this formation engenders stories, but the place I liked was the family cave.  Here the family sat around telling stories and drawing pictures about their lives which were given to provide information for the youngsters on how to survive.  For example, the line of concentric circles (a big part of aboriginal art) tells how to find water sources.  The insect with sections is called a witchity grub and the kids learn early how to find this delicacy in the roots of the desert trees.

This is a sacred waterfall at Kata Tjuta but word on the block is the elders will be coming around to do a rain ceremony any day now.  The aborigines bought back this land a few years ago amid great controversy.  Many thought the money spent would have been better used to help those displaced during the years of control by interfering Europeans.  Do I have to cue the music again?  Sigh.

But…….

Watching the sun rise over Uluru is probably the most spiritual experience we will have on this part of the trip and I embrace it with a full heart.

We made it!  A Two hour flight from Adelaide put us in a landscape light years from our imaginations.  When I thought about the Outback, pictures of a barren red desert came to mind. Alice Springs was a one dirt road town lined with bars and rowdy cowboys.  Yup!  All wrong.

Alice, as the locals call it, is a thriving community of about 30,000 in a *desert* with underground rivers, many species of trees and grasses, and with mountains, buttes, and rock formations all around.

The stunning red, rocky hills are somewhat reminiscent of the deserts in the southwest and aside from snakes and other weird critters appealed to me very much.  That’s a riverbed in the front of this picture!

In the 1800’s when “free” Aussies began moving outside the southern states to explore and build a telegraph to connect all of Australia with itself and England, one fellow decided Alice Springs would be a good  place because there was a river there. Little did he know it had recently rained and runoff was in the riverbed, just where you’d think it should be.  But, here the water sinks into the ground and has made a river underneath the topsoil.  Weird, right?  Well, the guy decided to stay and built a complex here and he invented a way of stringing the wire the singing words used to transmit Morse Code around ‘Stralya’ and to England cutting communication time from six to ten months to four hours!

The dark side is this post was also used as a re-education camp for aboriginal children.  They were taken from their homes and put in dormitories and taught white man’s ways, of course to the detriment of all.  When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?

Yes, when will we ever learn?  This monument is to the ANZAC’s who have fought and died in wars right up to the current one in Afghanistan. The chorus once more, please.

This night we were in for a special treat!  Out to a nearby cattle station we went and learned to throw boomerangs!  Be afraid!  We also sat around a campfire and ate steak, potatoes, salad,  bread, and dough pie (sort of like a big biscuit made in a Dutch oven over the coals and served with treacle.  Yum!). Then we stargazed and we’re amazed at the galaxies before us!  I used to sit on my Dad’s lap and count stars.  This took me back to those days of yore.

Next up was another wildlife park featuring desert animals.  There was a bird show with a desert eagle, a barn owl, a kite, a quoll (in red light because he’s nocturnal.  Has black fur with white dots.), another dingo, a Thorney Devil, and an Emu pronounced e-myou.

We stopped by The Purple House which is a sort of Day Treatment center for aborigines needing dialysis. They can only do two treatments a day because the house is in a neighborhood and the neighbors don’t like it.  So, they have an outreach van which can come to where the need is greatest.  The aboriginal diet has been changed so much they have an 80% diabetic rate.  I hear a chorus coming on!  But at least a few people care.

And, speaking of caring, back in the early 1900’s a woman decided that there were a lot of children in the Outback too far from schools to be able to get an education.  She figured out a way of getting school materials to these kids and having circuit riding teachers and by using the telegraph, later two way radios, and then computers, to give a good education to the far flung kids out in the bush.  This is called The School of the Air, or as I heard it when our guide told us where we were going, The School of th Ear.  That one took a while!

And, so, with the sun setting over Alice Springs we get ready for the five hour bus ride tomorrow to Uluru!

Okay, I’ve lost track of which part were on but I do know we flew to Adelaide two days ago.  When we got here we went straight to Cleland Park, another wildlife park.

The koalas are really cute but if you annoy them they’ll scratch you.  The pelican was as tall as me, and here we saw a couple of dingos doing what they do.

Mark was surprised at how big they are.  I’d say German Shepard size.

We went to dinner at the house of a local, Antoinetta.  It was a very pleasant evening with good food and wine.

And speaking of wine, yesterday we went on a wine tasting at McLaren Vale.

The wine was very good with the sparkling Shiraz surprising the most. The olive trees abounded on the first property we went to and I was quite surprised at how good they were.  I have some olive tapenade to share when we get home!

We also took a stroll around Adelaide and saw quail in the botanical gardens.  How are my quail doing at PEM?

More buildings with the pretty gingerbread metalwork.

A memorial to the US  for coming to that aid of Australia when the Japanese tried to bomb it in 1939.

These big trees are all over.  They are some kind of gum tree but not the kind the kookaburra sits in. Even though that is called a gum tree it is really a eucalyptus.

And finally, all my sewing compadres, this place is called The Button Shop. What a fantastic find in one of the many arcades found around the city!  Didn’t have enough time to browse and I had this weight on my arm pulling me away, but from the outside it looked like a lot of fun!

In a few minutes we depart for the airport and the flight to Alice Springs and the Outback!  We can hardly wait!!

Last night after dinner we walked out to the end of this jetty to look at penguins. Apparently Fairy Penguins, the smallest breed of this bird, hang out here.  They go out fishing all day and come back at night to roost.  The are about 18 inches high when upright and sport a bluish color.

These little guys are pretty cute and didn’t smell as bad as the ones we had at the aquarium when we volunteered there!

Today we went on a walk-about in Melbourne. Across the street from our hotel is a huge stadium which holds more that 100,000 people who are crazy about Aussie rules football.  As far as we can figure out there are no rules and the 18 players on each team just run around the large, round field and try to knock down those on the other team.  We wandered across the street this morning and our guide, Anna, convinced the security guards we were harmless and they let us in for a “wee peak.”

Here’s what we saw, not much, but enough.

Buildings were on the menu today.  The first picture is of an old theatre built in the 1800’s. It shows avant- garde stuff nowadays but it is still architecturally unique and beautiful.

All the new buildings are interesting here.  The second picture is of ACMI which stands for Australian Center of the Moving Image.

Next up is an alley where graffiti artists have had a heyday.  Some of the art is incredible e.g. the drops of water on the close-up.

Because many of the old buildings are so unique, innovative steps have been taken to preserve them. Here is a conical shaped mall built around an old “shot tower.”  A shot tower is an old place where gun pellets were made.  We saw one somewhere else and from what I remember hot lead is dropped from the top and shapes itself into balls on the way down. This is possibly wrong so please let me know if you know better!

Today’s final pic is an attempt to show some of the fancy fretwork found on so many buildings here.  Remember it was made from the ballast in the sailing ships that brought people to Australia. I will continue to look for good examples and post them when I do.

Tomorrow is another travel day.  We’re off to Adelaide and more adventures including wine tasting!!