In Coromandel for the Earthquakes

We read about the earthquakes in Wellington in the newspapers and had heard bits and pieces on the radio, but for the most part, we have been fairly blithely unaware of what was happening at the southern tip of the North Island.

Shortly after we arrived in New Zealand, we took a guided tour of the Te Papa museum, the national museum in Wellington. Our guide was a slightly kooky Maori woman, who liked to talk about which animals the Maori ate, and whether people in other cultures would eat those and other animals. It was an unusual way to wander through a natural history museum. Our guide also told us that every year in New Zealand, there are over 3000 earthquakes! A little quick math and you're probably thinking what we were thinking at the time: "Absolutely no way that's true, kooky museum lady." We had been in Wellington at that point for several days, and had experienced nary a single tremor.

Turns out, she was right. By a lot. Every year in the new Zealand area, there are about 20,000 earthquakes. If you don't believe us, check out:
http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/felt

I love that the page is a list of quakes that may have been felt. It's not by any means an exhaustive list. It also will ask you after each listing to click on a button labelled: "felt it?" presumably if you've felt it. I am waiting for the day when I can click that button. I'm wondering what happens at that point...

Anyway, there sure are a lot of earthquakes in New Zealand. Now we've learned a bit about the pattern of earthquakes and that they do occur in clusters, and we haven't really shared much of what we've learned with the children. Oh, except what to do in an earthquake. We actually looked that up online - and then reviewed it with the boys To sum up, in case of an earthquake, drop, cover, and hold. This means -- get to the ground, wherever you are, crawl along the ground to a safe (i.e. covered) area, and then hold on to something if you can. So now you know, too.

We may have been in an area where people could feel the earthquakes that occurred Wellington, but we were driving on unpaved gravel roads, and any tremor we felt beneath us was as likely attributable to the unevenness of the road as to the motion of tectonic plates. Tom did all the driving, of course, and thank god he did, because it was at times dizzying and terrifying -- which of course, translates into incredible views of the mountains and ocean.

Some photos below:

This is the only photo I will include of our hike up the mountain at Te Aroha. It started raining while we hiked and we were covered in mud by the end. The forest was amazing, though, and the hike made all our dry hikes so much nicer by comparison.

The view from our balcony in Coromandel - those are grape vines around the top.

The first of several beaches where we stopped. We were often alone on the beaches.

Boys pretending to be crabs on the beach

This beach was my favorite

This is me saying: "And we have it all to ourselves!!"

The perfect picnic spot for a chocolate break! (We did, actually, just have chocolate for lunch that day - later the boys reported that having chocolate for lunch was their favorite activity of the day!)

I took some photos out of the car windows as we drove home, a little bit afraid of getting home too late for restaurants to still be serving dinner, and having eaten only chocolate all day. Tom wouldn't stop the car.

The next day we went to the Driving Creek Railway -- for the trains, the views, and the eccentric history. These rails were built by one man who is a potter by trade. I know, totally random, but marketed proudly as a prime example of "Kiwi ingenuity."