We are lucky enough to have biologists among our friends in New Jersey (shout out to 3 Hillside Place) - it makes a big difference when you are spending time outside to have someone who knows something with you. I love being in the woods and in the mountains and by the shore, but it is even better when you are thinking and talking about the plants and the animals and the water and the health of the earth and the stories of the native species. We have now met in New Zealand a wonderful couple who are both biologists and ecologists, and they have children the same ages as our children. They live in the shadow of the most important National Park in New Zealand and spend a lot of time there eradicating invasive species and protecting native species. They took us on a hike last weekend around Lake Rotopounamu in Tongariro National Park - this was our first real taste of this enormous park that contains three huge volcanoes, including Mt. Doom.
Lake Rotopounamu is a bit redundant, as "roto" means "lake" in Maori. "Pounamu" means "greenstone" or "jade," a precious substance to the Maori, frequently used in weapons in the old days and jewelry then and now. The lake is at the foot of Mt. Pihanga who legend tells is married to Tongariro, the large mountain nearby. Pihanga has a jade necklace around her neck, Rotopounamu. (Evelyn's clinic is nearby, Pihanga Health.) As you can see from the map here, Rotopounamu is indeed jade green.
We are starting to learn some of the native trees here - when you learn the same facts over and over, you eventually start to remember some of them. Our friends pointed many of the trees out along the way and so many of my photos from this hike are trees. I had the camera for almost the entire walk, so you have me to blame for tree photos.
(This one is really a fern, but it is huge and tree-like. Dinosaurs probably ate it.)
Here is a peek through the trees at the mountains.
Here are the children hiking up ahead of us as we make our way toward the lake. See how nice the sky looks? It probably won't start pouring on us.
When Jasper gets to a body of water, he has to put his hands in it and often his shoes. Thankfully, this lake is so clean, you can drink it.
Here is Pihanga. She is a very small mountain compared to Tongariro and Ruapehu nearby.
Those of you bugging me for more photos of diatoms, here you go. Now get off my case, phytoplanktonheads.
Jasper pondering his place in the wonder of nature:
A weta hotel. Seriously. Weta are freakishly large bugs that are among the largest and heaviest insects able to fly. They look like crickets with really big hind legs covered in hairy spines. They are famous in New Zealand and you might have heard the name before because Peter Jackson called his special effects companies Weta Workshop and Weta Digital. See previous blog posts for photos of the Weta Cave in Wellington. In this post, we have instead a photo of a real weta curled up in a weta hotel that has been opened up for us. He's a little hard to see. I didn't really need to see this one, though, because Evelyn and I actually found one in our house once. I grabbed it and threw it outside. I was glad I didn't have to confess to killing it once I met the ecologists. They are scary-looking critters, though harmless to humans. (Weta, not ecologists.)
Here is a picture of some dirt. If you click on the picture to make it big and then look really carefully at the dirt, you might spot a robin. (Hint: it is gray. Look at the fern hanging down on the right, follow it almost to the tip, then look just to the left.) It is called a toutouwai and is an endemic bird. This really happened: our friend Nick stopped during our hike and said, "Hear that? That's a robin. I know this bird." He then whistled at it, walked a little bit into the forest, and then scratched the ground a bit to stir up the insects. The bird landed nearby, saw the scratched dirt, and then hopped over for a meal. I think this qualifies as a superpower. I have never been able to hear a bird sing in a forest and say, "I know this bird."
OK, now the sky is looking a little less friendly. Still, it won't start pouring rain, I am sure.
So, Jasper and I were slowest, so there are lots of pictures of Jasper. Here he is on a log.
An old dead tree stretched out over the lake, so Jasper climbed onto it and I took his picture. Later looking at pictures, Aidan asked, "How come Jasper was allowed to climb onto that tree and I wasn't?" Should have walked with Daddy, Aidan.
A photo from the far end of the lake. Harmless dark clouds not at all looming over our heads.
Another bird friend of our friends. Any bird friend of theirs is a bird friend of mine. This poor duck broke its wing years ago, but it stuck around and has had several litters of ducklings. Litter? Brace? Paddling? Whatever - a bunch of baby ducks.
On this beach, we caught up with Evelyn and everyone else.
Aidan, striking a pose with his water bottle:
Not storm clouds:
A log that every child had to climb into. They emerged dirty, needless to say.
A great picture of the four kids:
To our surprise, it started to rain really hard at this point.
Jasper, realizing that we were never going to make it back to the car without getting soaked:
It was an amazing trip into the forest and a great first visit to the Tongariro National Park. Can't wait to go back. In the winter, it can be a little dangerous, because the elevation is high and the weather can turn quickly, but the spring is just about here and we should be able to go up the volcanoes with the boys soon. That's good, because I've got this old ring that I've been keeping secret and safe for ages that I've been meaning to destroy there.
One last photo from the weekend - Taupo is the skydiving capital of the world and we expect this sight to become ever more frequent as the weather gets better:
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