Halloween, NZ-Style!

Hello, Tom here.  I'm sure you've been wondering - how does New Zealand do Halloween?  Does everyone dress up as orcs and goblins and hobbits?  Turns out, they basically don't do it much at all.  Some kids dress up, but it is hard to go trick-or-treating as most people would wonder why you were banging on their door, looking for candy.  The fellow behind me in line at the store where I bought costumes for the kids asked me if I was getting ready for Halloween and then asked me when it was.  This was on October 29th.

The options for costumes were very limited.  Aidan was a scary scythe-wielding skeleton and Jasper was The Devil You Know.  Here they are battling in front of our house:

Here they are, apparently reconciled:

We went downtown.  The small shopping district hosts an event where the retail stores give out little chocolate eggs (so Halloween!) to kids if they come by in costume.  Strangely, only about half the retail stores were participating, so about half the time the kids entered some shoe store and come out empty handed.  Here they are downtown:

Here is the scene in downtown Taupo.  There were a fair number of people out and about:

We had met up with a few friends and were trolling the retail stores together.  My favorite part of the event was the behavior of one of the children with us who wouldn't take no for an answer.  There were a few eateries that weren't participating in the egg-distribution scheme, but he insisted on getting something, so once the kids came out each eating a broken piece of bread and once they came out eating little pieces of Turkish Delight which they promptly spat out into the trash.  Good on him.

After the downtown fun, we went to a friend's house.  Our friends are Dutch, not American, but they had told us their neighborhood had had lots of trick-or-treaters last year, so we should wander their neighborhood this year.  This met with mixed success.  At many houses, no one answered the door.  One woman came out dressed as a witch and gave each of the kids lemons.  Several times the kids got handfuls of unwrapped candies.  Here is a photo of a typical effort - at least here they got some candy.

Rene and I manned the house in case anyone came looking for candy while Evelyn and Rene's wife took all the kids around the neighborhood.  Rene insisted we put hats on, so we did.

Afterwards, it was still light out, as it is spring here, so the kids went out and took off their shirts and bounced on a trampoline.  So Halloween!

Here is a photo of one boy's candy haul.  Yes, that's an apple.  Yes, that's a candy cane.  Yes, those are chocolate eggs.

I am hoping that Christmas and New Year's come closer to my expectations of these holidays.  What says Happy New Year's like a barbecue on the beach?

The prettiest farm in the world

We are in New Zealand. We are surrounded by farms. We have learned a lot about all the animals on the farm. I have learned that a "steer" is a castrated bull. I have learned that dairy farming is much more intense (as well as lucrative) than beef farming. I have learned what an awful, gruesome chore "docking" is. (Those who don't know should look that up.) I have learned that most of what is farmed in New Zealand is exported, to places like the USA :)

It seems everybody in New Zealand grew up on a farm, or has a relative who farms. One of our nurses was kind enough to invite us to see her partner's beef and lamb farm. The work scheduled for the day involved moving the cattle from one old, tired paddock to another, more lush and verdant. I was disappointed to hear that we weren't going to be riding horses for this activity. Turns out modern farmers do this from the comfort of their pickup trucks. Occasionally, our friend just drove slowly while yelling at the animals out the truck window. To our city-folk surprise, the cattle seemed to respond pretty nicely to that.

Yes, even the farm has views of Mount Doom

And the volcano we skied

Yes, my boys are behind the wheel of a tractor

Here they are "feeding out." This means that they are supplementing the livestock's diet with something called "silage" which is a little like fermented hay. This tractor with massive claws drops some silage wherever the the boys tell it to. Jasper loved being in charge of this.

There is a beautiful river that borders the farm and we headed down there for a picnic after all that hard work! Our friend reported that he actually owns half the river, due to his riparian right. (This was a new word for me, as well.)

You can tell the boys loved riding in the back of the pickup truck.

They probably mostly loved riding with that super-cool teenage Led Zeppelin fan guitarist between them.

The path down to the riverside. Yes, Jasper is wearing a sweater ten sizes too big. 

Our first glimpses of the river included this little waterfall.

We saw this pair of blue ducks, once common in New Zealand, now endangered.

Here's Aidan, impersonating a Dr. Seuss character.

Picnic!

A friend from home who fished used to say often: Trout live in beautiful places. He said it often because he would cite this as his main reason for fishing. I am starting to see his point.

I couldn't get over the color of the water. It really is that clear and beautiful.

Ready to head back to the main farmhouse.

No visit to the farm is complete without seeing the baby animals, especially the piglets!

My favorite were the lambs, who would suckle on my finger - it's not weird to like that, right?

Taranaki Falls, also Mount Doom

Hello, Tom here.  Here is a very timely blog entry - today!  We spent our Saturday at the Tongariro National Park, the oldest national park in New Zealand and one we can see across the lake from our house.  Yes, this is the park with Mount Doom in it.

Funny fact - people here don't seem anywhere near as Lord of the Rings crazy as I'd thought they'd be.  For instance, most people seem to be about 20% as interested in the movies as I am.  When I refer to Ngauruhoe as Mount Doom, people look at me confused.  I find myself reminding them that Lord of the Rings was filmed on its slopes and then they say, "Oh, yeah!  That's right." Maybe 20% is a generous assessment.

The first photo to share with you is part of a series of glamour shots I am taking of our car.  I am hoping to be asked to direct a Corolla hatchback commercial in the future.  Here is our Corolla with Mount Doom in the background.

We drove about an hour down around to the southern edge of the lake to get to the national park.  We were actually standing on the shoulder of Ruapehu just behind a famous 1929 landmark hotel called The Chateau.  The walk out to the Taranaki Falls begins here.  This is a famous walk and a famous set of falls - nearly all the locals have done this walk several times.

Here is a better postcard photo of the nearby mountain taken from the car park.

After a short way through the brush, we entered a little bit of forest.  Here is Jasper, standing in the last bit of sunlight before the darkness of the wood.

The forested part was short lived.  We came back into the stream-crossed shrub land as can be seen behind a cute Jasper.

Here is a cool little bridge.  It looks bright and sunny, but, as you can see by our winter gear, it was pretty chilly on the mountain.  When we left our car, it was 8 degrees Celsius.  Unfortunately, there is no known way to translate between Celsius and Fahrenheit, but let me assure my American readers, it was pretty cold.

There were occasional benches for resting.  This was a pretty well-developed little trail.

We were walking through a lot of very old lava flows and the rocks were often stained bright colors:

A rare photo courtesy a German-speaking passer-by of all five of us: our immediate family plus Mount Doom:

Here is some awesome lava.  Maybe the lava flows are less old than I thought:

About an hour in, we came to a pretty big stream.  Here is the view upstream:

Looking downstream, you can see that the stream disappears between those two big outcroppings.  Stay tuned to see where the stream goes.

We decided this was a good place to sit and eat lunch.  Here are Evelyn and Jasper picking out a place to sit:

Walking down around the cliff face, we finally saw where the stream had gone - through a gap and over the cliff into a stunning waterfall.  That's Evelyn and Aidan at the base.

Here is the postcard photo of the cascade:

Mother and son and waterfall:

Jasper, as close as he dared get to the pool at the bottom of the cataract:

We continued on a path that ran along the edge of the river and featured very pretty scenery like this view:

Here is one last photo on our way back to the car of Ngauruhoe (or, as it is known everywhere but New Zealand, Mount Doom):

This was a beautiful hike and only took about 2 hours.  It was fun to be in the national park again and to see The Chateau.  My swing band, The Great Lake Big Band, is playing a gig there on November 30, so we peeked in to see what the ballroom looked like.  (I am the drummer, of course.)  I have a feeling we'll be doing this hike again - maybe with some American visitors!