Stewart Island

Here we are! Sitting in front of a computer in a rather large hostel on Stewart Island - in the township of Oban. We are in love with the island already. Reason #1 - NO PASTURES! NZ may have mountains, glaciers, hot springs, and a beautiful environment, but they also have a lot of cattle and sheep. These critters are a nice part about NZ because they are such a huge part of the Kiwi identity and culture - but cattle and sheep have also wreaked havoc on native forests (in other words, there is not much native forest left here). Stewart Island, on the other hand, only had 2 small farms on it and those have since been bought by the Dept. of Conservation and/or a NGO and these bits of land are being converted back to native forest. So what do you see when arriving on the ferry? TREES! Beautiful forests and TREES! Not cattle and lambs, or even vineyards for that matter. A real treat for these little biologists. We like these native forests so much, we thought we would go for a hike through them. Tomorrow we take off on one of New Zealand's "Great Walks," on the Raikura Track. This is a 3-day tramp through the native forest, mountains, and along some beaches as well. We actually don't really know what else to expect except mud and rain! Yipee!

On a different note - we just spent the last few days in the Catlins - the remote southeast corner of NZ. Beautiful waterfalls, coastline and PETRIFIED FORESTS in the intertidal zone. These forests were SO COOL. Why? Because they date back to Gondwanaland - proof that NZ was once part of this ancient land mass. We were blown away by this little bit of rocky intertidal zone. We even found a large rock covered in fossils of ancient ferns and other plants. But the trees were so neat. They were petrified once they fell over, so you would look and see huge logs of "rock" along the shore. Looking further - we saw these big rocky bumps everywhere. Cloer inspection revealed that these bumps were actually tree stumps - and we could even see the tree's growth rings in some of the petrified wood! At the end of the day, we were walking back to the van and got to watch a funny yellow-eyed penguin hop and hop up the rocks to the nest on the cliffs. A real treat.