Science Can Be Fun!

New Zealand. Wow. The past 3 days have been incredibly busy and they have left me exhausted. Of course, that also could include factors like jetlag and waking up at 3:00 am this morning to catch the flight I’m on right now, but I’ll just pretend those don’t exist. So here I am following dawn around the globe and resetting my computer’s clock for a 3rd time in twice as many days. Caffeine is the beverage of choice, and I’m just going to hope that the Melbourne airport will have free wifi for at least 15 minutes so I can copy paste this post.

The trip was a success, which sometimes I’m still surprised by given how much of a headache planning it was. I landed in Christchurch 4 days ago and was met by a technician from the GNS. That stands for something having to do with geology, however basically her job is doing field work for scientists who are too busy, lazy, or scared of the bush to do their own. For some reason she reminded me a lot of my Russian hostess, and multiple times I almost called her Liza. Our first order of operation was to rent a car, which for me meant a few calls back to the states to remove the freeze on my bank account because I had forgotten to tell them I was traveling. That was a great way to start, but things got sorted out and we got on the road.

If you want to road trip, New Zealand would be the place to do it, especially the South Island. It’s small enough to be accessible in 1 drive, and is long and narrow which lets you be more efficient with your mileage. The spectrum of landscape within this small area however, is fantastic. The warm wet air creates incredibly lush and dense rainforests on the West Coast then it gets pushed up the Southern Alps, and the eastern side of the mountain is very dry without much tall vegetation. I think I actually prefer the eastern side. The browns are beautiful, and you can see for miles and miles and miles, and everyone can see you. To add to that, you are on a plain that is ringed by hills as tall as the White Mountains. I’ve never been there, but I imagine it would be like the Prairie next to the Rocky Mountains, except with fewer people and houses. There are also sheep everywhere. Sometimes they will be in the middle of the road. Cows too. We spent some time sticking our heads out of the car and yelling at the cows to get out of the way.

We stopped that night in Twizel, which is a small town created for construction workers on the local canal. Another Kiwi involved with this project was renting a house there, and we spent the night there and plotted our assault. Leaving the next morning we had another long drive to get to the mountain pass where we were going to sample. It was raining that day, so it was good that we were able to drive from site to site. We stopped to sample every 5 km or so from the coast to the bottom of the steep trail that we would climb the next day. We had 4 species of trees that we were looking for and once we had gone about as far as we wanted to, we would find a pull off that had some of the plants we were looking for nearby. We’d hop out, clip off a small branch with a few leaves on it, stick the stem in a test tube and the leaves in a paper bag and label them. I also took 2 samples of soil at each place, and where available I’d get some stream water in a small vial. It takes about half an hour per site.

We stayed the night is a small, really ugly triangular cabin that was cheap, but certainly not easy on the eyes. I was surprised that night that I recognized some of the stars. I was expecting them all to be different, and certainly a lot of them were, but there was Orion with his belt, extremely bright in the dark mountain night. I wasn’t out very late though, so it was still light enough that I couldn’t see many more than the big, obvious stars. Maine still remains my favorite place for star gazing and satellite tracking.

We were up the next morning with the sun to drive 20 minutes to the head of the trail we were going to take. Our objective for the day was to climb the hill (aka mountain in my New England dialect of English) to ‘bush line’, sampling every 100 m or so in elevation. That equated to about 8 stops. While I do have a solid amount of experience ‘tramping’ on ‘tracks’ in the ‘bush’, one experience was new to me, which was fording a river above your knees. It’s not difficult, it just means you get wet and your socks squish for the rest of the day. The rivers here flood so often that apparently they just don’t bother to build footbridges, even on heavily trafficked tracks. The ‘tramp’ was beautiful, especially once we got above ‘bush line.’ My companion gets super excited about rock formations, so we spent a few minutes sitting on the ground and she explained every salient feature on the surrounding hills. In fact, the whole trip was really a 4 day lecture on glacial formations.

The ‘track’ was pretty steep, which means my legs still seize up when I sit too long, however it was completely worth it. How come I didn’t get into Geology sooner? Mountains are a whole lot more interesting than Schlink tubes. We hiked back down in time to turn in early so that we could get another early start for another long drive through Twizel to Christchurch. I got back into Christchurch around 6:00 yesterday, however was so tired that I just found a hotel room (actually I had a whole 5 bed, 4 room suite to myself because it was the only one left and I must have looked really pathetic so they let me have it for the price of a studio) and fell asleep after repacking my bags. It is a shame that I flew in and out of Christchurch and still never actually managed to see the city, but as my Dean would say, it gives me a reason to go back.

Cheers!!