Author: ryan

The town of Waitomo is famous for having hundreds of caves, but even more famous for the glowworms that inhabit many of those caves. While you can see glowworms above ground in a number of places in New Zealand, there’s something very special about being in a cave illuminated solely by the light of thousands of tiny insects.

There are a few companies offering glowworm tours, and I scheduled trips with both Spellbound Tours and with the very popular Waitomo Glowworm Tours, the company that originated these trips more than 100 years ago. While Waitomo Tours had the better cave, Spellbound had the better glowworm experience. Spellbound’s cave is relatively short, but we went in with just a dozen people, walked a bit to get our eyes adjusted to the dark (photo below), then took a magical, no-photographs-allowed boat trip up and down an underground river with tens of thousands of glowworms lighting the place up and reflecting in the water. It was a scene straight out of the movie Avatar, and we got a good long while to enjoy it. Following that trip Spellbound took us to another cave that had many fewer glowworms, but a ton of stalactites and stalagmites to enjoy.

For the afternoon I booked one of the last trips of the day with Waitomo Glowworm Tours on their main cave tour, hoping that all of the tour buses would be gone, and that worked out well since it ended up being a less-crowded experience than most groups get. The cave was bigger and the cave formations were more impressive, but it felt more commercial and busy than the morning trip, and while it was still really, really neat, it didn’t have quite the same magic as the morning tour. Finally the day of many glowworms ended after sunset with a trip to the glowworm grotto next to my cabin, and I got to finish the day with a fern-covered cliff and its many hundreds of glowing bugs all to myself. Unfortunately photography today was a bit tricky since it’s hard to manually focus on a fly larvae in the darkness, but the two photos below hopefully give some sense of what it was like.

Tomorrow I’ve got a trip to one more glowworm cave, then it’s off to the impressive volcano of Egmont National Park. There’s a massive storm blowing up from the south, so odds are that the next few days may be the first bit of the trip to get rained out, but we’ll see if the weather gods decide to intervene and provide dry trails.

The first ten hours of the day yesterday were fun but less exciting than the evening. First, I woke up early and headed out of Auckland as fast as the two hamsters that power the Suzuki’s engine would take me. After a few errands I hiked up to a lookout in the Hakarimata Scenic Reserve that claims to have 1500 stairs, but I’m pretty sure they counted both up and down. Finally, to kill a couple of hours I visited the Hamilton Gardens and was surprised by how nice it is; they’ve created themed gardens such as “English Garden”, “Italian Renaissance Garden”, “Egyptian Garden”, etc that were all very different and fun to walk around. And then it was time to go to Hobbiton…

Hobbiton is literally the most touristy thing you can do in New Zealand. Supposedly 300,000 people each year take a tour through the place, but I gotta say, it’s incredibly well done. The artists who created this permanent film set absolutely went all out, and every little detail is like being inside of an art installation. The wooden frames of the Hobbit hole doors are pegged together as if built before modern tools, the firewood is cut in Hobbit-sized pieces, there are intricate carvings on most of the wooden beams, the thresholds under the doors are worn as if from years of use, and in one of the Hobbit holes that you can walk through they’ve even marked up one of the beams with the heights of the Hobbit children as they grew each year, just like we did when we were kids. There literally must have been tens of thousands of hours that went into creating this place, and you can’t help but be impressed by how they obsessed over the details, and how well they pulled off creating a living, breathing Hobbit village on a working sheep farm.

Four times a week they offer an evening banquet tour with a “feast fit for a Hobbit”, and after three weeks of often forgetting about lunch or dinner, I didn’t realize how much food I was prepared to pack away. At dinnertime they pulled back the curtains at the Green Dragon’s dining room to unveil tables completely covered in beef stew, roast chicken, legs of lamb, salmon, sausages, roasted vegetables, etc, and by my fourth helping an old lady at the table looked at me, laughed heartily, and said “that’s how it should be done”. Following dinner and an equally impressive dessert spread they handed everyone a lantern, and we set off in the dark back through Hobbiton with the Milky Way blazing overhead and Hobbit holes lit as if evening fires were burning inside. Again, it was as touristy a thing as you can possibly do in New Zealand, and I loved every minute of it.

Today started with the sounds of fur seals at sunrise and, for the first time in three weeks, ended with the sounds of cars in rush hour traffic.

As planned, I got up before dawn this morning and headed out to Kaikoura’s seal colony. Just as I’d hoped, no one else was there and the seals hadn’t yet retreated from the walking paths, so it was a landscape of pinnipeds around every corner as the sun peeked above the horizon. To my surprise, with the exception of one jogger no one else showed up for the entire time that I was there, so it was just a few hundred sleepy, ornery fur seals with a bald guy talking to them, while waves were crashing, the soft light was brightening, and the tide was retreating.

Since I had a plane to catch, and since Christchurch was still two and a half hours south, I had to leave sooner than I would have liked, but it was a pleasant drive along the coast and through pastures and farmland back to town. It was a bit of a shock to the system to see traffic lights again in Christchurch, but nothing compared to what awaited in Auckland. The flight was uneventful, I got to Auckland and picked up my car (a Suzuki… we have a mixed history, so we’ll see how the next three weeks go…), and then departed for my hotel. Google maps showed everything red, the highway was three lanes of often impatient drivers, and it was a rude reminder that the past three weeks have been spent far away from the masses.

Tomorrow I’ll almost certainly be leaving early to escape from the city, and the destination is one that I’m (embarrassingly) super-excited about: dinner is at the Green Dragon Inn, and I’m definitely going to take a selfie at Bilbo’s House.

New Zealand apparently has daylight savings time. I was utterly baffled this morning at how the sun had been coming up at 8am on the west coast but came up at 7am here, and why I was so wide awake at 6am. It wasn’t until much later in the day when I noticed sunset was at 6pm, while it had definitely been around 7pm yesterday, that I realized a) I was more intelligent when I was younger and b) America isn’t the only country to unnecessarily mess about with everyone’s sleep schedule.

As a result of the time change the 7:15am checkin for the whale watch trip didn’t feel early at all. We were on the water by 8am, but since we were the first boat of the day we had to find the whales. The crew would stop the boat, shut off the engines, drop a hydrophone, listen for whales, pull up the hydrophone, and then move on after announcing they didn’t hear any whales, but that was fine by me – I cared less about the whales and was more excited just to be on the water. There were a ton of fur seals, dolphins, and albatross out and about, and while it would have been nice to see a sperm whale, you can’t go wrong being on the ocean in perfect conditions.

After one last listen for whales we started heading back to harbor, dolphins surfing on the bow wave, when a call came in that there was a humpback near shore. Since they refund 80% of the trip cost for any trip that doesn’t find whales the crew was motivated to find the humpback, and we did eventually stumble on him, but only had a couple of minutes with the whale before we had to get back to pick up the next group. Despite having seen a whale, the company apparently felt that this wasn’t a good enough sighting, and still refunded the bulk of the trip price for everyone – if ever you’re in Kaikoura, go whale watching with Whale Watch Kaikoura, they gave us a great day on the water and then honored their “whale guarantee” because the whale experience we had didn’t meet their expectations.

Following the whale watch and a shockingly inexpensive seafood lunch from the Kaikoura Seafood BBQ Kiosk, the rest of the day was spent hiking along the beach with the grumpy yet highly entertaining fur seals. There are several hundred of them all along the shore here, some playing in the water, most of them sleeping, many of them arguing, but all of them a delight to see. After a few hours with the seals I decided to call it a day early, and am editing photos and writing this entry before sunset (anyone who has traveled with me before knows how rare it is for me to not be doing something whenever it’s light out). The plan for tomorrow is to get up early, make one last visit to the seals at sunrise, and then sadly I’ll be driving down to Christchurch to fly away from the South Island, but I’m excited to start the next part of the adventure on the North Island.

I ran into the German couple again while I was returning my key this morning; they were apparently staying at the same lodging. At this point it’s starting to feel like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the lady is driving across the country and keeps seeing the same hitchhiker.

After leaving Abel Tasman I stopped at a cafe that had a “world famous sausage rolls” sign out front. I refrained from rushing in and yelling “You did it, congratulations!”, but I did order one, and I gotta say, while I don’t have a lot of sausage roll experience, it was the best one I’ve had.

After saying goodbye to the Germans (again), followed by the famous sausage, it was mostly a driving day, first through the mountains, then through tiny towns and inlets along the northern part of the South Island. At one point the highway turned inland, but an inconspicuous sign reading “scenic route” pointed towards the coast, and luckily I’m not prone to motion sickness because the coastal route was extremely twisty, but also extremely scenic. I made an additional detour to the small harbor town of Picton where ferries depart for the North Island, and eventually made my way south to the town of Kaikoura, visiting another fur seal colony along the way.

Kaikoura is a bit like Monterey (California), with cold, deep waters offshore that attract a ton of marine life. There’s a colony of several hundred fur seals just outside of town, whale watch tours depart daily to see sperm whales, huge pods of dolphins can be seen frolicking along the coast, albatross and petrels glide across the waves farther offshore, and seagulls steal anything left unattended. I booked a last-minute whale watching trip that departs first thing tomorrow, mainly just as an excuse to get out on the water and see the birds and dolphins, although I’m also excited to see a sperm whale since I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.

“Hi, my name is Rodney but everyone calls me Rowdy, and I’ll be your skipper today. Go ahead and put your life jackets on, even though we haven’t had a trip that’s needed them since last week.”

And thus began another day in New Zealand.

After a scenic thirty minute boat ride, Rowdy dropped us at Bark Bay, and it was on to the trail. I had expected the Abel Tasman Track would be right along the coast, but it mostly traversed forest, and there weren’t really views of the ocean or beaches for probably 95% of the route, but it was a good walk nonetheless. The weka (ball birds) are utterly fearless here, and I was finding myself eye to eye with them on a few occasions while climbing embankments. One even came over to check me out while I was sitting at an overlook, pecking at my sock before taking a good whack with his beak at my ankle, and while he drew blood I’m confident that I won the fight.

The track wound through forests, across rivers, over estuaries, and past a few beaches, and was a relaxing way to spend the day. I made it back to town about eight hours after starting out, with the iPhone claiming that the total distance covered for the day was about 18 miles.

An odd side note: while at the Wilderness Lodge a few days ago, the only people who joined all of the guided walks were a German couple who spoke limited English. A day after departing from the lodge I was hiking to an overlook at the Franz Josef Glacier, saw the Germans hiking in the opposite direction, and joked with them that they must be following me. Today, in the midst of the forest, the same German couple appeared again; clearly we must have the same travel agent.

Tomorrow I’m on the move again, and sadly there are only a few more days remaining on the South Island before flying up to Auckland to start a circuit on the North Island.

It rained all night and through the morning, but when you’re starting your day at Cape Foulwind you sort of want the weather to live up to the name.

First thing today I made a short drive to Tauranga Bay to visit a small fur seal colony. In the midst of a steady rain, the two dozen or so fur seals reminded me of the South Georgia trip; they are playful, loud, and grumpy, but definitely a joy to watch. I didn’t linger since I’m not as waterproof as the seals, and after bidding the pinnipeds adieu I sloshed back into the car to begin the four hour drive to Abel Tasman National Park. I’d been hoping to make some stops along the way, but the rain never really let up so it was a scenic but uneventful drive to the north coast. It finally stopped raining after I arrived, so after checking in to my lodging I roamed around for a bit out on the sand flats as the tide was coming in, apparently annoying a few of the local shorebirds in the process.

New Zealand has ten tramping tracks that have been dubbed Great Walks by the Department of Conservation, and one of them is the Abel Tasman Coast Walk. This trail is actually New Zealand’s most popular hiking track, and while I don’t have time to traverse the full 37 miles, the plan for tomorrow is to have a water taxi drop me at Bark Bay and then enjoy a leisurely stroll back through the first fourteen-ish miles of the walk, ending at the trailhead near my lodging. The weather forecast calls for sun, the tides look like they’ll cooperate so that I can cross the estuary without having to make a long detour, the number of visitors has dropped since it’s late in the season, and I’m looking forward to yet another small adventure in this excellent country.

While reading about the trails around Franz Josef yesterday, I stumbled on a picture of a staircase cantilevered off the side of a cliff. Reading more about the trail, a woman afraid of heights mentioned a bridge that was so long and shaky that she didn’t think she could cross it. Further reading indicated that the trail was the Roberts Point Trail, and it has four swing bridges, a cantilevered stairway, and ends with the best view you can get (without a helicopter ride) of the Franz Josef glacier. Obviously this was a trail that I wanted to attempt.

There was no rain in the forecast this morning, so I took off before sunrise on the five hour trek. This trail was my first attempt on one of New Zealand’s “advanced” tracks, but for the first two-thirds of the trail I was thinking I may have given them too much credit. There were some small streams to cross, a few tiny stretches that I had to Spiderman up, and it was clearly a trail that would be an ankle-breaker in wet or wintry weather, but beyond that it didn’t seem that difficult. The last third, however, totally earned the advanced rating, with scrambling up slick rock and an uphill slog to the glacier lookout followed by a knee-breaking descent. Well played, New Zealand Department of Conservation.

The bridges on this trail were my favorite thus far. New Zealand seems to like “swing” bridges on its trails, which are normally suspension bridges, but on today’s trail it was a mix of suspension bridges and wire bridges. The best of the four bridges was the 100+ meter long Roberts Point Swing Bridge. This bridge is by far the longest I’ve encountered in New Zealand, and was moving a couple of feet in any direction as I crossed. I’m not an adrenaline junkie by any means, but it was exhilarating to be high in the air, swaying in different directions, with a massive glacier-carved valley to one side and a river below. The other bridges were a lot of fun as well – one had a “max load: 1 person” sign on it and moved around like it was on rollers, while another went over a waterfall in a gorge that was several hundred feet deep – but the Roberts Point Bridge was a special beast.

The cantilever section of the trail was fun as well. The stairs weren’t particularly high up, probably less than 100 feet above the ground, but they were anchored with iron rods drilled into the rock and made for a unique descent down the cliff face. The view at the trail’s end was somewhat anticlimactic after the tough hike up, but I sort of expected it to be; the glacier has receded so far that you still get an impressive view of the face, but can only imagine how incredible it must have been even ten years ago when it filled more of the valley floor.

I returned from the hike sore but on an endorphin high, grabbed a quick lunch, then drove the three hours north to Cape Foulwind, stopping at the striated limestone cliffs of Pancake Rocks along the way. Tomorrow I’m off again to Abel Tasman National Park for a couple of days of hiking along the north coast, but hoping to make a few stops en route if the weather isn’t bad.

As mentioned in an earlier journal entry, the Wilderness Lodge at Lake Moeraki was one of my splurges for this trip, but when I was planning the journey it sounded so unique that I figured it was worth the price of admission. It turned out to be better than I’d hoped, with the owners Anne Saunders & Dr Gerry McSweeney having led a campaign in the 1980s to protect the rainforest and helping to establish the 2.7 million hectare Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Area. They opened the lodge in 1989, and their enthusiasm for the rainforest and conservation is unmatched. Gerry led an hour-long trek through the forest on my first night, and every detail he pointed out gave me a new appreciation for the ferns, trees and mosses around us. I could literally listen to him talk about lichens for hours, and I’m not really a plant enthusiast.

Last night’s outing with Gerry was a trek after dinner to see glow worms, which have set up shop in the embankment along the road – apparently all glow worms need is an overhang and moisture, and they’ll then happily light up the night with their sticky silk lines. As per usual Gerry made the scene come alive, and at one point five of us were huddled up against the embankment in the darkness getting a close-up look at the tiny fly larvae fishing for their dinners.

This morning, after two last quick hikes through the rainforest, I went to bid the McSweeney’s goodbye, and Gerry surprised me with an inscribed copy of a book detailing some of his conservation work, and we ended up chatting for another hour. I’ve been lucky in my life to have met some people that have made unique and valuable contributions during their time on this blue marble, and Gerry and Anne definitely fall into that category.

After saying farewell to the Wilderness Lodge, the west coast’s only road took me north to Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, both of which have receded extensively in the past decades and are now only barely visible from lower elevations. I did a few hikes to visit overlooks of the icy giants, and it was rather surreal to be hiking in rainforest with glaciers on the horizon. The bell birds, fantails, tuis and tomtits were particularly active on the trails, which made for a fun and melodious hiking and photography session.

Tomorrow’s plan is going to be very weather-dependent, but there’s a hike here in Franz Josef that has my interest piqued. If the forecast continues to be rain-free then this will be my first “advanced” trek in New Zealand, but the route looks unlike anything I’ve ever done before so I’m thinking it’s worth putting my knees at risk for the sake of a new adventure.

I spent the day roaming around a 200 million year old rainforest and then kayaked all afternoon before feeding some longfin eels, because somehow that’s my life at the moment.

The rainforest continues to fascinate. I’ve seen rainforest elsewhere, but it always seemed like a normal forest that was much lusher and more overgrown. Here, it’s primordial. Twenty foot tall tree ferns tower over you, while lichens that are a foot across hang from the massive limbs of 1000 year old trees. Ferns and orchids grow on every exposed surface of every trunk and branch. I was humming the Jurassic Park theme while hiking today, and it seemed as if a herd of small dinosaurs might be around the next corner everywhere I went.

After a morning spent hiking in the forest, I hopped into one of the lodge’s kayaks for the afternoon. A short paddle up the river to the lake put me in view of the waterfowl, and in a country with few natural predators they all apparently decided that I was the scariest thing on the planet and fled whenever I got within fifty meters. It was nonetheless a relaxing way to spend two hours, silently gliding through the water with rainforest all around.

Tomorrow it’s north to the town of Franz Josef for a stop to see some of glaciers that flow west over the mountains, then it will take another day to get up to the next pass back east over the mountains and on towards Abel Tasman National Park on the South Island’s north coast.

The West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island is remote. The informational signs at pullouts keep referencing how much of the plant life here is unchanged since it evolved 200 million years ago when all of the continents were mashed together into a mass we call Godwanaland today, and as you wander around under dense rainforest filled with fifteen foot tall tree ferns and thousand year old moss-covered trees it’s easy to imagine dinosaurs roaming the forest. Meanwhile the Tasman Sea stretches off endlessly to the west, while the Southern Alps rise vertically in the east, and signs of civilization are few and far between. So far, I’m liking it.

The lodging for the night was one of my two splurges on the South Island. It’s located in a wilderness reserve, and I got in a few hikes tonight, including one with the botanist owner who was very excited to share all manner of details about the local plants, ranging from mosses without roots, to a 2000 year old tree, to the sulfur smell of the Easter orchid. Tomorrow I’ll do a few more hikes and some kayaking, and then Gerry is leading a nighttime expedition to see the local glow worms.

This lodge is all-inclusive, including a fancy dinner that is served in a communal dining room, so tonight, after two weeks incommunicado, I awkwardly sat down to eat with seven other people, four of whom turned out to be from Los Angeles. Thankfully I still seem to be able to converse with the humans in a semi-normal manner, but with four more weeks remaining until Audrey joins the trip there is a high likelihood that I may be fully feral by the time she arrives.

Arrowtown is apparently one of, if not the best spots in New Zealand for fall colors, and I randomly happened to end up here under blue skies as the show was starting. The karma gods clearly have me mixed up with someone else, but I’ll take it.

Today was another day of hiking, first on the unfortunately-named-but-very-scenic Sawpit Gulley Walk, and later on a two hour loop around Lake Hayes. New Zealand always seems to denote trail distances in hours rather than kilometers, which makes sense when a handful of trails are flat and the rest are vertical death marches, and thus a 5 km flat trail might take 1 – 1.5 hours, while a 5 km uphill climb of doom is more likely 2 – 3 hours. They also rate their trails as “easy”, “intermediate” or “advanced”, which so far as I have discovered means the following:

• Easy – A walking trail that is dead-simple to navigate and that will be designed and maintained to standards that would meet or exceed those expected of the best US Interstate Highway. The trail might be long and might have a few minimally challenging sections, but you probably won’t notice because the scenery will be so great.
• Intermediate – A trail that is relatively easy to follow as long as you pay attention to where you’re going. There will be several long and steep sections that will cause you to get lightheaded and lose a few pounds in water weight. While hiking, expect to be passed along the trail by at least a half dozen New Zealanders out for a leisurely morning jog.
• Advanced – A trail that may not be anything more than a goat trail, where navigation is done by following rock cairns and the blood and tears of other hikers. Expect to be using your hands for balance and support on steep sections. Advanced trails should not be attempted by anyone without survival training and hoofs. The Department of Conservation will have likely built a hut for backpackers along this trail, and it will inevitably be staffed by a lovely seventy-five year old New Zealand man who hikes the trail twice a week with 100 pounds of supplies on his back.

Thus far all of the trails I’ve done have fallen into the “easy” and “intermediate” categories (no, the vertical 2,000 stair Sealy Tarn trail didn’t make the “advanced” cut), but I’ve stared into the abyss of a few of the advanced trails and decided that I value my knees too much to sacrifice them for a slightly better view of the landscape.

The weather this morning in Milford Sound, one of the world’s rainiest places, was picture perfect. Blue sky, barely a cloud anywhere to be seen. I’m not sure what awesome things I did in a past life, but karma is obviously paying off big time. After checking out of the lodge I went down to the harbor one last time to enjoy the sun on Mitre Peak; I don’t know if I’ll ever be back here, but if not I want that memory to stick around for as long as possible.

From there I started up the Milford Road towards Te Anau, with plans to do some hiking. A few of the trails along the way were rumored to turn to utter muck after rains, so I ended up skipping them and choosing the road’s most popular trail, which follows a section of the Routeburn Track up to Keys Summit. Amusingly the sign at the trailhead warned that “snow can occur anytime on this trail, even at Christmas“; Bing Crosby probably had one less hit song in the southern hemisphere.

The full Routeburn Track is a multiday trail through the mountains, but the section to Keys Summit is a three hour round trip through lush rainforest and up to a summit with 360 degree views of the mountains. I arrived early enough that there was barely anyone else on the trail, got to the top with views of snow-covered peaks all around, and may or may not have done a Sound of Music twirl in celebration.

After returning from the trail it was a scenic drive back to Te Anau, which at two hours driving distance is the nearest town to Milford that has any services. While there was a restaurant at the Milford Lodge, I skipped it since the food was pricey and not anything I was excited about, so meals for the past three days have been mainly trail mix and a falafel sandwich during the scuba trip. Arriving back in town, I wanted something that was neither nut nor falafel, and thus ended up ordering a steak sandwich at a busy cafe. The six inch tall sandwich that arrived had an actual steak in it, wedged between two pieces of homemade ciabatta bread, with a fried egg thrown on for good measure, and, like a few other meals on this trip, it is very important that my doctor does not hear about it before my next cholesterol test.

Long ago the plan for tonight was to stay in Wanaka, but this weekend it seems like half of New Zealand is descending on that town for the Warbirds Over Wanaka airshow, with lodging having been booked months in advance, so instead of Wanaka I’m 55 kilometers south in the old mining town of Arrowtown. It’s unexpectedly pretty here, with trees everywhere changing color for fall, so it might have actually been a fortunate accident that Kiwis are apparently airshow fanatics.

After yesterday’s scuba adventures, today was quite tame in comparison. It snowed overnight at the higher elevations, so I woke up surrounded by newly-decorated peaks. The clouds cleared throughout the day, so today’s adventures mostly revolved around walks along the water to enjoy the changing light, as well as conversations with the local weka, a species that my mom would describe as a “ball bird”; they are birds about the size of chickens that look a bit like they were assembled in Jim Henson’s creature shop, with round bodies, big feet, and stubby tails, but they made for good morning companions. With no native land mammals (aside from a couple of bat species) New Zealand has evolved some odd and fearless birdlife, and it’s been a pleasure getting to know them as they come to visit while I’ve been out hiking.

One random note about Milford: one of the informational signs along the harbor was discussing the Maori creation myths about this place. In their telling, the fjord was created by a powerful god, but upon seeing it the goddess of death feared that it was so glorious that people who came here would never want to leave, and so filled it with biting sandflies to encourage people not to stay too long. Luckily the sandflies haven’t been too bad while I’ve been here, but good thinking on the goddess’s part for planning in advance to prevent overcrowding.

The skies are (shockingly) mostly clear at the moment, with the forecast calling for more of the same tomorrow, so with any luck there should be some amazing views and a bit of hiking in the high country along the Milford Road tomorrow as I retrace my path north to Arrowtown.

After thunderous wind and rain throughout the night, and despite a forecast that called for more of the same, the sun came out this morning in Milford Sound. And this place is beautiful.

The adventure for the day was scuba diving, which meant my first time in a dry suit since the water is frigid. The main diving attraction here is that due to the meters-thick layer of fresh water on the surface, as well as the steep fjord walls, the water is much darker than normal, so you get a lot of deep water species unusually close to the surface, including thousand year old black coral. But given the cold temperatures they strongly recommended a dry suit, and that was a new experience for me. I did the requisite online training a few days ago, but knew as we got in the water to practice a few key skills before our first dive that it wouldn’t be pretty. And I was right.

Unlike normal scuba, where you’re controlling your buoyancy with a BCD, they had us controlling our buoyancy by adding or removing air from the suit and mostly ignoring the BCD. That had the advantage that you’re only worrying about one set of buttons instead of two, but the disadvantage that all of your air goes to the highest point in the suit, so it was ass over teakettle if you got slightly upside down since air rushed to your feet, and you couldn’t do anything since your dump valve is at your shoulder. As the divemaster (correctly) warned would happen to just about everyone at least once, I suffered the ignominy of getting pulled to the surface towards the end of the first dive – I think I could have kicked out of it, but he kept pointing at my shoulder valve and by the time I had gotten upright to start dumping air I was a missile launching from the depths. A common refrain among the many experienced divers who were doing a dry suit dive for the first time today was that this first dive was “neat, but also infuriating”.

As we nursed our wounded pride they told us the second dive was always easier, and that turned out to be true. Whereas the first dive was mostly spent trying to figure out the equipment and how NOT to turn into an underwater runaway train, on the second dive there was a bit more familiarity with what to do and what not to do, so for me it was about 80% spent enjoying the scenery and 20% spent trying to avoid doing something stupid. The black coral (which is actually white) looks like a tree from another planet, and we also saw a large conger eel, a giant (by seahorse standards) seahorse, a small shark, and a bunch of different fish, nudibranchs, and other random marine life. The dive environment was also unique – the top 10-15 feet is freshwater from all of the rain pouring off of the cliffs, which was murky, filled with bits of leaves, and much colder than the seawater layer below. Descending, you would be totally disoriented with zero visibility and reduced buoyancy in the freshwater, then you would hit the saltwater and suddenly you could see again and manage your buoyancy normally.

Aside from the diving, the New Zealand dive crew added some local color to the trip. Cody, one of the two guides, was looking forward to the tourist season ending in a few days and getting ready for the The Great Annual Nude Tunnel Run, which is a yearly event held at the end of the season that traverses the Homer Tunnel, a 1.2 km long tunnel hacked out of solid granite 900 meters above the Sound. As one description of the event clarifies, “it’s not entirely naked because you are allowed to wear running shoes and a headlamp”, while another notes that “it’s at 10:30 at night because, well, trucks and sandflies”. In a similar vein, the skipper Carl asked if we wanted to see a shark shortly after pulling the boat out of the water. With some confusion we followed him down to the dock, where apparently a two meter long sevengill shark sometimes hangs out. He began splashing his hands in the water, but asked us to let him know when the shark was coming so he could get out of the way (side note: the shark was apparently elsewhere today). “I thought you said nothing in New Zealand could hurt you” someone said. Carl looked up, pointed at the land, and said “That’s New Zealand. It’s completely safe.” He then pointed at the ocean and smiled. “There’s stuff in there, though, that will take your leg right off”.