10 days and counting. I am getting so excited. Been thinking a lot about how this trip is going to be so different from last year's. Am going from the land of G'day mate and ta to Ciao and arrivederci. From being in countries younger than America and colonized by the British, to a land that has been conquered over centuries by Greeks, Turks, Arabs, etc. and the people speak a melodic romance language. From seeing kangaroos, wallabies, emus, cassawarys, crocodiles, Tasmanian devils and koalas to seeing donkeys and chickens. Traveling from a country that is approximately the same size as North America to one closer to Texas in size . Going from a land settled by deported British "criminals" to the home of the Mafia. I can not wait to live the differences. SO.... until ... read more

Well all, the trip is over. The last day in Wellington was amazing. We first went to a museum called Te Papa. Like all the museums in AUS and NZ, there is no entrance fee. Only bad thing about the whole time there was that there were about 500 screaming, running children enjoying it too. It was the middle of the Easter break so everyone decided to take the kiddies for a day out. The six floor museum had everything from geological rooms with an interactive earthquake house to a platform one jumped on to see how much the plate movement resembled an earthquake all in one exhibit. Except for the very loud noise it made when the platform kept hitting the floor, it was pretty amazing. In the same room were all kinds of fossils ... read more

Ran out of room before I had a chance to tell you about Punakaiki or the Pancake Rocks. The rocks were formed millions of years ago when alternating layers of limestone and mud were laid down by nature. Erosion caused the mud to wear away leaving stacks of rocks that look a lot like giant pancake stacks. They way they eroded, not all the mud between layers eroded, so there are slight even gaps between the layers. There must have been close to a hundred of these stacks around. There was even an entire area that looked like a small village. There were some amazing examples of water erosion in the rocks at the bottom of the stacks. On super windy days there are blowholes, but although we thought it was really windy, the Kiwis visiting ... read more

Ended up in Franz Joseph, this small Alpine-type town near the Franz Joseph Glacier. Today we went on a guided walk to the base of the Glacier. At least some of us went all the way to the base. I went about two-thirds of the way from the car park to the Glacier before the winds got too cold and made me start to cough. Our guide took us to the middle of what would be a raging river during the spring thaw but now was a dry boulder strewn creek bed. There he proceeded to draw a map of the area in the creek bed, showing how the NZ Southern Alps were formed by the Australian tectonic plate diving under the Pacific plate. He said the mountains were still growing at about an inch a ... read more

End of the last day here, and I will finally be caught up, so if you all look at the date, you can figure out where I am. This morning we went to Waimunga Volcanic Valley. Everywhere around Rotorua there are volcanic vents spewing out sulfer fumes and boiling ponds. Even the golf course has a couple of real hot hazards. Anyway, tourism started there in the mid-1880's because of the steam vents and geysers. On June 1886, Tarawera blew up in the early hours of the morning and at 2 am, a column of black ash suddenly erupted from the highest dome, Ruawahia. The eruption kept extending to the southwest. The eruption rift extended in a 16 kilometer line and was in violent upheaval. The rising magma hit the gdo-thermal pools and the resulting ejection ... read more