Ok so I lied a little bit when I said I would update everyone. But in my defense there was never any internet on the South Island unless I wanted to pay for it and the prices weren't cheap. And I really am sorry I haven’t written in over a month! I guess I’m a really bad blogger. I have been super super busy since leaving for the South Island, it seems like we are out doing activities and finishing assignments nonstop! This experience is really indescribable. But I will try and give you some details anyway…
 |
| First view of the mountains and the sea together! |
We left for the South Island on September 25th and spent a couple of days traveling. It took about eight hours of driving and stopping at pretty rest areas just to get to Wellington which is where we took the ferry from to get to the South Island. If you’ve ever been on the ferry from Long Island to Connecticut you know how big a car ferry is. Well this ferry was like the Long Island Ferry on steroids. The inside looked like a hotel. There was a café, a bar, a kids room, a full movie theater, and reclining chairs. The view traveling from the North Island to the South Island was absolutely fantastic I still cannot believe how blue the water is here. On the ferry ride I got my first glimpse of an albatross which has the largest wingspan in the world and that was a pretty good introduction to our four days in Kaikoura.
 |
| Kaikoura sunset |
Let me just start this off by saying that our South Island unit was based around Ecotourism. So throughout this whole experience we had to be both students and tourists in order to gain information for the paper we had to write about whether or not Ecotourism is really sustainable. The town of Kaikoura is a beautiful town with its economy based around tourism. This is because Kaikoura’s waters are a merging of cold salty nutrient rich water from the South and warm water from the North; this merging creates a process called upwelling where the nutrient rich water is able to come to the surface. This upwelling effect creates an abundance of marine life because lots of nutrients means lots of plankton, lots of fish, lots of birds, and lots of marine mammals. As you can guess the tourism in Kaikoura is mainly focused on the marine mammals in the area there are businesses based around whales, seals, and dolphins. So this was our first lesson in “Ecotourism.”
While in Kaikoura we got to stay in a Marae, one of the coolest things I have ever done. This Marae was a lot different than the one we visited at EcoQuest, it was more modern and all the panels on the inside were carved and painted and women from the Marae wove harakeke mats that were placed on the walls. There were no pictures allowed but trust me the building was absolutely stunning and we all got to sleep in it. The grounds at the Marae were also beautiful. You could look out from the deck and see the ocean and snow topped mountains at the same time.
 |
| View from the Marae |
Our second field trip in Kaikoura was a surprise, but a really really awesome-best day of my life kind of surprise. They sprung it on us the night before and there was an uproar in the Marae when we learned we were going to swim with wild dolphins the next day!!! I mean how else were we supposed to learn about the ecotourism in Kaikoura without participating? In the morning we walked down to Encounter Kaikoura and got fitted for thick wetsuits and then hopped on a boat and we were speeding across the ocean on the lookout for that fin skimming the surface. Before we saw any dolphins we saw about five types of birds including the endangered Hutton’s shearwater, which only lives in NZ, and many types of albatross including the wandering albatross which is the albatross with the largest wingspan that can reach to 12 feet! We finally spotted the pod of dolphins and afterwards the captain said we had one of the best days he had ever seen. We had a pod of about 200 dolphins and they were interested the entire time we were in the water, we swam for about an hour and 45 min and the pod kept circling around us. It was a beautiful day and even though the water was 50 degrees it didn’t matter because we were all so excited. The dolphins we swam with are dusky dolphins and they are really interactive. If you catch their eye you can swim in circles with them. The feeling of looking a wild animal in the eye and making a connection is indescribable and a feeling I will never forget.
Other things Kaikoura related were a hilarious, interesting, and informative talent show at the Marae. Where we each took our turn showing off talents we didn’t know about each other. The group of us became really close starting in Kaikoura and now it’s like we’ve known each other forever, learning about permitting that companies like Encounter Kaikoura have to go through in order to take people swimming with dolphins, and a peninsula walk to see Kaikoura’s coastline. A really unbelievable start to our South Island Adventure and that was only four days!
 |
| Kaikoura Peninsula |
The next couple of days we had a day off in Hanmer springs, a really cute town with hot springs, and drove to the West coast to see Greymouth and Reefton, old mining towns. Then we arrived at Nelson Lakes National Park. During our stay in Nelson Lakes we learned about Department of Conservation land, pest control techniques and NZ beech forest cycles. Pest control here is a huge deal. In case you didn’t know New Zealand’s biodiversity is severely threatened by introduced species that are wreaking havoc on the native species. We discussed the differences between kill trapping and poisoning which has a lot to do with the type of animal being targeted and manpower. We learned that deer are an invasive pest here and now they are captured and farmed for their meat which is apparently a big seller in Germany. It’s really strange to be driving down the road and pass a deer farm. Previously, we had already had some lessons on possums and stoats and other furry things that eat trees and bird eggs but in Nelson Lakes we learned about a small pest that disrupts the cycle of NZ beech trees – the wasp. In NZ beech trees, which are not closely related to beech trees in the states, a bug called the scale insect that produces a substance called honeydew lives in the bark. The bug eats the tree and excretes the sugars it doesn’t use as honeydew. This honeydew is an important food source for birds and also feeds a fungus, called sooty fungus, which grows on the beech trees which in turn gives the tree moist ground and more nutrients to live on. The problem is that introduced wasps are stealing the honeydew and messing up the whole cycle so there is a whole process of pest control measures just to kill wasps which are pretty hard to kill if you think about a forest full of wasp nests and you don’t know where they are located, etc. So pest control is really interesting if you think about all the different things you have to think about and plan in order for it to work but really frustrating because if those stupid Europeans didn’t bring over the possums in the first place there would be no issue.
 |
| Nelson Lakes |
 |
| Sooty Fungus growing on a beech tree |
We then had an amazing five day mid-semester break where I went to Abel Tasman National Park and did a three day hiking/camping trip. We walked the coastal track which is one of New Zealand’s “Great Walks” and it really was a great walk. You get the best of both worlds; hiking through NZ native forest and then you walk out of the forest onto a beautiful sandy beach with clear blue water. After our hike we continued up the coast to Takaka which was a really cool little town and we stopped for a much needed lunch. Then kept driving North and arrived at Whareriki which is West of Farewell spit where we camped at a small campground that was a 15 min walk to the beach. We got there just at low tide so we got to walk the entire length of the beach to the far west end where the really cool rock formations are. After exploring we sat down on a dune and had a beautiful sunset dinner.
 |
| Abel Tasman! |
 |
| Whareriki Beach |
The last day of our break we drove to Nelson where the staff was going to pick us up the next morning and I got to drive! Driving on the left side of the road and the right side of a car is only weird at some points. You have to keep telling yourself to stay as close to the center line as possible and its really disorienting when you want to make a right hand turn in an intersection. But I did really well and it was much easier than I thought it would be. The last night of my break we met up with all the rest of the EcoQuesters and had dinner and shared stories.
The next day we were off on another road trip to Te Araroa. Te Araroa is a town on East Cape which is on the North Island. There we stayed at another Marae and only went to be part of a special restoration project. This Marae was just as beautiful as the last and kind of the same style but we were welcomed by a lot of the Iwi (tribe). It was a really cool welcome ceremony; school kids came and sang some beautiful songs and then they made us dinner it was really special. The reason we were there was to start a restoration project on some native forest on the Iwi’s property. They thought of this project on their own and have hired a predator proof fence company to come and put a fence in and contacted EcoQuest to get some baseline data and be a partner in the project. We were the first ones to do this project so it was really exciting to get out in the forest and collect some real data that matters. We did big tree counts, set up four vegetation plots where we labeled, measured, and identified all the significant trees, took invertebrate samples to see what kinds of bugs are living there, and took a photographic inventory for an educational field guide we will develop. Wi, the man who started the project, wants this forest to be a protected area for New Zealand species and an educational tool for the local people. It was a really great service learning project and it will continue with EcoQuest students in the years to come. Staying at Te Araroa was a great end to our long road trip the people there were so hospitable they cooked us a traditional Hangi which is meat and vegetables cooked in an earth oven which was delicious and then at the end of the week they threw us a barbeque where we all got to sit and chat and we set up samples of leaves and bugs to show the people what kind of work we had accomplished. All in all the South Island trip was an epic adventure and we all came back closer and not quite so ready to take the midterm that was waiting for us back at EcoQuest.
 |
| Lunch break in the vegetation plots! |
Sorry it took me so long to write about that and expect more to come because we got back to EcoQuest on October 18th so there is more to tell!
-Emily
