~ Boo to the stinky plant

I really looked forward to seeing all the different plants and animals when I came to New Zealand. But I kind of guessed that they would be so out there, so varied and so different, that we wouldn’t be able to consistently identify them during our short stay here. But what with the nature walk on the first night of the Milford Track, the explanatory sign posts that the DoC puts in various places, and random information gleaned from people we’ve come across, we can positively identify most of the plants and animals common to the south and west of the South Island. I’ll try not to assume that because these things excite me that they will be equally interesting to the rest of you, so I’ll just list them here – and you can skip the list if it doesn’t interest you!

• Marble Leaf: a cool brush-type plant with… you guessed it… leaves that look marbled!


• Lancewood: a goofy long narrow-leafed plant that looks so different in juvenile form from the adult form that early botanists classified it as two different plants. Theory is that the moa (an extinct ostrich-type bird native to here) ate them, so they only sported un-appetizing leaves until they reached a certain height – beyond where the moas could reach.


• Pepper Tree: a bush that has glossy leaves. If you chew on a tiny bit of it, it really tastes like hot pepper – or like the first taste of Big Red chewing gum! It’s spicy enough that you really don’t want more than a bit at a time, but it is refreshing for when you’re walking through the woods.


• Beeches! These are the big trees that take over when forests here reach maturity. They’re everywhere and they’re beautiful. There are three types (red, silver and… mountain I think) here – and I don’t think they’re actually related to the beeches we know, they were just named that by English settlers because they reminded them of the beeches from home.


• Caposma (I think): a common, round-leafed brush plant that’s everywhere


• Manuka: a brush that is the first to grow in open places – so sheep farmers really hated it because it would start taking over their pastures. They introduced a blight which makes the stems black. The flowers are really popular and Manuka honey is highly valued here – both for it’s taste and because it has antiseptic properties.


• Ferns: there are heaps of types of those about. Some really interesting ones that we don’t know the names for but can recognize when we see them. One we have learned is the tree fern. It’s very cool and looks like a palm tree with fern leaves and fiddleheads at the top instead of palm leaves.


• and, of course, the Stinky Plant! Well – that’s not its Latin name. But the Latin name really does have the root “foetid” in it. If you crush the leaves of this lovely plant, it smells like – you guessed it – poo poo! Sometimes you can smell it walking down the trail, and (whether the plant is truly the source of the smell or not) shouts of “Boo to the stinky plant” suddenly echo up and down the track.

There are birds and other animals which I could list as well, but I think that should probably be enough to keep you going for a while!

Today we enjoyed New Zealand. We started out in Queenstown. It’s a tourist-trap type place. We wanted to go bungee jumping, but that didn’t work out with the small amount of time we actually wanted to spend there, so we ended up riding the gondola up out of town (BEAUTIFUL!) and racing carts down a luge track up there. We then headed out of town with stops at:

• Blue pools: a place where glacier-fed streams pooled. Amazing blue color that I’m quite sure the cameras won’t be able to pick up. The boys had fun skipping stones there, and I proved once and for all that I really can’t do that. :)


• Knight point: an amazing overlook to the Tasman sea. The color again was indescribable. Some neat tourists from Singapore lent us their binoculars, and Ben and Tom (and I think myself!) were able to see seals way down on a distant shore point!


• A random beach point where the sand was black. It was dramatic and cool. I proved once and for all that I can’t jump – I tried jumping a little stream and ended up soaking one foot and shoe!


• A random sheep pasture: we almost ran over a pukeko! Don’t ask...


• Fox Glacier: One of only two glaciers that actually descends into temperate rainforest. We walked right up to it and took heaps of pictures. It’s really hard to get the scale of something like that to click in your head. It was amazing.