We're dreaming of a white Christmas......

We've woken up to snow on the hills three times this week already. Just on the tops, but that still means overnight lows well down in the single digits! Not such a problem for those of us with nice warm beds, but we're a little concerned for Rachael, Dave and Stephen who will all be in tents in our back yard in a week's time. Especially considering there's more snow in the forecast for Saturday and Sunday. We're doing our best guys, but no promises on the weather! Might pay to bring your winter PJs!



On a mostly unrelated note, we put up the Christmas tree the other day...

Sprung!!

"It wasn't me.... it must have been another cat that knocked off that decoration! Besides, playing with Christmas trees is for kittens and I'm FIVE now."

A view worth preserving

Last Saturday (the 28th), I (Andrea) volunteered to join in the effort to rid Ben Lomond of Wilding Pines. "Wilding pines" is the general term given to various pine trees that self-sow on the wind, covering the hills around here and squeezing out all the natives. The worst offenders are the Douglas Fir trees, but the list is quite long and includes pretty much every introduced conifer.

It was a nice day, and the thought was that I wanted to do some exercise anyway, so I may as well meet some new people and do a bit of good at the same time!

In this first photo you can see the two types of forest up on the hill. The bushier stuff in the foreground is native beech forest, with the obviously pointy pines in the distance. It's a bit of a losing battle but the efforts at the moment are on preventing the spread of the pines, rather than trying to rid the hills of all the pines. The dead brown trees in the centre of the picture are the ones felled last year, if you can see those!


This is the sort of countryside I was working on. The downside to being a bit fitter is that the group automatically delegated the steeper bits to me! You can see a few of the Douglas Fir seedlings in the foreground.




And here's a view up towards the summit - that's mostly Beech forest on the left of the photo.

It was a very rewarding day - they estimate that over the weekend about 11 thousand seedlings were removed. I'd believe that easily, I think I removed over 250 in my 5 hours, and there were about 50 volunteers on each of the two days. It was hard work though, and my arm muscles are pleased I only did one day!

No words needed

Here 'Tis!

Up on the ridge! Now you can all understand how it can be a little difficult to firstly spot the deer and secondly get to them to take a clean safe shot. This one was particularly clever - he spotted us in one direction and once we'd gone through the valley a bit further and turned back to look he'd come over the ridge to watch us go. The second we turned around he scampered back over the ridge and down into an inaccessible gully. They're not stupid!

Hunting Trip

We've just got back from a couple of days hunting in an undisclosed location (not wanting to give away our secrets to internet surfers!) and had quite a bit of fun. We saw deer, Chamois, Tahr and LOADS of wild goats. These are not your average North Island Goat, with some of them getting up to 200 lbs with horns a foot long. From our experience the smell increases with weight and size of horns too! They can get quite aggressive and aren't scared of rushing you (if they see you) in an attempt to make you miss your shot. Definitely not for the faint hearted! It was our first "successful" hunting trip together (Greg's shot things by himself or with mates) - all up we shot 6 goats, and Andrea even shot one of them (after stalking it for about 20 mins and creeping over ridges in the long grass). Perfect head shot, not that she's gloating. Not bad for the second ever round she's fired though!

The walk in was quite spectacular, with about half the "track" being a stream. River crossings were more numerous than sections with dry feet. Typically of this area, it's an old gold mining area with relics littered around all over the place. We both kept our eyes down on the river crossings in the hope of finding a nugget but no such luck.

We came across this dam, which had a pipe coming off the side of it to an old shed with a wheel and generator still inside the shed. The gear was all made in Thames (Coromandel) in the 1800s which was quite interesting, due to the fact it weighed literally tonnes, being solid steel and copper. We've got no idea how they got it in there, in the middle of nowhere, with no helicopters or even roads in those days! The poor horses must have been exhausted.

We've decided Greg probably needs to get a camo pack.... you'll see why from the photo below. Deer might be colour blind but we're not so sure about everything else.

And lastly, here's why we're finding it a bit more difficult to get onto the deer. They are still very much up on the tops and haven't started coming down into the valleys yet. This is due to the snow melting and there being a lot of new growth up on the tops. Because the valleys are so steep-sided, the sun isn't getting down into the bottom as much yet so there's actually more fresh grass up high than down low. And in most of the areas we hunt in, getting up to the tops is virtually impossible (due to sheer cliffs) - even if we could shoot one from the valley we'd never find a way up to retrieve the body.

There's a deer in this photo. Good luck to you all in finding it! We'll post a zoomed in photo showing it's location in a couple of days.......

Thyme to stop and smell the flowers

(Andrea will try and restrain herself from further puns. Sorry)

Andrea spent the past 2 days in Dunedin for work. We took heaps of photos last year of the lupins around Queenstown, but through in Central Otago they don't seem to grow as much. The predominant wild flower over there is wild thyme. The Alexandra wild thyme festival starts this coming weekend (it's all about alternative art etc from what we can tell, having never attended) and the fields and hills both sides of Alexandra, through as far as Roxburgh in the south and Gibbston Valley in the northwest are all covered in light purple. It sort of looks like the rocks are slightly tinted with pinky-purple, it's only when you get up close that you realise that it's actually millions of tiny flowers. The hills will be at their best in a week, but here are the photos from today:

This first photo was taken looking across Lake Dunstan just above the Clyde Dam. All of the light greyish shading on the hills is actually wild thyme.

Looking across one of the fields further through the gorge towards Cromwell

And last but not least with some other wild flowers mixed in just before Cromwell - that's the back of the Pisa range (the other side from the Cardrona Valley) with tiny amounts of snow on it in the background, and again Lake Dunstan.

And yes, Andrea dug up a little bit and brought it home to plant in our herb garden. Now we just have to hope that it didn't die over the last hour of the drive home... and that it doesn't take over our whole garden! You should see our Rosemary tree.....

Nice View

It was Greg's day off today (Tuesday) so he decided to go for a walk up into the Wye Creek catchment area and took along his gun just in case. There had been a heavy snow fall overnight which made everything look like a postcard first thing in the morning. There is still a good snow base up on the hills, which is still making it difficult to get up to where the deer are but he did manage to shoot a "100 year old billy goat" (in his words). Apparently it smelt 100 years old too and had a good set of horns on it. Unfortunately he forgot to take a photo of it in the excitement as it took off into the scrub and took some chasing down!

Wye Creek rises steeply up from lake level to nearly 2000m and makes for some spectacular scenery, as seen below:

Looking back towards Queenstown - the first peninsula on the right is Jack's Point and the second one is Kelvin Heights

Looking towards Cecil Peak. And yes, that's the road at the bottom of the picture. "Rising Steeply" is an understatement! These photos were taken from about halfway up.

Daley's Flat Hut

We looked at the weather forecast on Friday and decided it looked nice for a tramp, but still a bit cold for tenting, so we decided to walk from Chinaman's Bluff (at a place called Paradise, near Glenorchy) up the lower Dart to Daley's Flat Hut. The signposts said 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 hours each way, summer tramping time. It took us about 5 hours in each direction, but that included looking around each of the grassy flats for deer sign (and following the odd stream up to the tops) and also crossing the odd fallen tree.

The tramp was a pretty hard slog in places - it varied between beech forest bluffs and large grassy flats. The following photo shows where we stopped for lunch on the way in.

When we reached Sandy Bluff, there was a fantastic sign that said "Sheer drop offs for next 200m, then track decends steeply". This next photo was taken from the top of one of the sheer drop offs - looking out over Dredge Flat.

We did see a couple of deer - Greg got pretty close to a big stag - but the wind was behind us so he didn't have a hope of getting a clear shot at it without it bolting. And as the last thing you want to do is injure the deer, he let it bolt! We also went for a walk in the evening to see what was further up the valley and saw a deer up there - but it was on the other side of a large flat surrounded by scrub and again no clear shot.

We don't know how valuable a hunting area it will be - at the moment it's still really frosty in the mornings so nothing for the deer to feed on, but by the time the frosts are over it's peak tramping season and the track is really busy. A great experience none-the-less and with the blisters we had on the way out, we're almost glad we weren't carrying a deer!

Dilemma

Greg was going to mow the lawn this morning........

But there appears to be a minor technical difficulty

Nice work, Met Service

We couldn't decide how to name this blog. We came up with a number of possibilities: Cold as a Mother-in-Law's Kiss, The Mad Jarvises but decided on the one above.

The weekend's weather was forecast as follows:

Saturday: fine, with light winds and early morning frosts. High of 17, overnight low of 6.

Sunday: Warm Nor'westers rising to gale late afternoon with rain by evening. High of 17. Free air freezing level 2300m.

Hence we decided that although there was the chance of getting a bit wet on the way out, we'd head into the bush anyway as we were keen to sight in the new rifle Greg has just bought.

The sighting in of the rifle went really well. This involves shooting at a target with inch scales on it, and adjusting the scope up, down, left and right until the point you aim at is the point you hit! It involves a bit of accuracy on the part of the shooter. It only took us a dozen shots to get the rifle shooting accurately at 100m. At that point, Greg decided Andrea needed to take a shot with the rifle so that she knew what it was all about. She took aim, fired.... and hit the bullseye from 100m. Much to Greg's disgust. Andrea maintains she won't shoot it again now - why ruin the perfect record?? Hehehe

Saturday morning indeed dawned fine and frosty with light winds. By evening the winds had gotten up a bit so it looked like the forecast was right on track.

We reached our camp site at about 2.30pm and set up the tent. We had a bit of a look around, then had an early dinner and headed up the flats to see if we could spot any deer. We didn't. We put this down to a number of reasons. Firstly, it's a bit early. There's still a lot of snow around, and the grass down low hasn't really begun to green up for summer yet (which is what the deer come out of the forest for). Secondly, DoC have been flying choppers into the area, dropping 1080 for Possums and Stoats in the area, which may have spooked the deer into staying in the bush. We weren't aware that the 1080 drop had been in this area, but we're pleased we had carried in all the water we needed. Not a risk you want to take.

We got back to camp shortly after 6.30 pm and headed into the tent. The temperature was starting to drop and we were also getting pretty sick and tired of being eaten alive, so we got into the tent and spent the next 15 minutes killing all the mozzies in the tent!

The temperature continued to drop. And drop. And drop. And so did the wind. We are very grateful we invested in top quality sleeping bags and a good tent. And that we had the common sense to put our thermals on before climbing into our sleeping bags!

So, to anyone out there who has ever said either of the following: "There's NOTHING worse than putting your feet into wet boots!" or "There's NOTHING worse than taking down a wet tent", we plead otherwise. Replace "wet" in both of the above sentences with "frozen solid like cardboard". Greg's water bottle even froze slightly in the tent. And there's photographic proof:

If anyone was wondering about the unusual shape of the tent, it's designed to withstand very strong winds and heavy snow and rain.

As you can see below, a very picturesque place for a camp site... it just wasn't the temperatures predicted. Free air freezing level 2300m - not exactly! We would have guessed the temperature outside the tent first thing this morning at about -4 or -5. The dew was freezing on the outside of our thermals! Looking on the bright side, the frost got rid of the mozzies and we were able to eat our breakfast without competition. Or extra protein.

The temperature came up considerably once the sun hit us and we walked out in brilliant sunshine (which we were grateful for as the water in the rivers was extremely cold). We went back a slightly different way to the way we went in, and we're very excited by the deer sign we saw on the way back. Watch this space!

Cracker of a Day!

We woke up on Saturday morning just in time to catch the most incredible sunrise.

After much oooooing and ahhhhhing, in that order, we thought we should make the most of the day and headed up the Remarks for a couple of hours on our boards, closely followed by a couple of hours on skis. On the way back down, we stopped take a look at this "wind lip" - which is formed when a big dump of snow is accompanied by gale force winds. This one was about 25 feet high.

Further down the road we couldn't resist this photo of Lake Hayes reflecting the mountains behind it.

And after that, we topped the day off with a couple of hours' trout fishing down by the golf course, where Greg let all the small quinnat salmon go... and then remembered that it would have made a good meal for Burton. Oh well, what he doesn't know won't hurt him....

Spring??

Tuesday was officially the first day of spring. However, with the warmest, wettest August on record, we felt like we've already had spring for a month here. It was colder all round in Autumn than it was in winter this year!

Anyway, Spring arrived properly...... and so did winter, again!

Here are a couple of photos taken by Greg this morning from our balcony once the skies had cleared. It was a beautiful day today - blue skies, fresh powder on the mountain, and work committments that neither of us could re-schedule... annoying!

The first photo is a close up of the Gondola and Ben Lomond. We like the snow in the trees the best! You may also be able to pick out the gondola building - like a little island in the middle of the snow covered clearing.

And a wider shot, showing Bowen Peak on the right.

It snowed to lake level for pretty much all of Wednesday, being Andrea's birthday (she was pretty impressed with the 'present' from Queenstown). We went out for dinner to a place called 'Prime' on the waterfront and sat at a window seat watching the snow lightly fall under the lights outside. Very pretty!

A warm spell?

Since our last post, we've had Adrian here to stay. Adrian was involved with Scouts with us up in Auckland, and was the MC at our wedding. Pete, who married us, was also planning to come down but due to family reasons unfortunately had to pull out at the last minute.

With Adrian here, we took the opportunity to explore the options for possible Gold Level Duke of Edinburgh award expeditions down around here. It's possible that some of the kids from All Saints Birkenhead might be coming down here in a couple of years for a tramp, so we wanted to show Adrian the possibilities. We took Adrian down to Glenorchy to show him each end of the Rees-Dart track, which looks to be the most promising option. We also did a short walk through to Lake Sylvan, which we did earlier in the year as part of another tramp. http://gregandandreajarvis.blogspot.com/2009/04/going-bush-again.html

It's a short walk through Beech forest, coming out at Lake Sylvan - giving Adrian an idea of the kind of forest the kids can expect to see.

This photo is the Rees Valley, the start of the tramp.

This weekend, we decided to head up on Friday night to give night skiing a go. The weather has warmed up a lot in the past week or so, and the snow conditions have deteriorated. On Friday night we were basically snowboarding on wet crushed ice, which had been pushed into 2 foot high moguls. We're still pleased we went up, but the conditions made the boarding less than impressive.

On Saturday, with the weather still warm, we headed out to explore a new hunting area and have our first day tramp of the season. True to form, we managed to pick an area that was steeper than planned, and then made it progressively harder for ourselves by deciding to climb ridges to see if we could spot any wildlife (verdict: only sheep). The track we decided to take back to the car was mostly covered in snow, varying between ankle deep and waist deep. Very hard going! But loads of fun.

Here's Greg, halfway up the steep ridge we decided to climb:

And here's the view from the saddle, a couple of minutes walk from the car on the way back. We were up the back of Gibbston Valley, looking across at the Crown Range.

Rachael, Dave and JJ come to visit

It turns out that Jeremy (our nephew) is the bringer of snow. On the night he was born (last July) we had the biggest snow fall to lake level that Queenstown had seen in years.

This is our house on the morning of July the 5th, 2008. JJ was born the night before.

And here are Andrea and Jen in our backyard with the snowman we all built. We named the snowman Jeremy.

The snow season this year started with a bang, but after that there had been very little snow for 8 weeks. Until the day before JJ showed up - when we received almost half a metre of snow up on the fields, in about 24 hours. Not that we were complaining! The weather cleared out just in time for their flight to land, and stayed clear for the weekend, and packed in again on the evening after they flew out.

While they were here, we tried to help JJ experience lots of fun things.

Like swings and slides. This is the playground down by the little beach we wakeboard off. It turns out Jeremy prefers to be upside down on swings.

At the top of the slide, showing off the jumper that Gran (Louise Houltham) made for him. Sorry Aunty Jen, he had dispensed with the beanie by then!

Jeremy also discovered that he likes ribs.

On their last afternoon here, Dave and Jeremy came for a walk with the two of us along the beach. It was the coldest we've ever seen the beach - the sand had frozen! It was like walking on concrete - quite a bizarre feeling.

And of course we took him up to the snow. He wasn't so sure - everything was just so different to what he's used to. But he loved the chair lift!

And last but not least a picture of Aunty Andrea holding JJ in the carpark before we took off to hike for some fresh powder snow. Sorry about abandoning you guys for an hour or so, Rach and Dave.... but on powder days we have no friends... or relatives.

Skipper's Canyon

Being winter and with no fresh snow for 8 weeks, and having guests here (thanks for the excuse, Jen, Bex and Carmen), we decided to take a drive through Skipper's Canyon. Skipper's Road is an historic road from back in the gold mining days - it winds through Skipper's Canyon from the Coronet Peak access road. It is strictly 4WD only, not open to rental cars, with signs that say things like "Vehicle Damage Possible" and "No turn around for 6km". It's a little scary in summer, so it made perfect sense to go through in winter.

The road was mostly alright.



The water falls didn't really fall so much anymore. They were roaring in summer!


The same waterfall/icicles from another angle - the icicles were about 40 feet in height! And probably about 30 feet in width. Quite breathtaking!


The second part of the road involves driving along a very narrow ledge with a sheer cliff below. This is the view out across to the tablelands on a not-so-steep part.

The historic Skipper's bridge. An awesome feat of engineering! It sways as you drive across it. And today with the ice on it, it also made cracking noises when we drove across it. Not exactly reassuring....

And last but not least, the view back up the canyon from just across the bridge. Did we mention it hasn't actually snowed for 8 weeks? So that snow down there has sat there for all of winter so far. We're pleased we wrapped up warm.

PS: As we write this, it's trying really hard to snow outside. We're expecting a few cm to fall overnight... fingers crossed!

Vanuatu

We had a fantastic time in Vanutatu over the past week. We did everything we wanted to do and a bit more while we were there - day spa massages, game fishing, 4wd buggying, snorkelling, sailing, kayaking, parasailing, horse riding, village visits... plus of course a bit of relaxing!

We stayed at Iririki Island Resort, which is a small island just off Port Vila (the capital). The staff were really friendly and helpful and the food and drink at each of the 3 restaurants was excellent. The buffet breakfast every morning was great - we both got slightly addicted to the local passionfruit and even went to the local markets three times to buy more! They are bright yellow or dark red and about twice the size of the purple ones we get here, with way more flavour.

(Iririki Waterfront "Fares" (pronounced "faa-ray" - meaning bungalow) at sunset from the wharf)

The location of the resort was great - a quick 5 minute ferry ride back to the mainland and we were at the pick up point for any of about 300 different day trips you could do. The only thing we were a little disappointed about was the lack of white sandy beaches - the only sandy beach on the island was about 100m long, and man-made. We've since been told that white sandy beaches on Vanuatu are few and far between - and not that great (if there is no coral, there are no fish, and, unlike where we were, not great snorkelling).

Which brings us to the snorkelling. We saw sooooo many fish, of all sizes and colours, including plenty of clown fish ("Nemo" fish!) - some of which were so tame they came right up to your hand to see if there was any food for them. We took a day trip to Hideaway Island, which boasts the best snorkelling on Efate (the main Island of Vanuatu) and we weren't disappointed - although we snorkelled at Iririki two days later and found it almost as good!

(Hideaway Island)

The highlight of our trip were the 4wd buggies. These are like 4wd go-carts, complete with rollcages, and had a top speed of around 90-100km/hour. There were particular places where our guide told us we had to go flat out or we'd get stuck - such as in the long tall grass he took us through. A little scary when you're losing sight of the guide and the buggies in front and behind you - at 90km/hr! It cuts the grass pretty effectively though! We definitely ended up worse off than the couples in either of the other two buggies. Greg must have found every mud puddle on the track, and went through them at high speed. The guide got off his bike, looked at us and cried with laughter... saying only one word: "CAMERA".

In the morning, on the same day we went on the buggies, we went horse riding. Andrea had never been on a horse before (with the exception of primary school gala day pony rides) so we decided it was as good a chance as any. The horses pretty much played "follow-the-leader" but she did manage to get hers up to a fast trot (not quite a canter!) a couple of times. The horse was called "Enana" and was a bit stroppy - Greg commented that they matched the horse to the rider quite well....

The resort had "Happy Hour" with half price cocktails, between 5 and 6 pm each night. It was really popular with all the guests - the staff handed out free bowls of banana chips (salty and deep fried, not like the ones here!) and there was often entertainment. The local tour operators made the most of the captive audience and came over to hand out "raffle prizes" which were usually 2-for-1 vouchers. We won a 2-for-1 voucher to go parasailing and decided to give it a go. It cost less for both of us to go up than it would have cost for both of us to go here in Queenstown - and a new perspective on the surrounding area was great!

(Andrea up above Port Vila)

(Greg took the camera up with him - this photo shows Iririki Island just to the right of the parasailing rope, and Port Vila in the background, to the left)

On the last day, Greg finally managed to book in a spot of game fishing. Unfortunately, the other guy on the charter only wanted to go for 6 hours, not 8, but they still managed some great strikes from a marlin or two (but failed to have a hook up) and he landed this beautiful Mahimahi, by casting a popper towards a navigation buoy.

All said and done, we had a great time away and are already talking about our next holiday! The last photo below, shows one of the three resort pools right on sunset. Which happened to coincide with happy hour - you can see why happy hour by the pool was so popular!