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I love getting these emails every little while.
They get and keep me excited for when I get the time next year to
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KiwiNewZ
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NewsZine - travel tips and information for the modern eco traveller. Enter your email. |
NewsZine - December 1999The independent NewsZine for the modern ecotraveller.New Zealand travel tips and information (from Evan Bloomfield) So here's to a happy Christmas and New Year. It struck me that we all have a little bit of paradise at our back door, wherever we live, so get out and enjoy it. ++ In this issue Queenstown floods and we all get wet, be a virtual spectator at the America's Cup, what's a quokka, win a free kiwi key ring, what's the 17th man, a study on Stewart Island Robins, the shoe fence and land of the last light. |
| Well it is hard to believe that just 4 weeks ago Queenstown and the surrounding areas was hit by the worst floods ever, well since we know about anyway. OK so it looks a bit like the Shotover River has been down our driveway and there are still a quite few shops in the lake end of Queenstown that are yet to re open but by and large things are back to normal. |
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The thing about our mighty Lake Wakatipu
is that it only has one drain - the Kawarau River. Fiver rivers flowing
in and one flowing out. And the catchment area for those five rivers
is huge - ever been for a drive up to the Branches of the Skippers?
If you have you will know what I mean. Anyway what happens with any
kind of serious rain is the Shotover river flows back up the Kawarau
and puts a mighty size plug in the drain - and the lake goes up. And it went up. |
| The rain that preceeded these floods was a sight to behold. It just set in and rained and rained and rained. Steady, persistent, un relenting and for 3 days solid. |
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One of the most visible remains of the rain are the hundreds of small and large slips on many of the hills and mountains. Quite a few houses perched on the sides of these mountains have had a bit of a rude awakening with mud slides running right in to there back door. |
| And then there is the gold rush. You might think this is just bunkum but you don't get the likes of 6th generation Chinese descendant Tony Suhoi coming all the way back from Nelson with his dredges and metal detectors for a holiday! |
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== Tell a friend Go ON. Spread the word about KiwiNewZ! Seriously, tell a friend, print off an issue, pass it around. If it weren't for you, who'd be reading this? The more people I can reach, the more people I can make happy. Consider KiwiNewZ the Christmas present for which you don't have to pay:} ++ The Americas Cup - be a virtual spectator Well its the end of the third round and the 6 semi finalists have been decided. The Swiss, Spanish, Abracadabra, Young Australia and Young America are on their way home .... paying the price for not spending enough time in the city of sails in the lead up. Those of you who have seen the TV coverage in New Zealand will have been wowed by those brilliant computer graphics with boats zipping back and forth in fast forward. Well this is the work of a small Dunedin firm VRL and you can have it on your desktop in real time! Using some souped up telemetry software, a bit of funky electronics and heaps of good old Kiwi ingenuity VRL have put together a nice little package. Here's some words of theirs; "Virtual Spectator is an exciting new live Internet sports channel established to deliver animated action from the Louis Vuitton Cup - the Challenger Races for the America's Cup - LIVE from your computer desktop. The technology gives Virtual Spectators access to real-time, 3D animated race action from data sent directly from the racing boats. View up-to-the-minute yacht positions, competitor information, results and more! "By combining hybrid CD-ROM, global positioning, tactical yachting software and Internet technologies, Virtual Spectator overcomes the Internet's bandwidth limitations allowing you to view and interact with major sporting events online. I talked to my brother who has purchased Virtual Spectator and he is pretty impressed. You can watch the sails flop back and forth as the boats tack, replay any of the races, fast forward or rewind. Data supplied on the screen includes wind speed and direction, boat speed, track made good and everything else a sea dog could ask for. He hasn't had any problem with download speeds although he is on an ADSL line and is running a dual processor seriously over clocked :) Changing from one course to another does take some time as the data appears to be on different servers. Overall a thumbs up! The price of the CD is US$70. For more details surf on over to; http://www.virtualspectator.com/virtual_spectator.asp Now the one snag is that Virtual Spectator only covers the Challenger series or Louis Vuiton Cup as it is known. To watch the big daddy final between Team New Zealand and the successful challenger then you are going to have to deal with that wily Australian John Bertrand. Now he's the guy that won the Americas Cup for Australia and his site is called "Quokka". Aye? It works out that Quokka have the rights to be the official America's
Cup web supplier and their version of an on line yacht race is QuokkaRaceViewer; Anyway I thought since I am writing about Quokka I better go take a look and got lost ..... I mean in time. Every so often whilst wondering the web you get stuck on a site, and get lost. And I got lost. You can check out the BT Global Challenge Around Alone race, do a Whitbread Around the World Race, go to the Olympics, race your CART ( that's the competition hot young Kiwi driver Scott Dixon is joining ), head outdoors for an Eco-Challenge in Patagonia or blast up the Great Trango Tower. Heck you can even bid on a 17th man position on Young America! This is a bells and whistles package and gives you a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the event up close and personal! You'll be there as Paul Cayard and the AmericaOne team prepare to win the Louis Vuitton America's Cup." So if you've got some time off between January 6-11, 2000 you can bid for the 17th person position on AmericaOne's Boat for one race during the Semi-Finals and they will throw in round-trip airfare to New Zealand for two courtesy of Air New Zealand ( from Sydney I presume ), two team dinners ( apparently they are huge ), a 1/2 scale model of the boat, your photograph at the helm of the boat and a signed framed limited edition poster of AmericaOne. Too much. And wot's the highest bidder so far? Well last time I looked it was a cool $40 000 ( I think that's Australian ). So QuokkaRaceViewer by all accounts is a simplified version of Virtual Spectator with a selection of still images, some text tables with results and statistics and lots of boring audio clips :( There doesn't appear to be any plans to update this viewer for the finals but you can buy John Bertrand's book "Born to Win". Hmmmm Wasn't that his boat that sank in San Diego? Here's some links; What's a Qoukka? Whoosszze seen one? Email me the answer and the best story will get a free Kiwi keyring for Christmas and we'll publish your story! ++ What's a 17th man and why would you pay over $40 000 for it? I mentioned before my brother Guy has virtual spectator installed and often has the races running in the background on his screen. Well funny thing is that he can look out his home window and watch the boats sailing ( OK the binoculars are required to see a couple of white dots in the distance ) and he has been a 17th man. Purchased at a school fund raising auction for $250 this was a ticket for a day on the stern as 17th man of the Hawaiian entry Abracadabra during their warm up for the Louis Vuitton Cup. For those of you land lubbers that don't know what a 17th man ( I suppose that should be person ) does don't worry. They don't do anything. Literally. Under race conditions they are not allowed to utter a word and they do as they are told. So anyway here's Guy standing on the stern of Abracadabra while they practice a few starts against the Spanish and work through a few manouevers and he was blown away! Having built an OK dinghy in the lounge with dad ( mom wasn't too happy ) and sailed from Fiji to Auckland he isn't a stranger to the power of the sail but nothing prepared him for this. Apparently the whole boat creeks and groans and shudders with each tightening of the sails or lurch in the sea, the acceleration is amazing and concept of trying to control one of these machines was quite amusing! So the Abracadabra crew had a good laugh when they heard how Guy earned his passage and the moral of the story is support your local schools fund raising ... you can get some great bargains. _________________________________________ Stewart Island Robins On a recent walk across Stewart Island we happened across a whole bunch of orange ribbons and plastic triangles strung along the track. "Clap friendly", "nest 10m across stream" and other symbols and dates led us along the path. On arrival at the Freshwater Hut all was explained as we met the Robin Lady, Lynell. She is doing a Postgraduate Diploma of Wildlife Management at Otago University in Dunedin. Titled "Are Stewart Island Robins Caught in a Corner by Predators?" Lynell is exploring the observation that the Stewart Island Robins (Petroica australis rakiura) seems to have moved down from the podocarp forest to only occupy the manuka forest because of predator numbers. The aim of this research is three fold; This type of research is seen to be even more important in light of a recent very reliable report of stoat tracks on Long Harry on the North West coast of Stewart Island an Island that was though to be of bird killing stoats and other musteltids. So if you happen to be walking in the Freshwater basin and see some Robins flitting around in the Manuka forest spare a thought for the Robin lady. _________________________________________ The Shoe Fence Here's a report from our interpid southern Bottom Bus reporter Ralph Davie's. "Just East of Burke's Pass in South Canterbury ( en route to Queenstown from Christchurch ) is a growing phenomenon on a farmers fence, the Shoe Fence." "Over 1000 ( well 1182 at last count ) shoes, sandals, ski boots, gumboots and flippers are strung along a good old 8 strand fence. It all started so they say when a pair of moccasins were left for a shearer as he had left his behind." So if you are going past and have a spare sole in the car why don't you add to this stringy south island attraction. With everyone clamouring to be land of the first light a small South Westland town Tuatapere has pulled on it's gumboots and launched itself in to the end of the year thingy with a Last Light Party. Now Tuatapere is better known for its sausages ( and its beech mills but that's another far more controversial story ) and fondly called "Sausageville" so you can be sure there will be some sausages at the party. They are also celebrating with a float parade, line dancing, gumboot throwing, hangi and an axeman's chop all before sun set at 9:43pm. For the record Tuatapere is the last New Zealand town with an elected local body member to see the sun set in summer. Hmmm, wonder what Halfmoon Bay have to say about that? == Back Issues Last month we talked about; Schedule for the America's
Cup in Auckland, air
points are us - guide to frequent flyers free flights, guide
to walking the Milford
Tack unguided, Y2K Whisky
Heritage Tour, Stewart
Island National Park, Mt Bruce
Wildlife recovery report, cheap flights
from the US to NZ. Click here to go to the index for our previous issues online. == That's all folks Thanks for joining us and see ya next month. Remember we live on feedback, suggestions, requests, comments etc. We try to answer every one personally. Just email us. This NewsZine is assembled from our own observations and reports from others and while every effort is made to get it right we can not attest to the accuracy or otherwise. Happy tripping. If you like what you read please forward this on to your friends ( reduce, re use, re cycle ). If you are reading someone else's and you like what we offer, please subscribe! It's easy and free. Just click here. == Contact Information Evan and Jane Bloomfield |