Random West Coast Events

Well the West Coast continues to blow me away. We're in Franz Joseph right now and depending on the weather tomorrow I'll take a hellicopter up to the top of the glacier for a hike. Below is a view of the town.

Below you can see a typical South Island bridge from my bus...drivers have to wait on either end and take turns going through the one land bridge. This bridge actually shares the road and the railway, so that's even more exciting. I'm anticipating driving on more bridges like this when I rent a car with Sarah next week.



So a bit shamefully I admit that today I carved bone. I debated whether or not is was ethical but ultimately decided to bite the bullet and do this once-in-a-lifetime activity. I decided to carve a Koru--a very popular Maori symbol. First we traced the symbol that we wanted....

....after much grinding, sanding and polishing I got the end result below. The teachers told me privately that this piece was good enough quality to be sold professionally on the market. Later today I got a compliment from another artist in a stop we made.

The studio we worked in.

Sunset at Barrytown (the only eventful thing there)

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We visited the pancake rocks yesterday. I wish I had more geological information to report for Gabe but I assume they are stratagraphic rocks eroded away by the sea. There are these things they call 'blowholes' that apparently occur very rarely with the tidal fluctuations. I did see it but it was more like water crashing up out of a hole other than any volcanic activity.

Oh, also--we heard that about an hour after we left Wellington on the ferry there was a 5.2 earthquake. Just incase any of you heard about it, I didn't experience it at all. But earthquakes in New Zealand are extremely common anyway. Where we are now, at the Franz-Joseph Glacier, is directly on a subductive fault line of the Pacific Plate and the Astraul-Asia Plate.

More later.