It is good to see your name back on the new messages coming in. We seem to have lost communication about November and am not sure if you received my last message... our response about Dunedin and its Scottish heritage. I unfortunately went in under the wrong byline and so you may have missed it even if you did receive it. I hope you have also
received the snail mail package we sent about November and that you have gained something worthwhile from it.
Our holidays are almost over. Only a week left to go. Teachers at our school are to officially return on Jan 29, for a teacher only day, but we will in fact be back before then as the painters are redecorating the interiors of the classrooms and all our teaching resources are in a huge piles in the centre of the rooms. It is going tp take some time to sort everything out again.
I have had a most enjoyable holiday. We had Christmas with my family at their holiday house inland from Dunedin. Unfortunately Dunedin is not renowned for its lovely summer weather and most people vacate the city during the holiday period for warmer, sunnier places inland. My husband's school maintains an outdoor education lodge in the Mount Aspiring National Park and the staff are encouraged to make use of it during the summer holidays. We love to go there. The lodge is situated in the Matukituki Valley,
at the head of Lake Wanaka, and is a great place for hiking, kayaking,
mountain biking and jet boating, and swimming too, if you
can stand swimming in water directly off the snow. It is a
beautiful place, quiet, peaceful and rejuvenating.
We then went on to spend a week in Fiordland National Park and stayed at Lake Manapouri. This lake is one of the most beautiful in New Zealand. During the ice ages glaciers cut huge swathes across the land forming unusual hills and hanging valleys and dumping morainal material. Manapouri is the Maori name for Lake of many islands.
It is an area of extremely high rainfall and the temperate
rainforests grow right down to the shores of the lake.
It is worth doing some of the day walks in and around the
Manapouri area. The views obtained from climbing a high vantage point are beautiful but it is equally as attractive
walking through the bush with beech trees encrusted with lichens and carpeted with mosses. We also walked a day portion of the Routeburn track (we weren't equipped to do the whole track which is a high alpine track taking three to four days for a person of average fitness) up to a place called Key Summit. This place would have been worth walking twice as far for. The 360 degree views from the top of surrounding mountain peaks is very beautiful but so too is the alpine vegetation. Mountain beeches which nor
mally grow to 30-40 feet in height have here been stunted into natural bonsai shapes of 5-6 feet. The ground is carpeted with alpine mosses and mats and lichen covered rocks, and small tarns nestled in sphagnum moss swamps reflect the surrounding mountain peaks. It is a picturesque place. The day was fine and almost cloudless.
Lake Manapouri has an environmental interest too. In the early 1960's an underground powerhouse was built on the West Arm of the lake. Water is transported by underground tunnel from Lake Manapouri through the turbines at Deep Cove and discharged into Doubtful Sound. The then Government of the day intended to raise the lake level. There was a public outcry about the huge environmental destruction that would occur around the lake shore in such a fragile area, and a
public petition containing hundreds of thousands of signatures encouraged the government to change its mind.
The main environmental problem which exists today is the area following the transmission lines out from Deep Cove across a pass called the Borland Saddle. It has been quite an engineering feat building the transmission lines across this very rugged terrain. In some places the lines are strung so low that regenerating bush cannot exceede a certain height and has to be continually felled.
I have been watching the inauguration of President Bill
Clinton on the video this morning. Such high hopes and expectations seem to rest on the shoulders of this man.
I hope he has a good set of shoulders.
Enough for now. I look forward to hearing from you and your class.
