Roadside Tourism

[[You can also read the Seeing Green column inspired by this trip here.]]

Until my first whirlwind of graduate school interviews back in 2008, I didn't realize exactly how much travel was involved in being a scientist.

But by the time I interviewed at Stanford in 2010, I was a firm believer in travel as one of the perks of the job. As a result, I somehow convinced my amazing advisor to let me siphon off his grant money for a field project in New Zealand, convinced the National Science Foundation to let me spend a month at a time visiting collaborators in Woods Hole, and in the end managed to spend fully half of 2012 out of my own bed.

In general, you can expect graduate students to have extra pages in their passports, stockpiles of frequent flier miles, and exceptional time zone-acclimation abilities.

How did we wind up getting so spoiled?

Mostly by being exceptional opportunists. Yes, concerned funding agencies and taxpayers, all the travel we do has a very carefully justified purpose! But once we're at our fantastic destination, it doesn't hurt to poke around a bit, right?

A snowmelt-fed stream cuts its way through native
mountain beech trees in Arthur's Pass National Park.
Our first stop on our way across the Southern Alps.

That's the principle that J. and I applied last weekend. Tasked with obtaining a handful of leaves from a species of tree that grows only on the western side of the Southern Alps (the mountain backbone of New Zealand's South Island), J. generously offered to take me on a bit of a sightseeing tour on the island's other coast.

After stopping briefly in Arthur's Pass (and snickering at the Kea, who were earnestly prying the rubber insulation away from other people's cars), we dropped down onto the other, wetter side of the South Island.

The change in the vegetation was dramatic! Finally, a glimpse of a real New Zealand tree fern-stuffed temperate rainforest!

In the foreground, native flax, for which the Maori had many
uses. In the background, a relatively open tree fern canopy
grades into a densely forested hillside, the beginning of the
slopes leading up to the Southern Alps.

We stopped briefly at a few points along the coast. At one point, I even got to dip my hand (and soak my shoes) in the warm waters of the Tasman Sea! Sadly, there wasn't time for total immersion.

Stunning rock formations are cut into the coastline by the
frequent storms that spin across the Tasman.

One of the most stunning can be found at the Pancake Rocks
and Blowholes near Punakaiki, in Paparoa National Park. You
can see just a bit of spray coming out of this blowhole here.

These rocks lie just offshore from a fur seal colony. We had
just enough time to spot a couple of this year's pups.

Besides the spectacular geology, I also enjoyed a bit of car window birding, glimpsing the native pigeon for the first time, and also encountering my first wekas!

NZ's endemic flightless rail in a totally native habitat. These
guys are both highly curious and highly territorial, and made
for an amusing reststop before our long drive back to Chch.