A perilous place!

Don't follow me!

Well it was inevitable that we would face some wild weather at some point seeing as we're just north of Antarctica. A powerful southerly gale pushed into Wellington and battered the coast. This is a view of Petone at the height of the storm on Friday and widespread flooding caused no end of problems. We had scheduled a park run at Lower Hutt very close to this scene on the next morning. However the major surprise was that, of the three parkruns in Lower North Island, this was the only one to go ahead. Straight into the teeth of the storm we went facing 40 mph winds - we did get blown back fairly swiftly though and I managed 10th in 20.52 knocking well over a minute off the previous V60 record. In 71st Vicky was trailed by a good many others and came back strongly in 34.26.

Australia has poisonous snakes, spiders, hungry crocs, dangerous plants and more whereas there's none of this stuff in NZ. However the Kiwis are definitely conscious of being in a dangerous part of the world. This is the headline from the Dominion Post, which is Wellington's daily paper, warning that a major quake is overdue. Since the earthquake that caused major damage and killed 185 people in Christchurch in 2011, there have been several more of at least equal magnitude. On top of this there are a number of volcanoes waiting to 'go off'. In addition there are other natural phenomena which are firm evidence of dodgy activity not far below ground. As we drove through the middle of North Island, Vicky spotted what she thought were bonfires in the distance. These were, in fact, steam vents releasing superheated water from below ground.  The pungent smell of sulphur wafted through the car windows, the sky darkened, fire and brimstone gathered around us and the end of the word nearly became nigh. Foot on the accelerator and we got through by the skin of our teeth and were able to stop off for a nice meat pie for lunch in the gumboot capital of the world (more of this later!)

There's a kettle boiling somewhere!

Did you leave the keys in the car darling?

Another unnerving consequence of the Christchurch earthquake was something called liquefaction, nothing at all to do with milkshakes it's the result of rapid vibrations in the ground during a quake. In scientific terms it's a process within a mass of soil where the soil particles lose contact with one another. Basically solid earth temporarily turns into quicksand resulting in remarkable scenes like this. All in all New Zealand seems to have it's fair share of hazards!