Treading Dangerously!

There she blows - well hopefully not just yet!

This is an impressive sight - if you can see it, unfortunately for the duration of our stay in New Plymouth it was covered in dense cloud. However we thought we'd go and pay it a visit and drove up to the visitor centre. Taranaki is an active volcano and is currently over 8000 feet high. According to the vulcanologists it is overdue for a major eruption! Because it looks very much like Mount Fuji, they filmed the epic movie The Last Samurai here which starred Tom Cruise and, for some reason, Billy Connolly and Timothy Spall!

And here we are, well here is Vicky and here's me taking the photo. This was about half an hour or so quick tramp up the mountain from the visitor centre, so we were well higher than the top of Snowdon. You can see the start of the snow line in the top left hand corner of the picture and I went up as far as the beginning of the ridge that you can see beyond the end of the tree line (with the land slip off to the left - there seem to be plenty of land slips in New Zealand!) It was pretty nippy up here but we'd climbed vigorously through the New Zealand rainforest to get to this point so were warm enough. Didn't see another soul on the mountain but then again this is the start of their winter. And they don't call them hikers over here - as in the US we fall into the category of 'trampers'!

On our way to Wellington we listened to the car radio and heard the most casual news flash ever along the lines of: 'Hey guys, there's just been a 'quake down at Queenstown, if anyone knows anything 'bout it can they give us a call!' And for the next half hour folk rang in arguing whether or not it was a 'shaker' or a 'roller' and bragging about how many plates had fallen off the sideboard. It's all very laid back!

Not seen Polly for 100.000,000 years - does she still talk rubbish?

And also on the way to Wellington we stayed overnight with Chris and Fran's very nice relatives who lived on Denbigh Road at Feilding (no that's not a misspelling). Despite being over here for 50 years Alan has a very pleasant broad Derbyshire accent.
We managed to also sneak into an aviary in Palmerston North to spot some rare New Zealand birds including a Kaka which eventually we discovered is the Maori word for parrot! These are distant relations to the rest of the world's parrots and they split off from the rest of them 100 million years ago.

Final word on the pies here - even better than the pies in Australia - Vicky had a Lamb, Rosemary and Kumara pie yesterday - yummy!