Supples’ Pub

Well, another long day has come to an end. I’m remembering that I’m happier in my day to day grind at home, but that’s for another post.

We’ve been around to quite a few cool places around here. Hell, just driving around exposes you to all kinds of beautiful scenery.

This is a pretty common sight when you get outside any major city. There are plenty of cows, sheep (freshly shorn), horses and various crops spread across seemingly endless farms. Need a Christmas tree? There’s even a farm for that - a very nice gentleman who specializes in growing all types of Christmas-type trees, where we got ours (which still needs decorating).

Greytown, where we are staying, is pretty much in the valley between a couple mountain ranges - as you can see on the left.

Just as it looks, take a glance in one direction or the other and you will see sweeping mountain ranges. As we are in the prime of summer, with hot days in the 80 degree range, the skies are a bright blue with intense formations of white clouds. Apparently, New Zealand is known for its cloud formations - they can be quite unique.

Our first major excursion was to the Tararua Forest Park, a dense rainforest type of park which you can see in the higher elevated regions northwest of Greytown in the map above.

As you can see, the tree cover was pretty dense in most places. This was welcome, as it was a hair bit toasty when in direct sunlight while being near perfectly temperate in the shade or with a good breeze. It was truthfully a lot of the same in the forest - just a ton of greenage, some interesting looking trees and the feeling of a pretty unique landscape on the whole.

Kat posing for size comparison

Apparently one of the few natural problems NZ has are possums, as there was a big warning sign not to play with the posion dropped to kill them. This wasn’t even just in the forest, as I saw this sign elsewhere around NZ.

It’s interesting, because NZ is generally very restrictive over what comes in & out of their borders. There are almost no poisonous animals, few natural predators on the whole, they sanitize your hiking/golfing/etc shoes to make sure you don’t bring in any parasites from soil you’ve been in. But apparently the possums are out of their control and poison is the remedy.

On day 3 we ventured into Wellington, about 70km away from Greytown and the closest major city. I’ve got a ton of pictures from wandering around downtown and the harbor, as well as the very cool, super windy road around the mountains to get into Wellington.

For now, I’ll leave you with a few more pictures that I liked. Of course check out my photo sets on Flickr for the full range of photos.

NZ Scenery set
NZ Forest set