Goodnes Gracious Green Specks of Light

New Zealand is famous for many things, and one of them are the caves of glow worms. Green glow in the dark spots, tiny pin pricks on the cave walls. While there is not enough light to light up the cave, there are often enough of them to define the shape of the rocks. So the challenge was to find and photograph them. Never done that before, but it was worth a go. A cave in Waipu, North Island of New Zealand provided the opportunity. This is not a ‘tourist cave’, stuck about 20km from the nearest town down a windy and steep dirt track, with no guide or laid out path inside. But with camera, tripod and a brand new head torch brought an hour before we set out.

Down a muddy path into the darkness and through and along a stream to the glow worm chamber, with only our torches picking out parts of the cave as we made our way along. Then about 30 minutes playing around with different conditions to try to photograph them while standing in the same stream trying not to either slip over or knock the camera into the water. The result:  A panorama of Glow Worms.

Well take a look and decide if it was worth it. I said before that the worms do not provide enough light to show up the rock face. The images taken for this had a 30 second shutter delay, and I played torchlight over the walls of the cave to begin to pick out the rock, while it remained dark enough for the glow worm’s glow to still show through. I am pleased with the results, I think it is a pretty unique image, and not bad for a first time effort. Maybe one day I will get a second shot at it…

To Surf a Couch

2 months on the road so far and only 2 hotel nights used. Quite amazing really. Some of this has been through friends, but a lot has been with total strangers through www.couchsurfing.com – a site that links travellers with people who open up homes and allow them to stay. This is an amazing travel resource, and can lead to quite amazing experiences. Here are some of the highlights I have had:

* Staying on a farm in the Hunter Valley region of Oz where the ‘roos came onto the lawn at dawn and dusk, there were fantastic night skies and a barbie was duly turned on and a bear opened on my arrival. Great place to relax and unwind at the end of a day.

* Staying with a marketing manager in Hong Kong who is also a stand up comedian at nights in the middle of Central, a fantastic way to get a taste of this highly paced city. To get there took 20 minutes on a series of escalators to ‘Mid Level’ which only go down in the morning and then up in the afternoon.

* A wooden hut on a hillside in North New Zealand with a self sufficient family with almost 10 children who had built their own home, were upgrading to another they were in the midst of building, had built their own hydro dam and to practice a stone wall building method, made a swimming pool. Another world. Kept ‘company’ by a possum that insisted on dancing on the corrugated roof for the night.

* A gypsy caravan on the west coast of South Island owned by a couple from Cambridge (UK) who had moved out to set up their own self sufficient area. Shared with dogs, cats, chickens and other assorted. Fantastic place.

* A home made sailing boat built by hand by the person living on it over a 2 year period in Lyttleton harbour. What a great  last night on South Island. Would love to have had the time to spend a few days there.

And that is just a few of the fantastic shows of hospitality I have received over the last 2 months from various people in various places. So, with all my limbs still intact I am about to finish New Zealand and head for Fiji.

Sitting on a Brick

The modern world is an amazing place really. I type this sitting on a brick on a pavement in a suburb of Melbourne ‘borrowing’ someone’s internet signal. Sadly there is no street light nearby, so this is liable to be full of a number of typos as it is really quite dark. Thankfully the temperature has now dropped a little from the 42C it was earlier in the day.

It is now 2008, so Happy New Years to one and all. How did you spend yours? I had fun being taken to a party and knowing only one person there. We were provided with fantastic food, which continued to pass before us on a never ending conveyor belt as the hostess continued to circle with numerous changing plates of snacks.

First there were home made mince meat rolls with fine, flaky puff pastry and spiced meat, followed by samosas exquistetly filled with more spiced fillings. All was home made. Tiny bisquits with cheese and smoked salmon then paraded round the room. Next came tiger prawn tails fried in a variety of spices, oozing flavour and succulent. Small pita breads home baked with a ricotta cheese spread followed by fried BBQ style lamb cutlets and chicken wings. Then came the deserts… I think we managed to finish eating just in time to pop the poppers as midnight rolled by.

And throughout the evening the ladies experimented with a variety of cocktail recipies. Truly an evening to remember, let alone a New Years to remember. I have had a fantastic time in the last few days, seeing the Great Ocean Road and topping it off with this.

Just 2 more days and then off to New Zealand.