If you have ever wondered if sea lions fart, well here is your answer:

PASSENGERS have condemned the trial of new airport x-ray technology dubbed the “virtual strip search”, saying they fear images of their genitals will end up on Facebook and MySpace.

Children could be screened by pedophiles, while pregnant women could be exposed to radiation if the new technology is accepted, say news.com.au readers.

The full-body scanner, on trial in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide airports from this month, allows screeners to detect non-metallic devices, objects and weapons concealed on a person’s body. It also reveals body outlines, organs and genitals.  [News.com]

If this technology means that I don’t have to empty my pockets, take off my shoes, or belt at airport security anymore then I would be all for it.

The small village of Kaikoura (Pop: 3,621) is located on a relatively flat peninsula of land that extends out into the ocean and is backdropped by large and dramatic snow capped peaks:

For someone originally from Colorado, it sure was nice to see such large snow capped mountains that cannot be found in Australia, though Mt. Feathertop in Northeat Victoria and the Snow Mountains of New South Wales do a decent impersonation of the much higher and impressive peaks of Colorado and New Zealand.

It was late November when we visited New Zealand and that night sleeping in our campervan was actually a little cold.  For those that don’t know late November in the Southern Hemisphere would be late Spring in the Northern Hemisphere.  During our stay on the North Island the weather was mostly beautiful and warm with the only coldness I felt was when I hiked through sometimes freezing temperatures in Tongariro National Park.

The next morning we woke up and headed over to Whale Watch Kaikoura, which as the name of the company suggests, is a company that launches whale watching tours off the coast of Kaikoura:

Kaikoura is famous in New Zealand for the abundance of whales that flock around the peninsula.  The Kaikoura peninsula that extends out into the ocean is surrounded by extremely deep water. Here is a nice picture of the peninsula from the Wings Over Whales website:

Less then a mile from the peninsula’s coast is what scientists call the Kaikoura Canyon which is a massive geologic complex with trenches that plunge to depths of 22,000 feet (6,705 meters):

This geologic complex is popular with scientist because it is rich with sea life and one of the few places in the world where scientists actively search to film giant squids that live in the canyon.  The sea life of this canyon was well known even before scientists discovered it because the original inhabitants of the peninsula, the Maori, named the peninsula Kaikoura, which in the local dialect means “feast of crayfish” because of the large catches of seafood they would harvest from the peninsula’s surrounding waters.

However, with the arrival of the Europeans the area became popular with whalers that set up a whaling station on the peninsula:

Remains of the whaling station along with a historic home known as the Fyfe House, from the whaling days gone by can still be seen today on the peninsula:

Whales continue to be a big part of the local economy today, but now it is now for hunting them but instead helping tourists to see them.  Unfortunately for my wife and I we would not have the opportunity to get out on the ocean and see Kaikoura’s famous whales ourselves because Whale Watch had suspended its tours due to winds that were causing high waves.  It was windy out but the weather appeared to be pretty nice overall.  However, I guess out in the deeper water where the whales were located the waves must have been pretty high for them to suspend the tours.  They told us to check in later in the afternoon to see if the weather improves.

So my wife and decided to spend the morning walking up and down the sea shore of Kaikoura:

Along the beach it wasn’t uncommon to see fishermen looking to catch some of Kaikoura’s abundant seafood themselves:

After walking up and down the beach we decided to check out the downtown area of the city next.  The city of Kaikoura is very small, a bit uninspiring, and totally focused on catering to tourists.  There is a number of hotels and hostels in the town along with all the nice little quaint tourist stores that sell plenty of whale and New Zealand related items:

Truthfully there isn’t a whole lot to see in the town and the real attractions of Kaikoura is the wildlife that surrounds the peninsula.  A great place to see this wildlife is to drive to the far tip of the peninsula where a large sea lion colony lives. The tip of the peninsula is extremely rocky and the type of terrain sea lions like to live on:

We walked out on the rocks in search of the sea lions and along the way we had the opportunity to see birds that were poking around the pools of water probably looking for fish to eat:

We did eventually find what we were looking for out on the rocks and that was the sea lion colony.  If you look closely, in the below photograph you can see the black shapes of sea lions both in the foreground and background:

On some of the outlying rocks where the majority of the sea lions were located, we could actually see divers swimming out there to see the sea lions.  My wife and I were not about to do that when we could just do some rock scrambling and get near some of the sea lions that were located on the more inland rocks:

We approached this sea lion and it seemed like he actually liked having his picture taken.  Every time I would pull up my camera he would strike a pose:

This sea lion was really tame and soon enough more and more tourists came over to where we were at to take pictures of this sea lion and he seemed to enjoy every minute of it:

This sea lion wasn’t alone though.  He had a female sea lion that was dosing near him:

We eventually had a group of probably around 30 tourists now mobbed around the sea lions which of course meant plenty of noise which didn’t seem to go over well with the female sea lion who woke up and gave the crowd an angry look:

After giving the crowd an angry look, the female sea lion then began to walk out back into the ocean and even took a big stinky fart to let us know what she thought of us tourists spoiling her beauty sleep:

She was eventually out to sea and gone:

However, her male friend had no intentions of joining her.  The male sea lion was continuing to have a ball posing for photographs for the increasingly bigger and bigger mob of tourists:

After checking out the sea lions, my wife and I then drove back to Kaikoura to see if the whale watching tours had restarted.  Unbelievabley despite what appeared to be nice weather, all the whale watching tours were cancelled for the entire day because of the wind.  It was extremely dissapointing, but the Whale Watch Kaikoura folks told us to come back tommorow morning and hopefully the weather would improve.

We hoped it would because we were really looking forward to the whale watching tour.

Next Posting: From Kaikoura to Hamner Springs

A LEADING American travel magazine has panned Sydney Airport and Qantas in an annual poll of readers.

The Conde Nast Traveler magazine’s annual survey of business world travellers, published in its October edition, gave Australia’s busiest airport a 48.2 rating out of 100, Fairfax has reported.

Singapore was named the best international airport with a 79.8 rating.

Customs, baggage, food, shops and amenities were the categories in which Sydney dropped the most points.

A Sydney Airport spokesman said it was not fair to judge the facility before the completion of a massive $500 million upgrade that began in February.

Embattled airline Qantas - which has weathered damage to its safety record in recent times - ranked seventh in a list of 10 airlines offering business class flights on trans-Pacific routes.

Australia again lost out to Singapore whose national carrier rated top in all categories.  [AAP]

I totally agree with the findings in regards to Sydney Airport.  I hate having to connect through there because I have had bad experiences with the customs people who were rude and hate having to wait to take a bus between terminals that takes forever to show up.  One time I waited nearly 25 minutes for a bus to show up and where I was waiting had either no air conditioning or it was broken.  Not a pleasant experience.  I try to avoid the airport if possible by taking direct flights from Melbourne which has a much easier airport to fly in and out of compared to Sydney.

Australia and the US could learn a lot about airport management by checking out some of the Asian airports such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Incheon, & Narita which are all far superior then any airport the US and Australia have.

The ranking of Quantas I think is driven by recent safety issues.  I have never had any problems flying on Quantas and find them to be a good airline.  If there discount carrier JetStar is included then maybe that knocked them down a bit because I flew on them before and was not impressed.  Bottom line is I am going to keep flying Quantas and avoiding Sydney Airport at all costs.

A Desert plain in Australia may become the world’s largest source of meteorites, according to preliminary surveys which have already recovered more than 1000 fragments of stones and lumps of iron from space. The fragments are of about 150 meteorites that fell up to 20 000 years ago. An initial analysis of the fragments suggests that the proportions of different kinds of meteorite have changed significantly over the millennia.

The new source of meteorites is the Nullarbor Plain, an area of limestone that stretches for 600 kilometres along the south coast of Western Australia and South Australia. Alex Bevan, of the Western Australian Museum in Perth, has been leading the search for meteorites in this region. He says it is unusually easy to find meteorites on the plain, because the pale smooth limestone pavement provides a perfect background for spotting the meteorites, which are dark brown or black. In addition, the barren plain has very little vegetation to cover up the meteorites (its name comes from the Latin nulla arbor, meaning no trees).

The aridity of the Nullarbor Plain has not only made meteorites easy to spot, but it has also prevented rain and chemical reactions from eroding them. There is no shifting sand to cover them, as there would be in other desert regions. ‘We can pick them up from the surface just where they fell,’ says Bevan, ‘possibly as long as 16 000 to 18 000 years ago, when the region began to experience severe aridity.’ [New Scientist]

Read the rest of the article but it goes on to explain how the Nullarbor has gone on to replace Antarctica as the top place to look for meteorite fragments. Some of these fragments are especially large. For example one fragment, found in 1966 near Mundrabilla Siding, WA, weighed in at an incredible 11 tonnes.

You can see my own pictures of the Nullarbor Plain here and here.

and even more sheep:

The South Island was actually reminding me of Victoria back in Australia with its rolling green fields of agricultural land until the single lane highway we were following to Kaikoura headed directly for these large mountains covered in brilliant yellow flowers:

I have no idea what these flowers were but as we drove through these mountains it was incredible how the mountains were absolutely covered with this flower:

The main single lane highway between Christchurch and Kaikoura twists and turns through these quite scenic mountains:

I don’t know for sure it appears these mountains have been heavily logged and turned into grazing land which has allowed this yellow flower to flourish:

I think the yellow flower is actually a weed called a gorse which is a foreign species to New Zealand that is proving difficult to eradicate.  As we began to descend down the mountain range towards the sea shore the yellow flower was suddenly gone and replace with fantastic green scenery:

There was still plenty of grazing land but this time instead of sheep and cows we saw lots of deer farms:

The road quickly descended down the mountains and before we knew it we had reached the sea shore:

The seashore did not have any real beaches and was really quite rocky in some places:

These rocks were quite popular with the local birds though:

Looking towards the south back towards the range of mountains I had crossed was really quite scenic with the rolling hills descending into the border ocean waves:

As we continued driving down the coast we soon could see a peninsula of land sticking out towards the ocean in the distance:

It is on this peninsula that our destination the city of Kaikoura awaited.

Next Posting: The Kaikoura Peninsula

After completing our tour around the North Island we then took an Air New Zealand flight to the major South Island city of Christchurch.  The airport at Christchurch really wasn’t all that impressive and actually fairly run down compared to the pretty decent airport that Auckland has.  It didn’t matter though because we got through the airport pretty fast and waited outside for a shuttle bus to take us to  Britz Campervan Rentals:

My wife and I have used Britz campervans before to get around both the Northern Territory and Western Australia and were quite happy with our experience renting a campervan.  My wife and I decided that on the North Island we would stay at hotels and use a rental car, while on the South Island we would rough it a bit and use the campervan to camp around the South Island.  Since it was just the two of us we rented the smallest campervan, the HiTop:

Here are the features that comes with the HiTop campervan:

Features:

• Solar Portable Handheld Shower
• Gas Stove
• Fridge
• Microwave
• Air-Conditioning / heating (Driver’s Cabin only)
• Unleaded Petrol
• Manual Transmission
• Power Steering
• Kitchen Kit
• 1 double bed, 1 single bed
• Radio / Cassette or CD Player

Here is what the campervan we picked up in New Zealand looked like:

Picking up the campervan in New Zealand was actually quite a bit more easier and pleasant experience compared to picking up a Britiz campervan in Australia.  I was in out of the office in less then a half hour compared to when we spent hours waiting to pickup our campervan in Darwin.

Anyway like I said we were in and out of the campervan rental office and on our way on our trip around the South Island.  Our planned itinerary was to do a loop around the island by first going to Kaikoura, before driving over the Southern Alps and the West Coast of the island, before crossing back over the mountains to Queenstown and the surrounding areas before heading back to Christchurch again:

It was going to be an incredible experience for sure and our journey was to begin by first making the drive north to the seaside location of Kaikoura.

Next Posting: North to Kaikoura

THE dollar was trading lower this morning, falling below 80 US cents and at a three-year low against the Japanese yen after the US Congress rejected the US government’s rescue plan for troubled financial firms.

At 10am (AEST), the Australian dollar was trading at 79.85 US cents, down 2.35 US cents from yesterday’s close of 82.20 US cents.

The Australian dollar opened the local session at 7am (AEST) at 80.49 US cents, but quickly fell below 80 US cents as risk aversion took hold.

Since 7am (AEST), the local currency has traded between a low of 79.37 US cents, its lowest level since September 18, and a high of 80.46 US cents.  [News.com]