The Peterson Pack on the Move

We have now landed in Tasmania, the largest island but smallest state of the largest island nation in the world. Located off Australia's southern coast, Tasmania encompasses about 26,000 square miles, making it the 26th largest island in the world. Like the rest of Australia, this island has an interesting history, full of convicts, prisons, and disease. Fun times. This story starts,  like my last history lesson, with a colonial superpower. Well, it doesn't really start there. The British weren't the first people to arrive in Tasmania. Native Tasmanians, who called themselves Palawa, had been there for tens of thousands of years prior. The Palawa were a subset of Aborigines, the native people of Australia.  Aborigines first came to Australia around 50,000 years ago, back when Australia and Tasmania were connected by a land bridge. Some of them made their way to Tasmania and settled there, still coming and going from mainland Australia whenever they wanted. But, around the ...

We are in Tasmania now after spending only a week on the North Island of New Zealand. My blogging has fallen behind, taking a back seat to adventures and homeschool use of the one family computer. Our month in New Zealand was not nearly enough! There are many more places we would like to explore and places we would like to return to. Here are some brief highlights of our North Island week. We took the ferry out of Marlborough sound and across Cook Straight on a calm sunny day and enjoyed the views coming into Wellington from the rooftop of the ferry. (Hopefully you read Quillian’s post about the interislander).  In Wellington, we celebrated Quillian’s ninth birthday. We had a blast exploring the city and celebrating our girl. From the moment she came into this world she has had been a content, positive, optimistic, team player. She is so expressive and often a clown. She is affectionate and social, making friends everywhere she goes. She is always up for an adventure. She loves to ...

     The forests of New Zealand are extremely varied, with trees from native ginkgos and red beech to towering introduced redwoods. But one tree —if you can call it that —stands out from the rest of the forest. You might first mistake it for a palm tree, but if you looked on the underside of the "leaves" you might see a rusty, reddish brown dust just waiting to spread, similar to another plant that many of you are very familiar with. If you looked at its trunk, you might notice that it seems almost porous, with a pattern on its bark that looks almost like scales. It's a very odd tree, not coniferous or  deciduous. It's actually a giant prehistoric fern.      The tree fern looks a bit like a palm tree. It has a "trunk" which is actually a modified  rhizome (a sort of root) that leads up to the tree fern's head, where the trunk sprouts a bunch of fan-shaped ferns.      While the tree fern is a plant, it's different from most other pla...

Last week we spent three days in and around Abel Tasman National Park. We rented a bach (New Zealand for beach cabin or lake house) right at the boundary of the national park, complete with cows in the front yard and a bathtub on the deck. We could walk right into the park from our front yard, but we also used a water taxi to get farther into the park for a day hike.  This is the lovely bach that we rented right at the boundary of the national park.  The water taxi operations are quite different from what we are used to in Alaska. The passengers (18 of us on a boat about 25 feet long) are loaded onto the boat on a trailer on dry land and life jackets are donned. The boat on the trailer is pulled by a tractor from the base of operations, through the streets of the small town (picking up other passengers along the way), and to the boat ramp. At the ramp the tractor backs the boat right into the water and off we go! On the return trip the tide was out, therefore the tractors driv...

 My family and I went on a ferry boat today. The name of the ferry was Interislander. It started in Picton and went to Wellington. It crossed the body of water called Cook straight, going from the South Island of New Zealand to the North Island. It was a massive boat! It was so big that semis could fit on it and still not tip or sink it. On the inside of the ferry there was a cinema, a cafe, a restaurant, and a small playground. We took some seats that were padded on the left side of the boat. I dragged my mom with me to read the sign next to the playground. My mom read it and then said, “7 and under.” I couldn’t use the playground, so I decided to read. By the time I had been reading for one and a half hours I was done with my book. We got some pizza and played D & D. Then we went up deck and I fell asleep for the next hour. Overall it was a very fun trip!

Explorers do funny things. Christopher Columbus found the Americas but believed he had landed in India to his dying day. James Cook named a place the Sandwich Islands. Marco Polo moved two islands with a typo. Oh and also, the Europeans invented a new continent to balance the Earth. The concept of the continent Terra Australis was first theorized in the time of the Greco-Roman Empires and appeared on maps in the 15th century. The idea was that continental land mass in the Northern Hemisphere must be balanced by land mass in the Southern Hemisphere. The result was a giant landmass occupying an area similar to where we know Antarctica is today. So in a way, they were kind of right. They just misjudged the size.  Marco Polo accidentally added to this supposed continent with a slip of the pen in his third book. This book cataloged his voyage from China to India. Along the way, he passed through Champa (modern southern Vietnam), as well as the islands of Locach (modern Lopburi) and Suma...

 At 12:51pm on Tuesday February 22, 2011 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake caused a lot of damage in Christchurch and Lyttelton, New Zealand, killing 185 people and injuring several thousand.  The earthquake's epicenter was near Lyttelton just a short ways away from the central town. It happened nearly 6 months after the September 4th, 2010 earthquake. The earthquake struck at lunchtime when many people were on the streets. More than 130 people lost their lives in the collapse of a television company and the Pyne Gould corporation. Although not as powerful as the earthquake on September 4, 2010 which was 7.1 magnitude, this quake happened on a shallow fault line close to the city so the shaking was particularly destructive.  On Friday November 30, 2018 at 8:30 am two back-to-back earthquakes measuring 7.0 and 5.8 struck the Anchorage, Alaska area. The 7.0 magnitude quake was centered about 8 miles north of Anchorage on Cook Inlet. I remember this earthquake because I was in Litt...

     In many ways, New Zealand is a lot like Alaska. It has mountains, friendly people, and the climate is pretty similar. It's a bit warmer, but overall the mountainous terrain, cold ocean, glaciers, and windy conditions make it seem a lot like home. Right now it's summer here, and the temperature is about seventeen degrees Celsius, or 63 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is nice and cool compared to the scorching temperatures in French Polynesia.       But what I didn't expect is how easily I burn here. It's not crazy, but definitely not what you expect from a place that's cloudy and sixty degrees. In high summer you can burn within minutes of stepping outside if you don't wear the proper protection. This is due to an interesting atmospheric phenomenon.      Above Antarctica, the ozone layer, which protects us from ultraviolet radiation, thins due to a complex chain of meteorological events. And, as is the case with many other destructive weat...

I think that "Kiwi" should be recognized as its own language. Really, all their sentences sound like questions and their speaking is so rapid-fire that it can be difficult to tell what they're saying. And that's not even mentioning the slang. New Zealanders , otherwise known as "Kiwis," have all sorts of different slang and local parlance, which is words and technology specific to a region. To an outsider, it can be challenging to tell what they're talking about when they say that they were "tramping out in  the wup-wups." But, as I spend more time here, I'm starting to get a hang of it.  First off, you might be very confused if you're looking at a restaurant's menu and you see that they put tomato sauce on their burger. There's no need to panic —it's just ketchup.  French fries are called chips, and chips are  called chippies (Kiwis love slapping a "y" on the end of a word).  For the next time you run into a Kiwi,...

 What is the difference between real fruit ice cream and normal ice cream? Let me explain... New Zealand style ice cream, also known as real fruit ice cream, is a popular concept in New Zealand. A machine ( like the Little Gem ) takes hard packed ice cream and mixes real frozen fruit into it creating an amazing, delicious, soft serve ice cream. Traditionally, real fruit ice cream is made with a vanilla base. So far in New Zealand I have seen boysenberry, raspberry, strawberry, and mixed berry fruit. I tried boysenberry and it was not very sweet, with a smooth and fluffy texture, like a pillow. According to the New York Times, the United States is just catching on to real fruit ice cream, but now with brand new flavors with tons of candy, sprinkles, chocolate sauce, and sweet stuff. Personally, I would much rather have the New Zealand real fruit ice cream compared to the American sweet stuff.  - QUILLIAN :) -Source:  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/dining/new-zealand-re...

We traveled from Tahiti to New Zealand last week. Upon landing in New Zealand, we could not get over the friendliness of the people. Everywhere we went (including the customs office) it seemed like people were jumping up to help us. That has continued into this week. We spent a morning in Christchurch exploring the Riverside Market and the Botanical Garden. We all felt like we would have liked to stay longer, however the Banks Track was waiting for us. We stocked up on treats for the hike (keeping the French Polynesian philosophy of never being without a baguette or two) and drove to Akaroa.  There we met up with the eight other people (seven Kiwis and one from Wales) who would be walking the Banks Track over three days. We were delivered to the first homestead, Onuku.  Each of the sleeping accommodations on the trail is an old homestead with its own character and quirks. Our gear was transported for us daily, we only carried clothing layers, water, and food. The trail was so ...

As we have continued on our travels, we have spent a lot of time in tropical areas and discovered an unfortunate fact. Well, unfortunate for some. The mosquitos in the French Polynesian islands are of a particularly vicious variety: they crawl through the smallest holes in our bug nets, they swarm you whenever you step into the forest, and as an added bonus the bites swell too, getting far more inflamed than the Alaskan mosquito bites that we are used to. Despite all of this, I remain relatively unmarred. You should see my dad and sister —they look like chicken pox victims. But  my mom and I only have a few bites here and  there, similar to a typical  Alaskan summer. This leads us to a pretty commonly asked question (or at least in our family). Are some people tastier to mosquitos than others? The answer isn't as simple as it might sound. Research has shown that many factors can influence mosquito attraction, the carbon  dioxide in your breath, and even the color of ...

We have spend the past week on the French Polynesian atoll of Fakarava in the Tuamoto archipelago. As on Rangiroa, we found the Tuamoto people friendly and happy hosts.  People, even teenagers, make eye contact and wave, saying “la Orana” in greeting as we pass on our townie bikes.   The island and beaches are very clean and the  beach combing is the best I have ever found.  The day has a different rhythm than we are used to. Everything starts as soon as the sun is up, with the few stores opening at 5:30 am and closing again at noon in the heat. Everything shuts down from noon to three and its anybody's guess after that.  I was twice greeted by sunrise rainbows! The seas on the inside of the atoll have been much calmer, often almost glassy, something we saw only briefly on Rangiroa. The sea life is like nothing I have seen anywhere. Sharks, coral, fish, eels, just off shore and easily seen from land or a snorkel in front of our cabin.  “Snack” restaurants a...

                On the oceanside of Fakarava my mom and I found pink sand. We wondered how it was formed. We had some theories like crushed pink coral or broken up orange rocks. It turns out the little one-celled organism, foraminifera, makes pink sand.       Foraminifera, forams for short, are single-celled organisms with shells called tests that are made of calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is the same material found in shells of other marine organisms such as coral, lobsters, and muscles.       Forams are not considered animals because they do not have bodies that are divided up into multiple cells. However, they are also not quite like plants because they do not have photosynthesis like plants and algae. As a result, foraminifera are clarified separately from both plants and animals in a group called protists. Protists are found in most fresh water and salt water environments. The majorit...