Nau mai, haere mai!

Time to start the blog up again.

Journey to Te Ika-a-Māui is the next project, a trip to the North Island of New Zealand, arriving on February 11 in the wee minutes of the morning and leaving on April 7, 2015. There is still a lot to see and do.

First and foremost on the programme are the remaining Great Walks of the North Island, the Whanganui River Journey and the Tongariro Northern Circuit. Twice on previous visits have I tried to go over the Tongariro Crossing, but to no avail. Having more time this time around and a better season for mountain climbing, this should be doable at some point.

The Whanganui River Journey, although titled a “Great Walk” is really a great waka journey, 150 km and 5 days down the river. I’ll claim for now that I never wavered in my resolution to complete the necessary preparations for this, and will leave the details for another blog. And, of course, once I’m on my way in a kayak, there is much more of New Zealand to discover.

Secondly, photography, photography, photography. I simply don’t think I can take enough pictures – would 20,000 in an afternoon be enough? Just to give you a taste for things to come, here’s what I’m aiming for:

• Time lapse of some of the kayak trips, and perhaps some car footage;
• Time lapse of sunrises and sunsets, thermal areas (Lady Knox Geyser?), clouds forming and evaporating, rivers, waterfalls, stars and the Milky Way, yea, if needs be sheep grazing in a field;
• The eclipse of the moon, April 4-5, and I’ll drive nearly anywhere to get the most of the clouds out of the way.

The technical preparations for the photography will be the subject of another blog, needless to say, we are still with the Canons, CHDK, and a couple of further developments concerning both the cameras and the processing software.

Thirdly, writing. The travel diaries continue to develop, and this is a perfect opportunity to try an extended format (800 words, instead of 500), with the aim again of producing a richly illustrated book. The first time around I did this just to unite the two paper diaries I was recording in. I had one smaller volume, more easily transportable, for the hikes, where weight and space was at a premium, and a larger volume for the other times. I’ll continue this practice this time around. What I did notice about the 500-word format, apart from being extremely easy to write, was that it was very compacted to the point of being unable to record all the details I could have recorded. Well, not all of those details are going to be interesting, but the new format will allow the project some room to relax in, to spin out a tale or two.

Having said that, I started off the final preparations by buying a travel guide by National Geographic for this tour, and this has been the greatest mistake thus far. I’ll discuss in a later blog the utter nonsense that goes for travel information at NG, but it occurred to me that I could both write an account of my travels, and include some actually pragmatic travel advice at the same time. Much to my surprise, the first book has sold a couple of copies, and the presentations that I did for the Great Walks of the South Island were well attended and received, so that I get to do that presentation one more time before heading off on the new adventure, and to exhibit around 50 photos as part of the medium term exhibition at the Centre for Applied Languages where I work. The final presentation will take place on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, from 7:00 pm in the Bahlsen Lecture Theatre (F 303), Leibniz University Hannover, Welfengarten 1, admission free. It focuses on the three Great Walks that I did in 2013 (Rakiura/North-West Circuit, Abel Tasman, Milford) with GoogleEarth flyovers of the GPS data I collected, and the edited short films I put together from the stills. This event will also double as the vernissage of the exhibition.

Finally (if finally makes much sense here), I’ll be doing the rounds of Skeptics in the Pub, wherever I can find the time, with a new talk called “The Skeptics’ Dilemma” about the problem that “You can drag a person to knowledge, but you cannot make them think.” How can a skeptic effectively change other people’s minds, when telling them that they are wrong is possibly the least effective method? As it turns out, believers are no less knowledgeable than skeptics for the most part, so what makes one a believer, and the other a skeptic? Stay tuned to find out, as the sketches for this talk will be prepublished here in several instalments.

This all means that the next trip is holiday from work, but working holiday, for which the expense account has already taken on substantial proportions.