Straight after we
had vacuumed all chips' fragments and grass from the housewarming
party out of the carpet on Sunday, we left on another fieldtrip with
colleague and friend André
(it takes only little fieldwork misery to become friends…).
Instead of only 3 sites
we had now planned optimistically for at least double that amount.
Instead of North, we drove South. We passed Mount Aoraki/Cook in
perfect visibility, and 7 hours later arrived in the town of Lumsden,
where we were to stay in the Lumsden Hotel. Lumsden's motto is “this
is as Lumsden as it gets”, and we can confirm that that is true,
although not quite sure what it means…
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| Aoraki in the background, lake Pukaki in the foreground |
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| As Lumsden as it gets |
This
time the sites were much better accessible by car, which meant that
we didn't have to lug heavy equipment up and down steep canyons.
Instead, we could use all the labour intensive and equipment-rich
techniques. This included the use of “black pearls” to estimate
the volume of soil pits we dug in stony soils, and also the use of
the insanely heavy soil corer in stone-free soils. So despite the
lack of walking, it was still a physically active week, and I was
pleasantly surprised on the last day that the heavy soil core
hammerhead didn't feel heavy at all anymore. This
is not to say that everything was easy and fun. For instance, we
painstakingly dug 3 soil pits to 40 cm depth through large rocks
while a hurricane was blowing away all equipment, and the wind
direction changed constantly so that we always had soil blowing into
our faces.
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| Black pearls to estimate volume |
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| A detour to the Mavora lakes to wash the soil off our faces at the end of the day |
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| How not to use the soil corer, we had some initial difficulties to remember the method correctly... |
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| The classic soil scientist's position peering into the soil pit |
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| A soil pit with rabbit hole |
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| Car next to plot, nice and easy |
From
Lumsden we moved to the Catlins into the Papatowai motel, where I
stayed a long time ago on my first hard-core fieldwork trip in NZ.
This time it was much more pleasant and we even had time to walk the
estuary/beach and the wrong trail through the forest (had to walk
back, barely made it through the estuary before high tide).
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| Papatowai beach |
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| Papatowai motel |
And
finally we stayed in Beaumont, which kiwi's pronounce differently
from the French, which confused us and the locals alike.
We
sampled 6 sites in 5 days, destroyed 1 soil corer, ate 4 out of 8
dips left over from the housewarming party, found out that rural NZ
doesn't bake the best pizzas, and finished off with a textbook soil
directly overlying schist parent material, so all in all another
successful soil experience.
Unlike
the upcoming trip with Thomas' parents, it was very easy for this
trip to find accommodation spontaneously, so any future visitors
coming over in the busy tourist season can expect to be taken to this
very rural side of NZ that little tourists will know… Nice and
quiet!
