Plants

We left the northern most part of New Zealand and headed down the west coast, eager to check out the Kauri trees that we had heard so much about.  Now I've seen some big trees, but these trees were BIG!  They are amazing huge trees, not so much tall as wide, and were heavily harvested for their timber value when Europeans settled NZ.  There aren't too many left, but they still harvest down trees out of swamps.  They make some pretty interesting products out of it, including sculptures and couches and stairways out of single trees.  They also sell little blocks of rough cut wood for about eight dollars for five cubic inches.  Ok, it's cool, but maybe not that cool.  The really cool thing about these trees in my opinion is how many other plants live on them, and just how big they are. The first Kauri tree we saw (well, that we knew what it was) was Tane Mahuta, god of the forest who separated earth and sky.  

Tane Mahuta, the perspective is a bit off, it's actually bigger than it looks in that picture because I'm standing on the rail about ten feet away from it. 

Four sisters, again, perspective is a bit lacking, but  lets just say if you wanted to hug one of the sisters, no way you could get your arms all the way around.

National symbol

In order to help protect the Kauri trees, we washed our feet before and after walking in the forests to help prevent kauri die back disease.  

We saw a lot of weird plants today, but I think these were the weirdest!