The land of the long white cloud.

New Zealand is not called ‘The Land of the Long WhiteCloud’ for nothing.  When you fly into New Zealand, the first thing you see is cloud, a long white cloud marking the land. And flying in on Tuesday, sure enough, right along the North Island and over Mount Egmont, there was the cloud.

New Zealand is made up of two main islands, both long and narrow with a spine of mountains running from the south of the south island to midway up the north island and into the sea. The country is basically built on a huge fault line in the earth, on the ‘ring of fire’ tectonic plate, and also known as ‘The Shaky Isles’, because New Zealand experiences many earthquakes.

Yesterday we drove from Masterton to Napier, along the east side of the main ranges. There were some interesting cloud formations along the ranges so I have put a couple here.

Cloud formation over the ranges east of Woodville.

We were also interested to see the expansion of the Woodville wind farm. There are many more of these wind turbines now. I’m not sure how much power they get off these, but it must be a bit.

 The rivers along the east of New Zealand are almost dry. We have been amazed to see what is normally a reasonably sized river practically non existent. Another sign of the drought.

The Tukituki river outside Waipukurau, practically non existent.

It is also very very dry along this way. Most of the North Island is now drought declared, and they say this is going to cost the country lots of money in lost milk etc. Production is falling and farmers are using their winter feed now. The short term forecast is for more dry weather although the long term is for rain during autum.  It is really interesting to listen to the radio and see the major differences. In New Zealand, rural matters predominate. In Australia, farming is important, but mining is high on the list of topics, along with satisfaction or dissatisfaction with how the country is being run.