it's not every day one can say their being hunted... sadly people of the web wide world this is one of those days for me (come to think of it, does this happen to other people ever or just me?).
ms. rhonwyn warned me that mythical creatures may very well be after me on this job she sent me on... who knew 3 dusty old maori baskets could be that desirable. needless to say i've now met my tracker (what if there are more out there come to think of it?!?)...
something that calls itself whiro, and is clearly maori related... though i have no clue at moment what or who whiro is... once i'm out of danger i'll be looking up a BUNCH of stuff in this maori book i bought back in invercargill (why didn't i follow ms. rhonwyn instructions in the first place?).
the reason this situation has become particularly pronounced is that whiro tracked me down in milford sound. one of the most isolated and remote areas in all of new zealand. there is only one road in and out of the whole region, and as best i can tell whiro is now waiting for me somewhere on it...
so i'm now driving my way out of the fiordland as fast as i can (within safety limits... the roads here are really treacherous!)
i'd been making great progress. i hadn't even needed to stop to hit the little dinosaur room (considering how scared i was i kinda needed to go sooner or later). i was 3/4 of the way back to te anau when ahead on the road i noticed something...
a car... now this was not in and of itself abnormal. i'd passed probably a hundred, and i'm not exaggerating. a hundred cars. milford sound is a very popular tourist spot... this car though had glowy green headlights... which i've never seen before...it was also speeding. i hoped that somehow it was just someone really wanting to see milford.
as it approached the sun glinted off it funny (or at least what i could see through the blinding aura of it's green high beams). it was as though the surface of the car were... oh no! green rock!!!
it made no sense, but somehow an ancient maori being was a car?!? i thought miss rhonwyn only mythical creatures would be after me... not demon cars too!!!
oh well i thought as it was about to rocket past me on the road. going that fast it'd fly by me, and probably not even realize i was in this car!
i'd thought these thoughts too soon... as it was about to whizz by me suddenly there was a loud screech of rubber on pavement. my eyes shot to my rear view as we passed...
rather than shot off down the road behind me suddenly the green car swung in behind me... burning rubber as it went...
they don't do it better in hollywood! more to the point i was now in a REAL car chase... and from that little stunt i'd just seen this car was a way better driver than me! how was i possibly going to loss him?
the only good news, that little cross lane 180 degree trick had slowed him down... he was a ways behind me now, but gaining speed... FAST! (pun intended i guess).
than a beacon of hope approached on the road. a sign ahead which read... mirror lake turn off in 1km...
i had an idea. there was sure no way i was going to out run a sports car on the road, but i sure could lose it off the road!
i pulled in rather fast (and to be honest unsafe) to the mirror lakes pullin. on my speedy young tyrannosaur legs (man this being stuck at age 2 developmentally has been paying off on this mission a LOT!) i shot away from my car, and onto the forest trail. in my pockets safely sat the baskets.
that other car could do what it wanted to my car, but there was no way it was getting onto the gangplank walkways!
i couldn't help but notice in this beautiful weather (and sun fully in the sky. when i stopped earlier it'd been morning) that the lakes were even more pretty.
though they had lost some of their mirroriness...
than my attention came back to the here and now. the green car pulled up to the turn off.it really was a bizarre and almost alien looking thing. though it basically was a car everything about it was wrong. its smooth surface was not actually smooth like a normal car, but rather pitted and cracked like metamorphic rock. the green headlights glowed in at unearthy brightness that show out even here at the car's flank. on the roof of the car were what looked like ribs or spikes embedded in its surface. in various places it had glowing maori emblems or symbols that seemed to just float there.
as i watched the car, i was overcome with a tingly feeling that went through my whole body. similar to when i'd run into whiro earlier this morning, and a little less intense than when i'd opened one of the baskets dosing myself in magic... or what was it ms. rhonwyn called it... mystic gradient radiation...
why was i tingling? clearly this all tied into my opening the basket, but how?
at least here on the path i was safe from this demon car. hopefully it'd get bored of waiting for me, and move on... if not i'd cleared the worst of the mountains, and could probably walk back to civilization and resume my journey on the nice safe open road...
suddenly the tingle got worse... almost as bad as opening the basket in fact!... there was a strange vacuum like sound. the surface of the car suddenly rippled and wrapped as though it were made of liquid...tentacles of greenstone crept off the car and onto the ground. a puddle of fluid rock gathered on the ground for a moment, and than the stone started to ooze up into a shape... not just any shape... but the form of... of a?... well a whiro...
so that was it! i'd seen enough stuff on TV like this to get it... this wasn't a demon car... exactly... rather a whiro possessed automotive...
meaning i wasn't safe anymore at all! whiro could easily follow me onto these trails!
i quickly backed up to the far fence and jumped over landing as softly as i could... which wasn't perfect. i'm a sad excuse for a dinosaur at moment! you'd think i could wander the forest with stealth and ease like no other... wrong!
rather than keep going that direction i decided to run underneath the pathway and closer to the cars... whiro's now looked as normal as could be...
suddenly there were heavy yet strangely delicate foot steps on the gang planks... whiro strolled along its head craning side to side up and down clearly looking for me...
it was almost as though it could sense where i'd been! it wandered up to the exact spot i'd stopped at when its car had pulled up... than it looped around, exactly as i had to where i'd hide watch it peel itself off the car...
oh man i thought... i was only metres away! if it was sensing where i was it'd be on top of me in seconds!!!i real should have gone to the little dinosaurs room before now... though it wasn't a probably after that thought (good thing i only wear a human style shirt, and not the pants!).
whiro perked up either alert or annoyed when he hit the spot i'd leapt off the gangplank.it just stood there for over a minute statue still... for what reason i had no clue.
suddenly... startling me... it lept off the pathway down onto the ground...
but not where i'd landed. it'd over shot, and was several metres from the foot of the pathway where i'd landed...
than whiro started to wander towards the mirror lakes... directly away from me! its eyes darting this way and that. much more erratic and urgently than when it was on the pathway...
what was going on? i wandered as my heart stopped pounding like a drum in my chest...
a second ago whiro was following my every foot step... now it was as lost as me at a vegetarian buffet.
whiro just kept wandering aimlessly, and within a few minutes had wandered completely off into the forest.
i poked up from my hiding spot... the greatness of my hiding was the most dinosaurian thing i've done ever as far as i can tell. i mean look in that photo. can you easily see me?
there i am... how i mastered the art of camouflage like that is beyond me... i hadn't practised or anything... just something inside me made me do it that pro star... oh well i had to put a pin into this tapping of my tyrannosaurian nature for a later time...
cautiously wandering back up on the pathway for a better vantage point (i didn't want to sneak up the small hill i was on to the cars only to find i'd been tricked)...there was no sign of whiro anywhere...
rather than look a gift moment in the watch i sprinted back to my car...
moments later i was speeding down the road again. whiro and its car were now safely behind me, and the open road was only an hour away...
my first task after reaching the safety of the open was to find out what: whiro was, the baskets were, and what was happening in general!
i hoped i'd left whiro in my dust, and that was the last i was going to be seeing of it... yeah i know people of the innerweb pretty slim chance of that being the case indeed...
to be continued...
so my mission for ms. rhonwyn, of getting rid of these maori artifact flax baskets hasn't exactly been going so well. not only did i utterly mess up and break the number one rule of NOT opening the baskets (which turns out to overdose you in a mystically charged light show), but i've gotten myself corned in the fiordland, and at moment milford sound. this is kinda a problem because there's only one way in or out of the area. meaning if my pursuers (whom i hadn't yet seen) were to catch up with me here than i'd have a really tough time escaping...
not that it still wasn't cool, but in my opinion without that rain their almost never without, the sound (okay again techincally fjord) loses some of its majesty without the clouds, rain, and fog...
alright only a smidgen...
the boats passing them disturbed the penguins into running away. so off into the water they swam. (again my camera didn't catch them so well, but their those tiny rippling things in the center of this photo).
i panicked... i thought i was going to die... i resorted to a move from the movies... "what is that?!?" i screamed (my current fear helped with the authenticity of the scream i assure you!) pointing out into no where...
with my nice 
once here i hid behind the flax for good measure...
after several minutes it became apparent whiro was not following me... i only had the line of single flax plants to hide behind. if it'd come up the same path i'd have been a sitting duck...
even at this distance i could see whiro stalking the dockside clearly angered by my escape...
well despite things being a lot more stressful on 
approaching the milford port (the settlement here is pretty sparce actually. turns out that milford is in the greater fiordland national park, and as of such you can't build a lot in it... so there's a port, air strip, and motel/resturant/pathetic gas station/bar here... that's IT!) what was i saying again?
i double checked the bundle ms. rhonwyn had assembled for me. she'd taken the liberaty of getting me a pre arranged boarding pass for any of the boats i might need.
they were giant sand flies... which if you've never heard of or encountered before are pretty much the same thing as canadian black flies. their tiny as, and itchy as if they bite... ten times more itchy than a mozzy bite... i'm just glad they have trouble getting through my scales (though sadly they can get through the weaker skin between my scales BOO!).
wow a cool maori statue of someone... er something?
so out i ventured onto the peer to catch a boat to take me around the sound.
immediately the spectacle and awe of the area struck me! i mean just look at that... the picture only captures a fraction of it. trust me!
this picture does a little better, but still if you can come down here and check out milford do it!
boarding one of the many boats that sail around the sound i was off within 10 minutes...
one of the first things i discovered was that it rain a LOT in milford! in fact if it doesn't rain for just 5 days in a row they consider it a drought in the area...
all that dawned on me immediately was that i'd never seen anywhere else like it in the world.
man oh man i was into this place, let me tell you!
there were more waterfalls than i could take photos of...
i know i said it about doubtful sound, but milford could also very easily be the lost world.
the trip was going super slow due to spectical of what i was seeing, but super fast at the same time.
it was pretty obvious why this was considered a special place by the maori (i'd be surprised to find anyone who won't think the same thing!)... at the same time nothing had happened to the baskets...
we'd been out for almost two hours, and the baskets weren't effected at all by the sound (technically fjord!)...
not that the opening to milford is that unimpressive... well actually i guess it sort of is. because of an extreme bend at it's mouth you don't really notice it from the ocean. the great explore james cook missed it during his exploration of the west coast of new zealand...
this was a problem though. if these stupid baskets of ms. rhonwyn's were going to react to cool things you'd think this would be the place. we'd done the whole thing, and indeed nothing...
the fun was bleeding from the situation, despite the fact we drew closer to one of the most amazing parts of milford. the stirling waterfall...
you see the underwater observatory was just that, an underwater installation. down there you could see the rather special coral gardens...
basically what these cunning kiwis had done was stick a giant tube down into the ocean.
into the water world of fish and coral...
the main attraction of the coral gardens were the very rarely seen black corals. these are normally a very deep water coral that doesn't occur anywhere near the surface. meaning that few people see them... except here.
even more cool looking out just beyond the corals appeared to be a galaxy of... well technically fish... but they looked like stars. there was that many of them, and they were that small.
around the observatory windows they'd transplanted the whole black coral ecosystem. so that you got a front row seat to all the critters interactions and lifestyles.
definately the highlight though were the ubber pretty and kinda eerie black corals though.
fortunetly another tour boat showed up quickly after i made this realization. hastily i made my way to the surface to head back to the port, and to make my way out of the fiordland (though it saddened me to have to do so).
as the boat jetted away from the observatory, and back towards the port i tried to relax.
to be honest despite the odds i should have taken the bet...
