Today we awoke in a misty haze and stumbled to the kitchen to make breakfast early in the morning. We left soon after, around 9:30, to make our way to Pohara Beach in Golden Bay.
The drive was extremely long, but worth it. The winding roads up and down mountains were slightly nauseating but the view was spectacular. Going over the Takaka hills was fascinating as well, as lumpy features carved out of marble (metamorphosed limestone) and even some blue schist marked an ancient continental shelf, circa the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era (~390 million years old!).
Once reaching the beach, we set up our tents quickly and immediately hit the sand. The afternoon was spent walking down the beach to beautiful limestone cliffs teeming with shallow ocean fossils from the Cenozoic Era. Many of us also found a cave-like outcrop structure with more fossils and great climbing walls.
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| Limestone "caves"! Huge!! |
The differential bedding of the limestone on one of the large blocks was interesting because it was indicative of varying depositional environments through time.
On the beach itself, it was particularly interesting to see the comparison between recently washed up shells and their fossilized counterparts in the rocks.
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| Extinct and extant bivalves; New Zealand dollar for scale |
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| Probably an echinoid of some sort. (similar to a sea urchin) |
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| Acroporan corals. |
The late afternoon and evening was spent taking a break, with students building a sand castle and (attempting) to protect it by fighting off the rising tide; but to no avail - the castle was destroyed.
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| The castle! |
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| But then the tide came in... |
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| Another castle; whoever built this one was smarter than us, building it so far up the beach! :) |
Afterwords we played some ultimate frisbee on the beach:
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| Avery getting some air! |
and then had a magnificent vegetarian dinner, enjoyed the local bar, and eventually ended up all sitting on the beach, watching the waves.
Tomorrow, we head to CHRISTCHURCH!!!! Flight home is in two days. Time certainly flies when you're having fun. We will post pictures soon. Thanks for reading!
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