He is a New Zealand alpine parrot, living high in the Southern Alps.
He wants to eat parts of your car.
He is also pining for the fjords.
A fjord is is a long, narrow estuary with steep sides, created in a glacially carved valley that is filled by rising sea water levels. In En Zed, there are something like 17 fjords, or 'sounds', as they are misnomered.
We Temporary Kiwis visited two of these sounds: Doubtful and Milford. And there's really no way to describe them except: whoa.
Pictures can't do it justice because you don't understand the scale. You're on a boat that's maybe 50 feet high. The walls of the fjord, scraped out by glacial action thousands of years ago, tower over you for hundreds, and thousands of feet. The highest peaks rise 4500 feet above the waterline, not counting the 1200 or so feet of water below you.
And we kayaked through one of these. If you want to feel small, go kayaking in a fjord. Try not to think about how far you'd have to go for your feet to touch the bottom of the valley, or how high you'd have to reach to get to the sky. How isolated this area is, where roads inward were completed only half a century ago.
But think of the silence, of swimming with penguins in the waters, of the overwhelming hugeness of nature. Of the few sand beaches that disappear when the tide comes in, and potentially sweep your lunch out to sea. Of the wind that carries you sailing across the narrow valleys. Of fighting your way through the same wind, the breakers, trying to strike for the opposite side of a valley that's wider than it looks.
This is why Polly Kea pines for the fjords. This is why Pinky keeps screeching such a funny word. This is why everyone should visit Fiordland and just see what it's all about.
Perspective. And scale. And the thought: is that it?
Just don't get too close to the fur seals. They might try and eat you.
