<Pixie's Letter on Her Trip To the Chatham Islands>

We visited old petrograph tree carvings and a cliff of rock carvings which were not impressive. The seal colony was fun with all the baby seals climbing over the rocks and the old ones resting or playing in the waves.

We flew to the smaller island -Pitt, and it was different again with big volcanic cores and a very small population but some good farming land. It was pretty amazing with an old wind smashed caravan sitting beside it and not much else except a modern toilet. A lady artist gave us a lovely lunch and we viewed her paintings which were pretty bright for my taste but it's lovely to see people using their talents.

One thing that was really cute was the old jail which was a small cave cut into the cliff and was used to hold runaway sailors until a boat came to pick them up. As the boat service would have been awful doesn't bare thinking about.

There were only eight of us in our party and we got on really well which made for a happy time. It was really cold the first few days and we wrapped up in lots of layers but the morning we left it was idylic, no wind and sunny. We spent the last hours there paddling on the edge of the lagoon looking for more teeth and then it was into the plane and home.

The scenery was quite different to mainland NZ, huge lagoons and marshes, little volcanoes and big basalt out crops. In one spot a great up welling of lava had lifted the sea bed to the top of the cliff and there was a big bed of fossil scallop shells sitting on top of it. Also there was a blow hole in the lava and you could look down and see the waves sucking back and forth through giant kelp. Pretty scarery. We visited two good old homes built from mainland timber but over- all the houses were pretty grotty. The Cray fishermen make gigantic fortunes but it sure didn't show. Some of the farms are really huge but it is hard for the farmers to sell their stock as the government has closed their freezing works and so they have to live ship to the mainland and the the boat service is dependant on the weather which isn't kind. We had a lot of fun hunting for fossil sharks teeth on the lagoon shores. They are millions of years old and are washing out of the limestone floor of the lagoon. They are a blueish black and pretty small but we got in hunting mode and found a lot.

	We visited old petrograph tree carvings and a cliff of rock carvings which were not impressive. The seal colony was fun with all the baby seals climbing over the rocks and the old ones resting or playing in the waves. The basalt columns were really wonderful and we took lots of photos there. We flew to the smaller island -Pitt, and it was different again with big volcanic cores and a very small population but some good farming land. It was pretty amazing with an old wind smashed caravan sitting beside it and not much else except a modern toilet. A lady artist gave us a lovely lunch and we viewed her paintings which were pretty bright for my taste but it's lovely to see people using their talents. One thing that was really cute was the old jail which was a small cave cut into the cliff and was used to hold runaway sailors until a boat came to pick them up. As the boat service would have been awful doesn't bare thinking about. There were only eight of us in our party and we got on really well which made for a happy time. It was really cold the first few days and we wrapped up in lots of layers but the morning we left it was idylic, no wind and sunny. We spent the last hours there paddling on the edge of the lagoon looking for more teeth and then it was into the plane and home.