Elements Emblazoned

Its beauty is dazzling enough by day, but when the sun goes down New Zealand’s seas, caves and starlit skies are another world Jonathan Freedland describes in a Guardian travel article. On an overnight fishing trip near Motiti Island in the Bay of Plenty, on deck in the darkness, skipper Mike turned on the ship’s lights. “Suddenly the waters were revealed as throbbing with life — full of silent, almost translucent jellyfish, swelling and pulsing in an elegant ballet around us,” Freedland writes. “The surface of the water was marked by trails of neon-bright green light: the phosphorescent glow of plankton. We were on the water again a couple of nights later — in McLaren Falls Park near Tauranga. We glided on the water, avoiding marshes, steering down a narrow inlet until we were in a gorge lit up like the most dazzling planetarium. What we were looking at was a galaxy full of glow-worms, clinging to the steep rock walls on either side, each one a bright star.”