Still Chuggin'...albeit slowly

Four days in the saddle and we're a bit sore, but I think we're finally starting to get stronger.  Yesterday we emerged from the rain forest and found the coast.  Wow! 

Lessons learned:

1. Use sunscreen...even if it's cloudy. Whoops.
2. Sandflies don't suck that bad...per Bill. Cass still thinks they're pretty awful.
3. Tomato sauce (ie: ketchup) is not a commodity to be taken for granted. We were reminded of that by a very friendly Kiwi who served us tomato sauce on the side of our fish 'n chips, for no extra charge! "I don't do this for everybody," he said. He runs his own dairy (small convenience store) and used to be a fisherman; so it was with great enthusiasm that he explained that the meal we were about to consume was elephant fish: funny looking but delicious. 
4. NZ uses 80% of the world's supply of the neurotoxin 1080. It's meant to kill possums, and is dropped from the air, but apparently it gets in the surface water supply. We didn't realize this until we'd downed several bottles of water we'd filtered from the above waterfall. We've not yet felt the effects...