Of all the pictures with Valerie, this is my favorite.  Actually, it's probably one of the favorites from the whole trip.  I was content to go where she wanted to go as I had more time in NZ.  The one area that I said we had to go to was the boulders.  She was enthusiastic about seeing them too, so that's where we went.  We were expecting them to be big, but not quite this big.  The Maoris say that the Moeraki boulders are food baskets from the canoes of the gods that washed ashore.  However they got there, they're pretty neat.

This is a septarian nodule that I found when I was in Utah.  It's the same rock as a moeraki boulder.   I met a hotel owner who said he would bring me up to the mine the next day.  He took me up there by truck and dropped me off.  The people working at the mine showed me around and told me that whatever I could find, I could keep.  I found a few nodules and rode my bike down the mountain.  I had about 12 kilos of nodules in my backpack and everytime I hit a bump, the nodules would bounce and feel like it cracked a vertebrae.  I guess it's a good thing that we have so many of vertebra.  One nodule was cut open and polished and this is shown above.  This is very typical for a septarian nodule.  I think they are among the more beautiful rocks in the world.  This nodule is approximately 15 cm across.  The nodules form as mudballs made out of bentonite (the grey portion of the rock).  The bentonite cracks and other minerals seep into the cracks and crystallize.  The yellow portions are calcite and the two minerals bordering the bentonite are aragonite and barite.  Some of the moeraki boulders had cracked open and they looked almost exactly like this in the middle, though the colors weren't quite as bright as this.  Since the moeraki boulders are much bigger, it was common that one of the inclusions at the center of a boulder to be three times as big as this entire septarian nodule.