Dave's small paintings

I still have several blog posts to do from our trip to the North Island, but I'm going to take a break and post some of Dave's recent paintings. He's been painting smaller works to sell matted but not framed. These thirteen paintings range from 2x4 to 4x5 inches. The first two are sunsets: fishing boats in a harbor on the Coromandel Peninsula (North Island) and Halfmoon Bay on Stewart Island (off the southern tip of the South Island). Dave paints from photographs, and, in my last post, you can see the photograph he used to paint this first one.

The next one is Otago Harbour from the Peninsula looking toward Port Chalmers, which is the main container shipping port.

The next one is a "poor man's dry dock," according to Dave.

Dave painted the next one in Queen's Gardens, a park in Dunedin.

Now some churches. First, two versions of the Church of the Good Shepherd, an iconic New Zealand church on the shores of Lake Tekapo, a turquoise blue glacier-fed lake at the foot of the Southern Alps. Then an Anglican church in Arrowtown, near Queenstown. Then First Presbyterian Church in Dunedin. You can see that Dunedin was founded by Presbyterians, because they built a Presbyterian version of a cathedral. Last of the churches is the small Roman Catholic church a couple blocks from our house, with lovely tree roses lining the walkway to the church.

Now lighthouses. The first one is in Lyttleton Harbour, near Christchurch. Then Tairoa Head, at the very end of the Otago Peninsula, near Dunedin. Then Shag Point, a lighthouse about an hour north of Dunedin.

The Coromandel Peninsula

We've been home from our trip to the North Island for 10 days now, but I'm still sorting through photos and deciding which ones to post. After we spent two days in Auckland, we drove about two hours south and east to the Coromandel Peninsula, a mountainous thumb that runs north and south. It's about 60 miles long by 20 miles wide. At the base of the thumb, on the west side, is the town of Thames, where we stopped to get groceries. Dave didn't want me to take this next photo, but I liked the hills in the background and I thought you'd be amused at the familiar foreground.


We drove north along the western coast of the Coromandel. On the other side of the huge bay to west of us we could occasionally see land, which would be the area south of Auckland where Dave had been exploring the day before. To take the next picture, we stopped and looked back the way we had come (so this photo is looking south with the huge bay to the right/east).

As we drove north on the incredibly slow road (a very twisty road that mostly followed the shoreline), the sun went down. The next two photos were taken just before getting to Coromandel Town, which is about two-thirds of the way up the peninsula.

At Coromandel Town we headed east through the hills to the place we were staying, Matarangi Beach. It's a resort community a lot like Sun River, Oregon, with tennis courts, a golf course, and walking paths through the houses. The house that was lent to us was only about 100 yards from the beach. We stayed there five nights, and I loved it there. Every day the weather was rain-sun-rain-sun. Here are some photos of the many moods of the beach near the house we stayed in.

We didn't get many good photos of other parts of the east side of the Coromandel because of the weather. Below are two. We did drive down the whole east side of the peninsula and then further south, along the Bay of Plenty. I'll post some photos of the Bay of Plenty in the next post.

just south of Auckland

The first day after we arrived on the North Island, I had to give a seminar all day, so Dave went exploring. We were staying in one of the southeast suburbs of Auckland, so Dave drove a little further south, outside the city. Here's what he saw. A few notes on the photos. The white car in one of the pictures is the rent-a-wreck we had the whole three weeks for an incredibly cheap price. (Gas is now just over $6 per gallon in US dollars, so getting around wasn't cheap.) And you'll see pampas grass in the last photo. We saw whole hillsides covered with it, but never managed to get a good photograph of one of those hillsides.

North Island Fauna

As I've mentioned before, New Zealand has some really cool birds. One of our favorites is the Pukeko. I had seen them stuffed in museums, but I got to see them alive for the first time on this trip. They have orange beaks and blue and black feathers.


No landscape in New Zealand would be complete without some sheep, so here's our obligatory pretty sheep picture. We were surprised at how many fewer sheep we saw on the North Island than on the South Island. Perhaps we didn't go to the sheepiest parts. All over NZ sheep farmers are converting to dairy as prices for lamb and wool fall and as Asia develops a taste for cheese and other milk products.

We've had several enounters with whole flocks of sheep that farmers are moving from one field to another via a road, but this was our first encounter with a lone sheep in the road. We came around the corner pretty fast and saw this fellow. He moved off the road pretty quickly.

And this was our first encounter with a herd of cows in the road. You can't really tell from the picture that they were VERY close to the car.

We've gotten quite used to the red-billed seagulls that are common on the South Island. They are one of three species of gulls in NZ, the other two being the black-backed gull and the black-billed gull. Say those three bird names quickly! It was fun to see our familiar red-billed gulls on the North Island as well.

The statue below is the iconic statue of the town of Whakatane (pronounded FA-ka-tan-ee) which is on the Bay of Plenty, on the east coast southeast of Auckland. The girl has a gull on her head, as well as one standing beside her on the rock.

North Island Flora

We just got back from our three-week trip to the North Island. We've got lots of photos to post, and I'm arranging them by topic and location. One of the things I loved the most about being there was the flowers. It's the dead of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but Auckland and the area south and east of Auckland where we traveled are subtropical, so it was a treat to see flowers in winter. To put the geography in perspective, if Auckland were in the Northern Hemisphere, its latitude would be between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The first photo was taken on the sand dunes by a beach.

The next three photos show some random flowers we saw in people's gardens.

I saw these next flowers several times. They're on a climbing vine, in this case draped across a fence.

The next two photos show a tree with unusual flowers. Someone told us birds really like the nectar in the flowers. Dave is wearing his rain gear, because for the first two weeks of our trip, the weather was rain-sun-rain-sun, back and forth many times every day. We saw more rainbows in those two weeks than I think I've seen in my whole life put together.

The North Island has lots of Norfolk pines. They were imported from Norfolk Island and seem to thrive in New Zealand. When I first saw them, I couldn't believe that the tree I once had as a house plant could grow so tall.

The North Island is also home to the black fern, which is a tree fern, the largest fern in the world. We saw whole hillsides covered with these ferns, making a really unusual texture. In the second picture, look carefully and you'll see the many tree ferns on the hillside. The third picture shows how big they are.