skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This past Wednesday Dave and I went to Invercargill for two days. It's the southernmost city on the South Island, with about half the population of Dunedin (59,000 and 120,000). I had to do some interviews there for a project I'm doing for the Presbyterian Synod here (the Synod of Otago and Southland, the name of the province where we live and the province to the south of us where Invercargill is). Invercargill was settled in the 1850s, and a beautiful park was established in 1869, as you can see in the first photo. The second morning was sunny, and we had some time before one of my interviews, so we walked in the park.
A gazebo in the park honors the World War I soldiers. It seems like every town in New Zealand, no matter how small, has a World War I memorial. Lots of New Zealand soldiers died in that war, something I hadn't known before.
I love the trees here, as I've said before. The one below is a spreading elm, and it was blooming with light green blossoms. I thought the shape was beautiful.
Also in the park was the largest rhododendron I've ever seen. It was actually numerous bushes that had grown into one big ball.
And after all the exotic birds I've shown on this blog, here are some familiar mallards that were in the park.
A lot of the photos on this blog might lead you to believe it's always sunny in New Zealand. The afternoon we drove to Invercargill it was pouring and very windy, horrible weather to drive and and horrible weather to sightsee in. We had some time before my first interview, so we spent it indoors in the Southland Museum. Here's a potpourri of things I enjoyed. There was a quilt exhibit, and this one in the photo below is a stylized map of New Zealand, done Maori style. I thought it was wonderful.
There was an exhibit of stuffed birds. I know stuffed birds are disgusting, but I have to say they have helped me understand the shape and size of birds in New Zealand. The next photo is kiwi birds, the national bird, and I was really surprised at how big they are. Their bodies were about the size of chickens. They are very reclusive and don't exist in many places anymore. Because they are flightless, they are virtually defenseless against the mammals that have been imported into New Zealand. I don't know if we'll ever see them in the wild, so I thought I'd post this photo.
Another exhibit showed stuffed wandering albatrosses. These birds are HUGE. The albatross in the back was probably six feet from the tip of one wing to another. Their bodies were the size of large turkeys.
Another exhibit focused on the subantartic islands, which I had never heard of. They are six islands between New Zealand and Antartica, and the exhibit showed photos of the windswept landscapes and talked about the ways the vegetation has adapted to the harsh conditions. Two of them are volcanic, one of them was created where two plates bumped into each other, and two of them are vestiges of a much bigger New Zealand in ancient times. I can't remember how the sixth one originated. There was a whole series of exhibits about castaways on those islands who had to survive sometimes several years before being rescued. The shipping companies set up shacks on these islands stocked with food and clothing for people who were washed up onto the islands after shipwrecks.
On our second day there, the sun came out and it was gorgeous. We drove to Bluff, 20 miles southwest of Invercargill, which bills itself as the southwesternmost place on the South Island. That's why the big sign is there.
We ate lunch in a restaurant with the view below. You can see a path going around the headland. After lunch, I walked partway out and Dave walked much further.
Below is the view Dave saw around the other side of the headland. The waves coming in were 20 feet tall, he said, and because there's no real scale in the photo, you can't tell how big they were. But he said he could hardly stand in the wind. The ocean south of New Zealand is called the Southern Ocean, and it is a wild place.
We drove home to Dunedin (about 2 3/4 hours) on Thursday evening, and it was one of the most beautiful drives we've had here. The sun was behind us, lighting up the hillsides, many of them covered with sheep. We haven't taken many pictures of sheep, partly because they are mostly just white dots on hillsides. But there are many, many of those dots. We had a discussion about how many sheep a person sees between Dunedin and Invercargill. We estimated that most fields of sheep have maybe 100 sheep. So how many sheep fields are there on that road? We decided 100 was too low, probably way too low. If there are 200 sheep fields, that would be 20,000 sheep visible from the road. Maybe that's a good estimate. One of the guidebooks said there are 12 sheep for every New Zealander, as well as one beef cow and one milk cow. (There are just over 4 million New Zealanders.) We saw two huge fields of what they call deer, more like what we could call elk. Venison is fairly common in the supermarket, but it is expensive. We buy venison sausage at the Saturday market. Back to the topic of sheep, lambing season has been going on for a while, and I wanted to get a photo of some lambs before they get totally grown up. (It had poured the day before, so that's why there's standing water in the field.)
Sheep are everywhere. We've driven to a lot of neighborhoods to go to garage sales or look at houses, and you'll often find a few sheep right next door to someone's house. The two photos below are taken from the grounds of a church in a suburb of Dunedin. One photo looks south and one looks north.
Before I launch in to the topic of today's post, I'll tell you that today is Labour Day in New Zealand, a Monday holiday like the U.S. has. Labour Day was first celebrated here in 1890 and then was set in law in 1899 to commemorate the fact that New Zealand was one of the first countries to have an eight hour work day. In fact, it was the 1840s when people first began fighting for an eight hour work day.
Now my topic of the day. Dunedin has lots of old houses, and one of the most common styles is called a villa. Dave and I were trying to estimate what percentage of all the houses here are villas. Maybe a third. Maybe a quarter. Maybe 20 percent. But it's amazing number. We live in one. They were all built about a hundred years ago. They have a central hallway going straight back and typically two rooms on each side. Often the front room on the left or right is the living room. The kitchen and bathroom are mostly add-ons. In our case, there's an addition on the back of the house with bathroom, kitchen, dining room and a small family room. As far as I can tell, the original kitchens were small lean-tos on the back or side of the house. The upside of villas is their charm. The downside is the lack of insulation and the leaky old single pane windows. (When it's windy, our curtains sway in the breeze coming through the windows.) The first photo shows a typical villa.
Some villas are decorated with iron lace, like the one in the next photo.
Yesterday we were invited for tea at someone's house who lives on the other side of the university. In her neighborhood were several houses with iron lace, so we photographed them. And on the way home we drove past the area around the University, where I had scoped out quite a few villas with nice iron lace. So here's an assortment of iron lace on houses. The first four are other styles of houses, and then the next six are villas.
This last one, below, is one of the few houses I've seen with iron lace on two stories.
We recently spent six days on Stewart Island, located about 20 miles south of Invercargill on the southern end of the South Island. Stewart Island is roughly 25 by 40 miles in size, and has only about 450 inhabitants, most of them in the small town of Oban. We drove to Invercargill then flew to Oban in a 9-passenger plane. It was terrific to see Stewart Island from the air before landing. Oban is set on a bay, and the first photo shows the bay and some of the buildings.
The tiny Presbyterian church in Oban doesn't have a minister, and if a person is willing to lead the service and preach the sermon, they can stay in the manse for six nights. So that's what we did. It was my first time leading worship and preaching since I left Seattle. I really enjoyed celebrating communion as a part of a New Zealand congregation on World Communion Sunday. The low building beside the church is the manse where we stayed. It has a terrific view over the bay.
Another view of the bay, the church, and the manse, taken from the other side of the bay.
Dave did a lot of painting. Here he's standing on a dock doing a sketch of the church above him on the hill.
Stewart Island gets much more rain than Dunedin does, so the vegetation is much denser. From a distance the landscape looks a fair amount like the Pacific Northwest with the water, islands, and trees, but the trees are almost entirely different species than we have in the Northwest. The island has beautiful beaches and bays. Below are four different places we liked.
Stewart Island has a huge bay on its east side, and in the middle of that bay is Ulva Island, a nature preserve. In the mid 90s, the Department of Conservation began working to get rid of all the predators on the island (mostly rats). It took five years, and now that the island is predator-free, they have been bringing birds there. New Zealand orginally had only a few species of mammals, all of them bats, so the birds in New Zealand all became fat, slow, and stupid (the wording of the Auckland Museum -- I'm not quite that rude in talking about birds!). Many native species of birds are dying out because of feral cats, possums, rats, and stoats (like a weasel) that have been imported to NZ. Islands like this one are an attempt to create a place where native birds can flourish. There were signs asking us to check our bags to make sure we weren't bringing rats to Ulva Island. I've never had a rat in my purse before, but I guess there's always a first time. In the first picture below, Ulva is the long narrow island beyond the round island in the foreground.
Dave is waiting for the boat to go to Ulva.
Eric and Ngaire Hind were also with us on the trip to Stewart Island. Eric and Ngaire did a sabbatical in Seattle in 1982, and when we visitied NZ in 2001, a friend in Seattle connected us with Ngaire and Eric. Dave and Eric spent five days fishing together in 2001, and it's great to see them again.
I'm standing on the highest point on Ulva Island. A hundred years ago all the mail for Stewart Island was delivered to Ulva Island, and the postmaster would hoist a flag on this high point to let people know the mail was in. They would all dress in their best clothes and come to Ulva for social interaction. We saw some cool pictures of people coming to get their mail. No one lives on the island now.
There are tons of beautiful ferns, many species I've never seen before.
The bird below is called a weka. It is flightless. Dave wanted me to post this particular picture (I took about 10 pictures of this bird because I loved the color of its feathers) because it shows the shadow of my head, which gives you an idea of how big the bird is and how friendly it was. Later when we stopped for a snack, a weka came over hoping for a handout.
Below is a spotted shag, related to a cormorant. (Note added on October 28: based on an exhibit of stuffed birds in the Southland Museum, I now think this is a pied shag.) New Zealand has thirteen species of shags. We watched this fellow fishing in the shallows. We'd never seen a cormorant fishing in shallow water. He swam around like a fish, amazingly quick and agile. Dave thinks he was swimming 20 miles an hour for 20 yards under water before coming up for air. (Dave just said that he had never seen a bird swimming as fast as a fish, but he guesses they would have to swim that fast to catch fish.)
Below is a kaka, which looked to me like a cross between a parrot and a raptor. We saw several of them in the forest on Ulva Island, and then when we returned to Stewart Island, we saw some at the home of some people from the church. The two kakas appeared on their deck and ate peanuts out of the hands of our hosts.
Dave says these oystercatchers look just like the ones in the US. They have bright orange beaks and eyes, and pink legs.
I'm fascinated by the trees in New Zealand. They are such different shapes than trees in the Western United States. On our trip to Stewart Island I had time to take lots of pictures of trees, so here are a few of them. I'm slowly learning the names. The first one is a cabbage tree, which is very common and usually not as big as this one. The second and third pictures are the kind of eucalyptus trees that comes from Australia, a different species than the one that grow in Northern California. They are viewed as a pest tree here, but I like them. The fourth one is a tree fern. The last photo was taken in Invercargill, the town on the South Island that is the jumping off place to Stewart Island. There's a cool tower in the background.
A gazebo in the park honors the World War I soldiers. It seems like every town in New Zealand, no matter how small, has a World War I memorial. Lots of New Zealand soldiers died in that war, something I hadn't known before. 
I love the trees here, as I've said before. The one below is a spreading elm, and it was blooming with light green blossoms. I thought the shape was beautiful.
Also in the park was the largest rhododendron I've ever seen. It was actually numerous bushes that had grown into one big ball.
And after all the exotic birds I've shown on this blog, here are some familiar mallards that were in the park.
A lot of the photos on this blog might lead you to believe it's always sunny in New Zealand. The afternoon we drove to Invercargill it was pouring and very windy, horrible weather to drive and and horrible weather to sightsee in. We had some time before my first interview, so we spent it indoors in the Southland Museum. Here's a potpourri of things I enjoyed. There was a quilt exhibit, and this one in the photo below is a stylized map of New Zealand, done Maori style. I thought it was wonderful.
There was an exhibit of stuffed birds. I know stuffed birds are disgusting, but I have to say they have helped me understand the shape and size of birds in New Zealand. The next photo is kiwi birds, the national bird, and I was really surprised at how big they are. Their bodies were about the size of chickens. They are very reclusive and don't exist in many places anymore. Because they are flightless, they are virtually defenseless against the mammals that have been imported into New Zealand. I don't know if we'll ever see them in the wild, so I thought I'd post this photo.
Another exhibit showed stuffed wandering albatrosses. These birds are HUGE. The albatross in the back was probably six feet from the tip of one wing to another. Their bodies were the size of large turkeys.
Another exhibit focused on the subantartic islands, which I had never heard of. They are six islands between New Zealand and Antartica, and the exhibit showed photos of the windswept landscapes and talked about the ways the vegetation has adapted to the harsh conditions. Two of them are volcanic, one of them was created where two plates bumped into each other, and two of them are vestiges of a much bigger New Zealand in ancient times. I can't remember how the sixth one originated. There was a whole series of exhibits about castaways on those islands who had to survive sometimes several years before being rescued. The shipping companies set up shacks on these islands stocked with food and clothing for people who were washed up onto the islands after shipwrecks.
On our second day there, the sun came out and it was gorgeous. We drove to Bluff, 20 miles southwest of Invercargill, which bills itself as the southwesternmost place on the South Island. That's why the big sign is there.
We ate lunch in a restaurant with the view below. You can see a path going around the headland. After lunch, I walked partway out and Dave walked much further.
Below is the view Dave saw around the other side of the headland. The waves coming in were 20 feet tall, he said, and because there's no real scale in the photo, you can't tell how big they were. But he said he could hardly stand in the wind. The ocean south of New Zealand is called the Southern Ocean, and it is a wild place.
We drove home to Dunedin (about 2 3/4 hours) on Thursday evening, and it was one of the most beautiful drives we've had here. The sun was behind us, lighting up the hillsides, many of them covered with sheep. We haven't taken many pictures of sheep, partly because they are mostly just white dots on hillsides. But there are many, many of those dots. We had a discussion about how many sheep a person sees between Dunedin and Invercargill. We estimated that most fields of sheep have maybe 100 sheep. So how many sheep fields are there on that road? We decided 100 was too low, probably way too low. If there are 200 sheep fields, that would be 20,000 sheep visible from the road. Maybe that's a good estimate. One of the guidebooks said there are 12 sheep for every New Zealander, as well as one beef cow and one milk cow. (There are just over 4 million New Zealanders.) We saw two huge fields of what they call deer, more like what we could call elk. Venison is fairly common in the supermarket, but it is expensive. We buy venison sausage at the Saturday market. Back to the topic of sheep, lambing season has been going on for a while, and I wanted to get a photo of some lambs before they get totally grown up. (It had poured the day before, so that's why there's standing water in the field.)
Sheep are everywhere. We've driven to a lot of neighborhoods to go to garage sales or look at houses, and you'll often find a few sheep right next door to someone's house. The two photos below are taken from the grounds of a church in a suburb of Dunedin. One photo looks south and one looks north.
