Invercargill

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.