Fall in New Zealand

Most of the native trees in New Zealand have leaves but are not deciduous, so they don't turn color in the fall. Across the valley from our house is a hillside covered with trees that I call my "wall of trees" because it's the view from my office and it does indeed look like a wall covered with trees. You can see that a few of the trees in my wall are beginning to turn yellow, but most of them are not. Most of the trees that turn yellow are not native to New Zealand. The two tall feathery trees on the top of the hillside are eucalyptus, which are native to Australia, not New Zealand. The funny looking trees in the foreground that look like yucca plants on long sticks are cabbage trees, which are native to New Zealand and which Maori used for food.

Anzac Day

Yesterday was Anzac Day, sort of like a cross between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day, but celebrated more enthusiastically than either of those days are celebrated in the U.S. On April 25, 1915, the British Royal Navy dropped the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps on a beach near Gallipoli, Turkey. (Turkey was a key ally to Germany in WWI and Churchill, then the head of the British Admiralty thought that Turkey would be a back door into Germany.) The location where they were dropped was a mistake by the British Navy, and many soldiers were killed right on the beach. In 1921, the Returned Soldiers Association in New Zealand successfully lobbied for April 25 to be observed as a day of memory for soldiers in WWI who died. After WWII, Anzac Day continued to be a day to mourn fallen soldiers.

Today there's a huge interest in observing the day. In an amazingly secular country, it seems to have become a way to remember that there are spiritual realities to life. On Friday, the day before Anzac Day, all the ceremonies around the province of Otago were listed in the newspaper, and there were many. In Dunedin, a parade marched before sunrise (6:15!) from the center of town to the WWI monument in a park, where a ceremony was held. Dave got up early and attended the ceremony, which resembled a typical worship service with Christian prayers, scripture readings and songs. He estimates that 4,000 people were there. [Note from two days later: the newspaper says there were 9,000 people there!] After the ceremony, people put wreaths and poppies on the monument. Later there would be a service at the soldiers graves at the military cemetery and then a service at the Anglican cathedral.

That evening we went to the beach at St. Clair, Dunedin's urban beach, to get a little ocean therapy. In the first photo, that's White Island offshore.

Near the beach is a coffee house that always makes us a bit sentimental. When our son Mike came to Dunedin to write his masters thesis in December 2007 and January 2008, he rode Dave's bicycle to this cafe every day to work on his thesis on his laptop.

We saw two shags, relatives of cormorants, which swim like fish underwater. They can come up a hundred yards away after being down maybe 15 seconds.

Lake Hawea

Dave spent six days last week at Lake Hawea, about four and a half hours west and a little north of Dunedin. He took the first three photos on his drive there, along the Clutha River.

Some friends lent him a cabin on the shores of Lake Hawea. The cabin was in a little town that you can see in the photo below, close to the left edge of the photo.

In the photo below, you can see the Lake Hawea Lodge on the shores of the lake. The little town where he stayed is just behind the lodge.

The next five photos show various moods of the lake. Some of the time he was there, it was VERY windy.

The water of the lake was really clear. In the next photo, you can see how clear it was.

The hills around the lake are so velvety, as you can see in the next photo.

For those of you who are interested in Dave's success in fishing, it was not a good week. He could see fish in some of the rivers around Lake Hawea, but he couldn't get them to bite. He did a lot of painting, which he enjoyed, and he got rid of a sinus thing that had been troubling him. The air is much drier in Central Otago than it is here near the ocean, and the nice dry air dried him out. So he came home healthy and as happy as a person can be who didn't catch any fish.

While Dave was fishing and painting, I went to Auckland for four days for a conference and to see various people. Dave had the camera, so no photos, sorry. Auckland is beautiful city with views of water, islands and bays from many hills, woods and trees everywhere. But it is also unbelievably sprawling. I read somewhere it has the footprint of Tokyo with maybe 4% of Tokyo's population, only 1.4 million people. The traffic can be horrific. But I had a great time.

Two of Dave's new paintings

Dave has been painting up a storm, and I haven't posted any of his paintings for a while. Here are two that were recently in an Otago Art Society show. The first one won a prize -- $100! -- and it sold at the show. The subject is the World War I monument on the Otago Peninsula. You can see out to the mouth of the Otago Harbour in the distance. I think I've mentioned before that New Zealand lost more soldiers per capita than any other country in both World War I and II, so there are war monuments everywhere.

This second painting is the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, just a couple blocks from our house. The flowers along the pathway are tree roses and are lovely all summer long and well into the fall. We have a neighbor who is a member of that church, and she took Dave over to show the painting to the priest, who bought it at first glance.

Albatrosses

I recently posted a photo of a boat we saw on our Invercargill trip with seagulls and albatrosses trailing behind, but I took the photo from land, a good distance away. A friend here in Dunedin, Helen, recently took a tourist boat out into Otago Harbour and got very close to albatrosses catching scraps of food off the back of a fishing boat. So these three photos were taken by Helen, not Dave and me. In the first photo, try to get a sense of just how big these birds are. They look deceptively like seagulls, but notice the man on the boat and the relative size of the birds.

These are Northern Royal Albatrosses. They weigh between 14 and 18 pounds and have a wingspan of 9 to 10 feet. At the end of Otago Harbour is an albatross nesting colony, the only nesting colony in the world on a mainland (if you call New Zealand a mainland). The birds are born here, then fly to South America and spend several years at sea doing their teenage thing, then return here to nest. The Department of Conservation puts transmitters on some of them. Recently the newspaper showed a map of where they spend their time off the southern shores of South America before they come back here to nest. The albatross colony at the end of the Otago Peninsula is a big tourist attraction. Below are a couple more photos Helen took from the tourist boat that went out to the mouth of the Harbour.