Familiar places: St Clair Beach, Olveston House, Taiaroa Head

We've been in Dunedin six weeks now, and we've visited some of our old favorite familiar places. When we left New Zealand in 2017, I was totally surprised to find that what I missed most, in addition to friends, was the beaches. St. Clair is our city beach with benches and surfing. Our son, Mike, spent Christmas 2007 with us in Dunedin and wrote his masters thesis at the Hydro Cafe, at the end of the line of buildings in the photo. A couple of weeks ago, it was pure joy to sit on a bench, listen to the waves and seagulls, and watch a lone surfer float around among the waves.

It was also a joy to revisit the gardens at Olveston, a large Dunedin home built in 1904-1906 by a wealthy Jewish family, one of only a few Jewish families in this city. Their son died in World War 1, and their daughter died without children, so she willed the house to the Dunedin City Council, with money for its upkeep. When we lived in Dunedin, the house was directly on my route to the gym, and I would often stop and walk in the gardens and visit the greenhouse. I took a tour of the interior once, and it's fabulous. But since the gardens are free, they drew me over and over.

Last week, I finished my writing one morning and noticed it was super windy. The albatrosses out at Taiaroa Head love the wind, so I suggested to Dave that we pack a lunch and head out to try to see albatrosses. The 45 minute drive out the Otago Peninsula is gorgeous. I didn't take any pictures on the way out except for one right below the World War 1 monument. I wrote an entire post on the view from that monument some years ago, which you can access here to get an idea of the views from the Peninsula. 

I'll also give you Dave's painting of the monument, one of his masterpieces. The little lump of land in the far distance to the right of the harbor mouth (to the left of a bigger lump) is Taiaroa Head.

Taiaroa Head is at the end of the Otago Peninsula, the only non-remote-island nesting place of albatrosses. I wrote at length about the albatrosses in my post a couple of weeks ago about the view from Mount Cargill. Last week, when we got out to Taiaroa Head, there was no wind and it was quite warm. Definitely no albatrosses. We had never been out there in November, and we were quite surprised by the hundreds of red-billed gulls who were nesting there. Above the nests, dozens of seagulls flew around and called. It was amazingly noisy. On my way into the Royal Albatross Centre to use the toilet, I zoomed right in on the nests and got to see a baby seagull. 

I went into the centre, used the toilet and poked around in the shop, and went back outside after perhaps 15 minutes. The wind had blown in, the temperature had dropped many degrees, and enormous raindrops were falling. I made my way to the car and got there before the heavens opened, the rain poured down, and the wind roared so hard that the car rocked and rolled in the wind. I strained my eyes to the sky through the raindrops on the car windows -- surely the albatrosses would start flying -- but no. Dave joined me in the car and we found ourselves fascinated by the behavior of the seagulls in the wind. Only a few were now flying, and they struggled to land. Often one would approach the ground, and a gust of wind would pick it up again. 

Below is an overview of the three seagull nesting areas, one in the foreground spread horizontally over a long mound of grasses, and two on the hillside in the background, one just right of center and the other higher up the hill to the right. (On my laptop, I can double click on the photo and it enlarges and gets clearer, so the little white spots, seagulls, are visible.) The Royal Albatross Centre is to the left outside the photo. That building at the top of the hill is the albatross viewing area, for which you have to buy a ticket. From there you can see the albatross nests on the hillside behind the viewing area. On most nice windy days, there's no need to pay for a ticket because the albatrosses fly overhead, visible from the parking area.

The albatrosses never did appear, but we were amply entertained by the seagulls. The rain poured down for about 15 minutes, but the wind continued after the rain stopped, probably the same wind we had experienced in Dunedin 2 hours earlier. Here are two videos of the seagulls taken after the rain stopped. The second one moves up the hill to show the power and beauty of the wind in the grasses.

Dunedin overview and highlights

 We arrived in Dunedin three weeks ago. The day before yesterday -- election day in the U.S. -- was beautiful and very still. I wasn't feeling well so I couldn't write that morning. Dave and I hopped in the car and drove to the top of Mount Cargill, 2230 feet or 680 metres. We can see it from our living room window.

The drive up is fairly well maintained because of the communication tower at the top. Halfway up we paused to take a photo of the first panoramic view of our city. 

The house we're renting on Maori Hill is on the far right side of the photo, in that patch of houses that looks white in the photo. In the distance is the Pacific Ocean. The body of water that looks like a lake is actually the Otago Harbour, which extends about ten miles to the left where it enters the ocean.

From the top, the view of the city looks slightly different, but you can still see the ocean and the harbor, and our current house is just to the right of edge of the photo.

The house where we lived for ten years is behind the hill in the foreground in Northeast Valley. Turning a bit to the left, I took the next photo which shows Otago Harbour on its long snaky path to the sea. 

Downtown Dunedin is to the right and the ocean is to the left. The piece of land between Otago Harbour and the ocean is call the Otago Peninsula, which has some gorgeous hikes and beautiful ocean beaches on the other side. For the next photo, I turned a bit to the left and took a wide angled shot, then shot zoomed in on the harbour cone.

To the left of the harbour cone is Hooper's Inlet, a salt water marshy area with great bird watching. To the right of the harbour cone, you can see the waves crashing onto Allen's Beach. For the next photo, I looked a bit further to the left again. 

The land in the middle of the Otago Harbour is actually two islands, originally part of the volcano that created the harbour. The harbour itself is the sunken center of either a series of volcanoes or a series of volcano vents. I haven't exactly figured it out, but Mount Cargill is a volcanic outcropping from the volcano(es) that shaped this area. Turning a little more to the left, the outlet to the ocean is hidden in fog.

I zoomed in on the end of the Otago Peninsula, partly because the fog was so beautiful, and partly because of what happens at the very end of the peninsula.

That little lump of land sticking up above the fog is actually attached to the peninsula. The opening to the sea is to the left of that lump hidden in the ground fog. That little lump is Taiaroa Head, home of the only albatross nesting site that's not on a remote island. The albatrosses come and go, feeding their babies. They are the most majestic birds I've ever seen. I fell completely in love with them when we lived here before. (Here are links to the Royal Albatross Centre on Taiaroa Head, and a 2 minute video of the life of an albatross baby on Taiaroa Head named Moana that was adopted by the whole city of Dunedin when we lived here. I cried when she fledged. When albatrosses fledge, they leave New Zealand, fly to South America, and spend 4-10 years there before returning to Taiaroa Head to mate. In the video, Mount Cargill is the pointy hill about a fifth of the way in from the right hand side of the image.)

All the above views from Mount Cargill involve looking south or southeast. To the north is a completely different view, Blueskin Bay (in this photo with the tide about 3/4 out) and the long and lovely Warrington Beach (waves visible). Blueskin Bay has an outlet to the sea which is hidden behind the hill in the foreground.

If you'd like to see a map of the area, here's a link. If you zoom in, you'll see where Mount Cargill is, in a triangle with Northeast Valley and Port Chalmers on the first map.

My Facebook friends will know I've been taking pictures of the amazingly large rhododendrons in Dunedin. The climate here is perfect for rhodies, with mild summers and intermittent rain all summer. Here are a few very tall rhodies to round out this post, plus a pretty fern in our yard. For my Northern Hemisphere friends, remember it's spring here.

Napier: art deco, palms and Norfolk pines

We left beautiful Napier more than a week ago, and I have been slow to get this post written because I've been sick. In our first two days in Wellington, I had a sore throat and a runny nose. I called the national Health Line to see if they wanted me to get a covid test. Within an hour of the phone call, I was on my way to a drive-in testing station in downtown Wellington. I had the test, for free, and got the negative results the next day.

The complication is that the Health Line person told me to self quarantine until I had a negative covid test AND 24 hours free of symptoms. This was perhaps related to the fact that I called them on our 13th day out of quarantine, and covid can have a 14 day or longer incubation period. I quarantined for 3 days in our hotel in Wellington, and still had symptoms. We couldn't stay on at the hotel, which was fully booked -- along with just about every place to stay in Wellington -- because of the big rugby cup game in Wellington between New Zealand and Australia. So we drove an hour and a half northeast to the Wairarapa Valley, a gorgeous agricultural valley between two sets of tall hills. We are staying at a cottage on a vineyard (photos in an upcoming post), and I feel well enough to take ferry to the South Island tomorrow (photos of the ferry trip in an upcoming post, too).

The rest of this post focuses on our two full days in Napier more than a week ago. Napier is the most visually charming small city in New Zealand, shaped by a big earthquake in 1930, which destroyed the city. A lot of it was rebuilt in the 1930s in art deco style. I had been there in June 2017 with my brother, who wanted to play the gorgeous golf course on a nearby headland, Cape Kidnappers. I thought Dave would love painting some of Napier's buildings, and he did.

One of the first things I noticed this time in Napier was the trees. On my first morning there, on the way to a public swimming pool, I drove on a street that looked like southern California. 

On the way home from the pool, I drove along the beach, and that road is lined with my favorite Norfolk pines (shown at sunset with the beautiful light).

Dave spent our two days in Napier painting like a maniac. Some of the charming art deco buildings:

The last two photos are the most photographed building in Napier. Here's Dave's watercolor sketch of the first photo, as well as his sketch of the sound shell and colonnade on the waterfront. 

I had seen a lot of the downtown art deco buildings with my brother in 2017, but this time Dave and I found an art deco neighborhood, about ten or twelve long blocks where maybe a quarter of the houses are art deco. I really enjoyed the diversity of the houses, and was particularly fascinated by the trim details. 

The earthquake in Napier influenced architecture elsewhere in New Zealand. In a museum, Dave found the following photo of Wellington's town hall. Before Napier's earthquake, the town hall had a tower. After the earthquake the tower was removed for safety in case of another earthquake.

Napier is a deep water port in giant Hawke's Bay. I mentioned in the last post that we saw miles and miles of tree farms as we drove across the widest part of the North Island. Most of those trees get turned into logs and shipped overseas, a lot to China. Here you can see so many logs they look like toothpicks.

The photo above is taken from a hill within Napier that you can see in the photo below. Beyond the hill is a long headland to the north which marks one boundary of Hawke's Bay.

Below is the view to the south. The headland you can see in this photo is Cape Kidnapper, the southern boundary of Hawke's Bay and the location of one of the most dramatic golf courses in the world. In June 2017, I spent a delightful 4 hours in the clubhouse looking out at the view while my brother played the course.

The beach at Napier was gorgeous in the lovely weather we had. A photo of Dave, and a look from the beach toward town, with the beautiful rows of Norfolk pines lining the street.

As we drove to Wellington just over a week ago, we saw a wind farm. A brief video to end this post: