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.

NZ spider webs

For months I've been trying to get a good photograph of a spider web, and I finally got an adequate photo. We have been so amazed at the difference in the design of spider webs here. Instead of being vaguely circular like they are in the US, here they seem to be a random collection of cells, each one of which is some sort of polygon. In the photo, the thing that looks like it might be the center of the web is a ball of fluff from some kind of plant. If you double click on the photo, you'll get a closer view which shows the odd cell shapes better.

Invercargill buildings

Ten days ago we spent the weekend in Invercargill, the southernmost city in New Zealand. It was settled in the 1850s and 1960s by Scottish immigrants, much like Dunedin. And also much like Dunedin, it didn't grow a huge amount in the 20th century, so the downtown still has lots of old buildings. At the main intersection downtown, we noted an obsession with columns.

The next four photos were taken within two blocks of the intersection with all the columns. This is one of Invercargill's main shopping streets. It was the second and third stories, above the shops, that interested us.

On the edge of town is Anderson Park and Art Gallery, a lovely old house that was given to the city decades ago and has been turned into an art gallery. The house was built in 1925 and has nice grounds with flower, herb and vegetable gardens and a big playground for children. They didn't allow photos inside, which was too bad, but you can see the outside in the next two photos.

Invercargill's old water tower is a landmark. It is 138 feet high and was built in 1889. Our guidebook says it is an excellent example of Neo-Romanesque industrial design in its time.

The watertower is close to the Botanic Garden, which was lovely on the sunny afternoon when we visited. Remember, it's late summer here (well, really early fall, but I'm in denial about the end of summer), so the trees are in full leaf and the roses are gorgeous. Below are a couple photos of the Botanic Garden, with a cute guy in one of them.

Bluff

During our weekend in Invercargill, it was sunny on Saturday night, and we decided to go to dinner in Bluff. We had eaten there before in a restaurant that overlooks the ocean. Bluff is the southeastern "corner" of the South Island, about a half hour southeast of Invercargill. The town has a few interesting buildings.

Near the restaurant is this cool sign, which we showed about 18 months ago.

The restaurant, The Drunken Sailor, has a great view.

I took the next photo from our table.

The fishing boat in the photo below had dozens of birds following it -- you can see them as white specks. Some of them were seagulls, but we could tell (using Dave's binoculars) that some of them were albatrosses, either royal albatrosses or mollymawks. Albatrosses have a distinctive hooked beak and are much bigger than seagulls. I really wished we had a zoom lens with the same view as Dave's binoculars.

In the next photo is the foot passenger ferry from Stewart Island to Bluff, which we could see in the distance from our table. Again, I wished we had a long zoom lens on our camera so we could show it in a photograph. (The two islands in the photo above and below are Dog Island, with the lighthouse on it, and Ruapuke Island behind it, 6 and 21 km away, according to the cool sign. If you go back to the photo with Dave and the binoculars, Stewart Island, 35 km away, was visible past the headland in the photo.)

Love at 111

Last weekend we went to Invercargill, two and three quarters hours south of Dunedin, because I was teaching a seminar there. The highlight of the weekend for Dave was visiting Henry, a tuatara who lives at the Southland Museum. I had seen Henry before on an earlier trip to Invercargill, but Dave had missed him. Here's Henry:

Henry is about a foot long. Tuataras are reptiles but not lizards. Their closest relatives are dinosaurs. They have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and live only in New Zealand. They do everything really slowly and rarely move. Dave was fascinated that in warm weather their hearts beat ten times a minute and in cold weather only one or two times a minute. Henry is world famous because he just became a father for the first time at age 111. I saw an article about his 11 babies in an American news magazine (The Week), and pointed it out to Dave. Because I'd seen Henry before, it was pretty cool to read about him in an American magazine. Here's an article about Henry's babies:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/henry-the-tuatara-is-a-dad-at-111-1516628.html

The Southland Museum has several other Tuataras, and 21 babies were born this year. Some of them were on display, and they actually moved around some. Those frisky little kids! The babies were about 5 inches long.

Below is one of the other tuataras that's the same species as Henry, and the last picture is a tuatara that's a different species, with big spikes on the back of its head.