A few glimpses of Dunedin

We've had an unusually rainy winter. To our relief, a moderate amount of sunshine has arrived with the spring. I'm able to hang laundry outside again. This is a new thing for me; before we moved here I had never hung laundry outside before. I get a lot of pleasure from being outside on crisp sunny mornings hanging it out. We really enjoy our little back yard. No grass to mow, which is a big treat. And the view up the hill is comfortably urban but private enough.

Dave went out on his bicycle a couple weeks ago to try to take some pictures of spring. The Botanic Garden was surprisingly bereft of spring flowers. You can see the trees are just starting to get leaves.

Up above the Botanic Gardens is an old cemetery which Dave visited that same day. The mausoleum pictured below looks like a small scale version of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Dunedin. He wonders if the same architect designed it. He sat in the sun that day and painted the scene in the next photograph.

Wellington

Last week Dave spent four days at a conference about 20 minutes north of Wellington. He was fighting the flu all week, so he didn't take a lot of pictures, but here are a few. First, a reminder that Wellington is the capitol of New Zealand, its second largest city, located at the southern end of the North Island. It takes an hour and 15 minutes to fly there from Dunedin. The conference was held in a barracks left over from WWII which originally housed US military officers.

Looking south from the old barracks, they could see Wellington. In the next picture, those hills in the far distance are the hills around Wellington and the lighter patch below the hills is the downtown.

Right below the barracks was the Hutt River, with a golf course on the other side of the river. Spring is just coming to New Zealand, with a few early spring flowers out and little buds on some trees.

North Island

I'm finally posting some more pictures from our trip to the North Island. The last trip photos I posted were from the Coromandel Peninsula, which is a couple hours south and east of Auckland. When we left there, we drove south along the Bay of Plenty (my favorite place name in New Zealand). The weather was rainy a lot, so we didn't take many photos on that day of driving. This first photo comes from one of the small towns along the way.

Just south of the Coromandel, where the Bay of Plenty begins, there are lots of kiwi fruit orchards. (Note that in New Zealand, a kiwi is a kind of bird or slang for a New Zealander. The fruit we call kiwi in the US is always called kiwi fruit here.) I wish we had taken photos of the kiwi fruit orchards, but it was raining and we thought we'd see more. Kiwi fruit grow on vines that are stretched on wires, sort of like vineyards but on a larger scale and with more draping vines. I've never seen anything that looks quite like them.

Below is a nice photo of Dave taken in Whakatane (pronounced Fa ka TAHN ee), which is near the south end of the Bay of Plenty.

This next beach is just south of Whakatane. That headland you can see in the distance is called the Eastern Cape. When we planned this trip, we planned to drive around that cape to Gisborne, on the other side. On the map, it looked like it might take four hours. In Whakatane we found out that it takes nine hours, more hours than we wanted to spend in the car. (This is typical of New Zealand. What looks like a short distance on the map often turns out to take forever because the roads are so slow.) So we drove across the mountains, the short cut to Gisborne. Those pictures of hillsides covered with tree ferns in an earlier post were taken on that road through the mountains.

An interesting note about the history of the Eastern Cape. In the early days, before a road went around the cape, if people wanted to travel with horses and carriages, they travelled at low tide and drove on the beach as fast as they could, to travel as far as they could before the tide came back in.

We spent two nights in Gisborne in a cabin right near that beach you can see below.

Gisborne is the site where Captain Cook first set foot in New Zealand in 1769, the first known European to do so. His landing site is just below the hill we were standing on to take the photo below. In fact, as far as we could figure it out, he landed close to the place where all those logs are stacked up below us. I've written quite a bit before about lumber as a big export from New Zealand, which you can get a glimpse of in the photo below.

The beach near where we stayed was lovely. Dave got a big kick out of watching the people on the inflatable boat below practice surf rescues.

On the outskirts of Gisborne are lots of vineyards. The area is called the Chardonnay capital of New Zealand because most of the country's Chardonnay grapes are grown there. I'm sorry the next photo is blurry, but we were too lazy to stop the car to get a photo of something we found very amusing: sheep grazing among the grapevines. An easy way for farmers to keep the grass under control.

A little further up into the hills on the road going north from Gisborne was some gorgeous country.

Our next stop was Rotorua in the middle of the North Island a few hours south of Auckland. It has been a tourist attraction for more than a century because of its hot springs. The building in the photo below used to be the train station and it's now the tourist information center.

Another similar building is the old hospital/sanitorium where people with medical problems came to stay and partake of the hot springs. It was built more than 100 years ago, and is now the city museum. It was fun to see the old treatment rooms with their old fashioned bathtubs inside. The minerals in the water were so corrosive that the pipes were continually rotting out.

In Rotorua, hot springs are everywhere, as you'll see from the next photos. There's a faint sulphur smell everywhere in town, and a stronger smell near each spring. We found a hot spring in a gravel parking lot. It was a place in the ground where some water was coming up. The water was so hot you could barely touch it.

We left Rotorua and drove to Auckland, where I had an academic conference to attend at the University of Auckland and where Dave went sightseeing. One of his first stops was Devonport, a charming little village a ten minute ferry ride from downtown Auckland. You can see the city in the background.

The next photo was taken in Auckland, looking toward Devonport.

We didn't get a lot of pictures of the University of Auckland, which is an urban campus with lots of unremarkable buildings. (Since they are the chief rivals of the University of Otago, where I teach, perhaps it's good that I'm not waxing poetic about the campus.) Below is the iconic clock tower of the University of Auckland.

On the University of Auckland campus is a Maori marae (pronounced mah rye), a gathering place where ceremonies are held. There are many more Maori on the North Island than the South Island, so we saw many maraes on our trip.

Snow and Birds

Last Thursday it was almost 60 degrees and sunny all day. By noon the house was so warm from the sun that we turned the heat off. On Friday the temperature fell dramatically, it snowed a little, more like hail, and Friday night it snowed some more. On Saturday night the temperature got down almost to 10 degrees (that's Fahrenheit) and it snowed a little more. It didn't stick much where we live, right at sea level, but we could see snow from dining room, looking up in the hills.


Dunedin's climate has so many similarities to Seattle, but it certainly changes much faster than Seattle. We've been getting so much pleasure lately from feeding birds on a table on our deck, right outside our dining room. So we can sit and eat and watch the birds: green finches, sparrows and silvereyes come and eat, and blackbirds sit around on the railing of the deck, or in the tree, watching. The blackbirds here have orange beaks. I didn't get a photo of a blackbird, but here are some sparrow and green finches. It's not a great photo because it was taken through the sliding glass doors of our dining room, but it gives you an idea of the fun we're having watching them.

Dave's small paintings

I still have several blog posts to do from our trip to the North Island, but I'm going to take a break and post some of Dave's recent paintings. He's been painting smaller works to sell matted but not framed. These thirteen paintings range from 2x4 to 4x5 inches. The first two are sunsets: fishing boats in a harbor on the Coromandel Peninsula (North Island) and Halfmoon Bay on Stewart Island (off the southern tip of the South Island). Dave paints from photographs, and, in my last post, you can see the photograph he used to paint this first one.

The next one is Otago Harbour from the Peninsula looking toward Port Chalmers, which is the main container shipping port.

The next one is a "poor man's dry dock," according to Dave.

Dave painted the next one in Queen's Gardens, a park in Dunedin.

Now some churches. First, two versions of the Church of the Good Shepherd, an iconic New Zealand church on the shores of Lake Tekapo, a turquoise blue glacier-fed lake at the foot of the Southern Alps. Then an Anglican church in Arrowtown, near Queenstown. Then First Presbyterian Church in Dunedin. You can see that Dunedin was founded by Presbyterians, because they built a Presbyterian version of a cathedral. Last of the churches is the small Roman Catholic church a couple blocks from our house, with lovely tree roses lining the walkway to the church.

Now lighthouses. The first one is in Lyttleton Harbour, near Christchurch. Then Tairoa Head, at the very end of the Otago Peninsula, near Dunedin. Then Shag Point, a lighthouse about an hour north of Dunedin.

The Coromandel Peninsula

We've been home from our trip to the North Island for 10 days now, but I'm still sorting through photos and deciding which ones to post. After we spent two days in Auckland, we drove about two hours south and east to the Coromandel Peninsula, a mountainous thumb that runs north and south. It's about 60 miles long by 20 miles wide. At the base of the thumb, on the west side, is the town of Thames, where we stopped to get groceries. Dave didn't want me to take this next photo, but I liked the hills in the background and I thought you'd be amused at the familiar foreground.


We drove north along the western coast of the Coromandel. On the other side of the huge bay to west of us we could occasionally see land, which would be the area south of Auckland where Dave had been exploring the day before. To take the next picture, we stopped and looked back the way we had come (so this photo is looking south with the huge bay to the right/east).

As we drove north on the incredibly slow road (a very twisty road that mostly followed the shoreline), the sun went down. The next two photos were taken just before getting to Coromandel Town, which is about two-thirds of the way up the peninsula.

At Coromandel Town we headed east through the hills to the place we were staying, Matarangi Beach. It's a resort community a lot like Sun River, Oregon, with tennis courts, a golf course, and walking paths through the houses. The house that was lent to us was only about 100 yards from the beach. We stayed there five nights, and I loved it there. Every day the weather was rain-sun-rain-sun. Here are some photos of the many moods of the beach near the house we stayed in.

We didn't get many good photos of other parts of the east side of the Coromandel because of the weather. Below are two. We did drive down the whole east side of the peninsula and then further south, along the Bay of Plenty. I'll post some photos of the Bay of Plenty in the next post.