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.

Flowers

For those of you longing for winter to be over, I thought I'd post a few flower pictures. It's summer here, although for the past ten days the weather was not recognizably summerish. We've been eating wonderful fresh fruit and tomatoes while wearing winter clothes. But today the sun came out and I went outside and took some pictures of the flowers in our garden. We're not very good gardeners, but the people before us planted some nice things. The first photo is from someone else's garden. Dave took it, and I found it on the camera, and had to include it since my theme was flowers. The second photo is some friendly flowers I just bought to put in a pot on the deck. The rest are from our garden.

Dave's fishing trip

Last week Dave drove up to Alexandra, about three hours northwest of Dunedin, and stayed there for three nights. Each day he drove somewhere to fish. The first day he came across the most common traffic jam in New Zealand (at least on the South Island).

The sheep started up that path on the right (in the photo below), and that's not where the farmer wanted them to go, so Dave got to watch the sheep dog go up the path and try to get them to come back down.

A little further on, he found this cute view of sheep huddling in the shelter of a rock (below). When I saw the picture, I thought they were trying to get out of the sun, but Dave said it was really windy, and they were sheltering behind the rock to get out of the wind.

Dave fished at the Manorburn Resevoir, created by a dam, and at the Nevis River. The rest of the photos show the places where he fished and the beautiful textures of the hills he saw.

Two more North Island beaches

One of the beaches we went to while we were in the Tauranga area was on a bay. The swimming was lovely, no waves, lots of people and boats to watch. Dave swam with me for a while, then got out because he was itching to paint. He found some cool orange flowers with purple leaves and stem (which we found out just today are called a canna lillies), and he sat down on a grassy hillside to paint them. After I finished swimming I walked around taking pictures. In the second photo, I thought the tree was a really cool shape.

In the previous photo, you'll see a hill with a few cars on top. After Dave finished his painting we drove up to the top of that hill. The next photo is a view from up there across the bay.

On another day, we were at another beach. One of my favorite things on the North Island is all the Norfolk pines, which originally came from Norfolk Island, one of the Pacific Islands not that far from New Zealand. We found out on this trip that the early missionaries liked Norfolk pines and often planted them near their mission stations because the new growth at the top looks like a cross. Most of the trees in the photo below are Norfolk pines. I just can't get over seeing them as tall trees. I've often grown them as house plants.