Landscapes …

A day off, a car, a GPSr, the open road, mountains, coast and greenery. What more could you want?

My friend Cath and I headed into the far south of the North Island of New Zealand today, in search of new landscapes. The basic requirements were: fewer than 100 buildings, no traffic lights (better yet, no traffic), mountains rather than hills or mere bumps, and water (both fluvially flowing and surging at sea).

Actually, it was even simpler than that: anywhere other than my office!

We headed out of Wellington and made the amazing twisting climb up and down the Rimutaka Hill Road to Featherston (I’ve just discovered this road was closed yesterday due to a landslip!), before continuing on through Martinborough to Lake Ferry. This is a curious little place where a river opens out to a lake behind a breached sand bar before it hits the sea. There are numerous holiday shacks, somewhat tidier and more upmarket than the shacks of similar coastal communities in Tasmania, but still with a rusticness of their own, culminating in the hotel, which somehow seemed to have captured aspects of various different eras into a slightly eccentric whole. We arrived at lunchtime, and were rewarded with the best and classiest roast beef sandwich I’ve ever eaten. Yum.

We then continued to Cape Palliser, which features in most of the photos I’ve included. It is the southern-most tip of the North Island, and is a wild and isolated place. There is a seal colony here as Cath discovered: she went exploring on the rocks and had a surprise close encounter, while I was off in the opposite direction in search of a very soggy cache. There is also an impressive lighthouse, perched on a rocky outcrop 251 steps above the carpark. I know there are 251 steps because I counted them, on the way up … without stopping. I’m not sure this was a good idea. I’ll confess that it DID take me a moment or two before I was composed enough to come back down again!

It is very dramatic countryside, with steep hills/mountains rising up from a narrow coastal plain, just wide enough to graze cattle and the ubiquitous sheep. There is also plenty of erosion. Later in the afternoon the scenery was a little more serene, with the late afternoon sun creating beautiful effects on the rivers. Most striking of all, to those of us too familiar with water-starved south-eastern Australia, was the fact that everything is just SOOOO green (and muddy underfoot!)

We arrived back in Wellington in the darkness, with the GPSr doing the navigating (and Cath doing the voice, since my GPSr doesn’t speak), having had a really good day.

Score: 60 or so photos (now culled to 40), 4 good-ish photos, 5 caches, 2 DNFs, 2 muddy shoes, 1 GPS-is-leading-us-astray moment (we told it to go somewhere, not realising there weren’t any roads there!), 3 TimTams, 0 sightings of my office, 15 seals, 60 bends on Rimutaka Hill Road, 251 steps, and 493 words of blog.