Though I might be white and therefore privileged beyond the average POC hair experience, the degree of policing and assumption I've personally encountered would probably surprise a centre-part Becky.  The suuuper-subtle inquiries about my background (they mean ethnicity) by that strange clade of people who are low-key preoccupied with one's precise degree of Anglo-Saxonicity; big hair and dark eyes get their pursuivant nostrils twitching.  Am I... something else?  The pervasive cultural insistence on curly (they mean mad) hair's link to certain kinds of personalities and conduct.  All those wilful, temperamentally incontinent and usually doomed literary heroines: they don't have flat lobs.​  Then there's the inquisitive strangers who feel entitled to physically touch your fucking hair (old ladies at bus stops: okay.  Jelly queens honking about your wig game: can deal.  Creepers in the seat behind you on the bus: not fucking okay).  And oh yes, the fetishisation from dipshits who think you're going to flip their penis for real with your feral, folicularly-driven sluttiness.  
​
And last but not least, the reason why I haven't been to a salon in twenty years- that look they give you.  As though your head was going to explode and infect theirs with your unruly aberrance.  The wistful yanking of your curls out to their real (they mean straight) length; it could be so much flatter and longer!  The clueless, disinterested butchering.  The completely unsolicited attempts to blow it straight.  The last peremptory ho to try this was astounded and dismayed that I preferred my natural texture and actually congratulated me on being able to 'come to terms with it'.  That was the very last time I paid someone with a fucking pixie cut on a homely-arse five-head to touch my shit.

So now I cut and dye my own damn hair, wash it once or twice a week, air dry and don't brush.  Recently I started using Deva Curl Let It Be finishing spray and I like it well enough; Deva products are fairly natural-ingredient based and non-irritant and I'm just grateful they don't make my hair situation more difficult.  I wouldn't boost them to anyone who wasn't interested in cutting down on synthetic nasties in their personal care regime as I don't think their performance is substantially better than anything else I've tried.

Washing your hair with Sabun soap is a bit of a trip, requiring you to let go of a few deep-core assumptions.  The dread of having to de-tangle non-conditioned hair is hard to understand unless you've held a fistful of your own crispy, broken frizz.  I've come to accept that the artificial shine furnished by conventional Eurocentric products just isn't in curly hair's best interest.  The softer natural lustre provided by organically-derived lipids is what curls need for texture stability and preservation.  This might be old news to people of colour, but curly white peeps just get pointed at white-people product and told we're not doing it right when that shit doesn't work. 

The Sabun lather feels rather unconventional on the head. It's important to get an even, all-over lather going, especially if you're longer, and to rinse thoroughly, working from back to front with warm water, to distribute the oils.  While still wet (don't even towel dry, just enough to stop it dripping), spray in your favourite anti-frizz product and either big-comb through or just work it down the length manually.  Scrunch gently to reinstate your curl shape.  Then leave it alone.  There's sometimes a slightly greasy feel while it's drying and it's hard to believe your hair won't feel heavy or dull, but I promise the finished product does not.  Allow an extra half an hour of air-dry time if you're on the clock.  

For me, the Sabun+spray allows my natural texture to reform peaceably without frizz, and doesn't bring on greasy-root syndrome by denaturing the scalp. It dispels that itchy product buildup that plagues us sensitive types and doesn't aggravate my psoriasis (it doesn't make it any better, but what does?).  It hasn't stripped my colour, which is a semi-permanent black.  And as a final blessing, the Sabun imparts a weirdly obedient cast to your hair; it stays placid and arrangeable.  The result is natural, snaky curl instead of morale-destroying fluff.  I am really pleased with how aggressively archaic it looks.

No one is paying me to say any of this.  I just want to share this rare positive experience with widely available, eco-friendly and inexpensive products.  The Sabun is about $7 per enormous bar in New Zealand; the Deva Curl spray is about $35 which is a lot, but for me it's lasted a long time and it replaces the $15 per bottle I dropped on shampoo and conditioner.  And both are so much better than tipping litres of industrial chemicals down the drain. Taking one damn product into the shower is incredibly liberating.  Give it a try if you have dry, frizz-prone hair and have lost patience with conventional shampoos and conditioners.

The Port to Port ferry was a long time coming, even though the 15 minute route across the harbour from Port Chalmers to Otago Peninsula obviates an horrendous hour-long, vomit-conjuring drive around the entire bloody inner coastline.  They had to have their shallow-draft boat custom built; there are one or two vintage ferries that used to make the trip still lying about the place in various states of disrepair, but the romance of an historical vessel is one thing and the economic reality is another.  I grew up in remote Northern Australia and still have a soft spot for tinnies anyway.  

​The boat is neat, stable and boarding from the low jetty in Port shouldn't pose any challenges if you have half-decent bipedal motility.  You don't have to wear lifejackets but they have all the requisite safety shit on board; I checked.

 Looking out at Taiaroa Head with its lighthouse and albatross colony.  Below- Mt Cargill and the inner harbour, toward the Dunedin city end of things.

Heading back toward Port.  It was a really pleasant trip and we definitely intend to do it again on one of those nice flat-water days over winter.  There was a half-decent nor'east swell on the day and the boat handled nicely; R gets motion sickness sitting in a driveway contemplating movement, and he was fine, as was Fir.

 Our one small gripe was the lack of commentary volume once we picked up speed in the rear half of the vessel.  But you know, there was plenty of room in the cabin if we'd really needed to know more, and a low key approach to audio is one thousand times better than being fucked in the ears by some rote-droning halfwit, as any bus tour veteran will probably know.  The experience was pleasant, affordable, low-key and irritant-free, so the Port to Port Ferry goes on our used+recommended list of local attractions.

Here in Port Chalmers, the cruise season is over, by and large, for another year.  Forgive me if I express deep gratitude for that blessed cessation, as an introvert domiciled in an increasingly visited small town.  This has been the busiest year to date.

Boatpeople, for us hapless residents, the season is long.  Have a thought for the flesh units trapped in those destination towns.  Your oceanic hell wagons belch carginogenic smoke, blast us with their fucking PA and mediocre musical stylings whilst decanting far too many people into the surrounding countryside.  Day after day, for months.  It starts tap dancing on the nerves.

We didn't ask to be put on the CS schedule; in fact, we were given no say in the matter.  You may be on an expensive holiday, but no one else is.  While your paying presence might provide benefits to a narrow demographic, you should probably know that much of your sweet, sweet visitor spend is expertly snatched back by your bloodsucking cruise co affiliates, which is why all those pre-booked day trips cost twice as much as they should.  Your dollar isn't equitably distributed and much of your impact amounts to exploitation.  To too many of us, you are just the thudding chug that wakes us in the morning and the smokestack emissions that permeate the contents of our clotheslines.  We twist the names of each boat into childish obscenities just to make ourselves feel better about the whole situation.  I'm not telling you what they are.

​You know how you wander in and sit your arses down en mass in local businesses, purchase-dodging and using their internet while actual customers stand out on the footpath melting your brains with their stares and wishing wing'd death on you?  You fool nobody, and the accrued karma will send you to an ER one day.

It would be great if you could use the literal biblical plague of buses specifically laid on for you to get into the city, instead of the local public transport which is already inadequate for our purposes.  These tourist buses create toxic stank and inconvenience for locals and they will not go the fuck away until you give them your fare, so have a heart.  You're making people late for work and school when you form 30-deep lines trying to save $1.50.  You even fill the bus sometimes so that locals miss their rides altogether.  Come on now.  Also: don't loudly complain when another passenger opens a window on the trip into town.  You wear 500% and 355% too much Red Door and Flower Bomb, respectively.

I know you're on a boat motherfuckers, but remember those basal social skills.  Treat locals with the respect you presumably afford fellow travellers on your amazing prefabricated journey of discovery.  We aren't props or extras.  Those people with dogs outside cafés are probably deliberately avoiding eye contact.  You are never the first person to loudly interrupt their personal convos by declaring how much you miss your dog, seizing and handling the unknown canine, snapping memorial photographs and going on to wanderingly impart your unsolicited attitudes to everything from race relations to phrenology.  Don't expect on-demand deferential engagement.  We're trying to chill for 20 mins with a friend and every successive version of you edges our hand closer to that cake knife.  Just smile at the dog and move on.

Further to this, people going about their business at their private addresses aren't props, either.  I say this as someone who lives on an increasingly popular walking route.  Please don't stare in to our houses; we can see you.  Think twice about coming up driveways to take photos of private property.  Don't pester strangers in their gardens when they're busy or obviously disinclined, and staring fixedly at them over the fence until they acknowledge you is a pretty fucked up thing to do.  If you're determined to go ahead with this behaviour, the least you can do is throw money; it might stop me clipping you in the head with flying dog shit.  I cannot tell you how much the imposition of awkward pleasantries with a day-long stream of randoms takes the shine off enjoying one's own yard.  ​It sucks.

So does trying to patronise a very small local supermarket packed to the tonsils with boat people who have just emerged from a vessel groaning, nay, listing with every fucking foodstuff known to mankind.  They need more, and right now.  They cluster in impenetrable clots in every aisle and in front of the items you need, stripping the stock whilst glancing over their shoulder at you but never, ever conceding access voluntarily.  They don't bother carrying local currency but do want to dispute the exchange policy at the checkout with 20 peeps banked up behind them.  They're always up for an arguement over NZ's alcohol ID requirements, the high cost of cigarettes here and maybe demanding the checkout person's help to sort through the things they actually want from the two stuffed baskets they've emptied on the conveyor while shouting to their sister in law who is jumping the cue with another two baskets.

Visitors, there's a reason why you don't shop like this at home and that reason starts with throat and ends with punch.

Wonky panorama taken on a phone from the central balcony.

The Regent is a late Victorian baroque extravaganza and apparently the only intact survivor of this idiom, at least in the southern hemisphere.  I know all the ones in Chch were knocked down in the 90s and the remaining, partial stragglers were taken out by the earthquakes.  Which makes me sad; you'll never be full feral til you've sat through Wild at Heart or Anatomie de l'enfer amongst that particular kind of feverish, moulting grandeur.  It's like tonguing a lollypop in the lap of a benevolent if superannuated courtesan with mercury poisoning.  There may be odours, but you learn so much.

The Regent was infamous for rejoicing in special arse-punishing seating; I remember writhing my way through a screening of Metropolis and swearing never the fuck again, so it took a lot to tempt me back to watch Romeo and Juliet (free tickets fuck yeah).  Despite the original coccyx-compressors having been replaced in a recent restoration the new seats are just as bloody hard on the buttockal region in an entirely new way.  Goddamit.

It was fun to watch all the flinty, thirsty ballet mums trying to out-alpha each other, less fun seeing more than one nascent ED in their anxious offspring.  The Royal NZ Ballet was mmmokay (Juliet was awesome); special mention for set and costumes.  No pictures of the performance because people who do that shit need to die in a fucking fire.

I personally burn to crayfish red in about five minutes in this kind of UV, so Felix gets the best of it.
​R's not really a beach guy.  He won't take his shoes off, which I find both pitiable and disturbing.

Brilliant silver Mullet, like shards of lustre glass, surf the glossy little breakers about 5m from shore.

The dunes manage to both erode and stubbornly persist, but no one knows for how much longer, realistically.
​They are clothed in spiky grass and feral flowers.

Millions of snails gave their lives for this pointless tableau.  The fine sand buffs the pastel crust from their outer whorls, revealing their flayed, roseate nacre.  I could shoot them all day.

This sort of stuff is xmas for us down here.  Northern tourists seem to forget the season and slide back into summer sloth, which must be nice.  Cooking a full roast on a day that might have fallen out of Satan's arsecrack, complete with fully-operational blowflies and beer bloat isn't my idea of festive.  Lots of people just chuck formality and get pissed at the beach with some ham and salad.

Metallic crap aficionados should really make the effort to extend sideways from Dunedin and visually fondle all this oxidised largesse.  Everything ever constructed and transported at ruinous expense is rusting on its arse somewhere in Middlemarch.  You'll love it.  

Let's have some background.  Possibly because they are so jankily idiosyncratic, my teeth possess a strange Jungian significance in both my conscious and unconscious mind; I share them with my blood relatives and they feature in my dreams.  They used to distinguish me from three hundred other punters grinning in the blacklight on trance nights.  They are weirdly totemic.  For these and other reasons I am one of the people who just do not go to the dentist and am strictly of the opinion that allowing people to tinker with shit that isn't broken is how you end up on the unnecessary procedure treadmill with five grand's worth of unpaid bills fermenting under your fridge magnets.

But you know, I'd been in a lot of dental pain for a couple of months.  Yes, months, because a prolonged fuck-tonne of pain is ironically the only thing that could have nudged me toward a cubical to get it looked at.

The nurse said I might hear cracks and 'ear sounds' as the tendons securing the tooth gave up, and possibly feel some sort of weird pressure but when the time came, the surgeon just selected the tooth with an implement I didn't even get a look at, rocked it a couple of ways slowly and then boop, there it was.  Out.  No sounds, no graunching, absolutely zero pain, some pressure (nothing startling or horrible) and the entire process lasted about 20 literal seconds.  If I could have allowed myself to blink by this stage, I would have missed it.  I should say that this was an uncomplicated extraction of a conventional molar with no breakages etc., but that's a pretty standard presentation.

We took a trip out to the mouth of Otago Harbour during autumn.  ^ This is the view of Port Chalmers, in the midst of said harbour, looking back down the windy ribbony road to Aramoana, path to the sea in Maori.

Aramoana and its beaches occupy the western side of the heads and are a fairly decent, non-life threatening surf break, nice walking and the chance to see the local avian and marine wildlife.
Below; still on the way out there.  Some of the small bays along the road are good for cockles (Littleneck Clams) and the occasional scallop.  There's fuck-all dairying around here and very few sewage outfalls so the water is cleaner than you might think.