Christmas Holidays, West Coast of New Zealand 2015- Part 1

We don't usually go anywhere at xmas.  Partly because we can't afford it, partly due to too-hard basket factors but mostly because we already live in one of the places by the sea that other people rent for their xmas holidays.  But driving frantically and at length on dangerous roads from one beach town to its exact analogue on the opposite coast is traditional in New Zealand, so this year we set redundancy aside and went to stay at my sister's house in Granity, the place that featured in my winter road trip posts.

Last time we took the Lewis Pass over the Southern Alps but this time we cut inland via Arthur's Pass.  It's a slight time saving from Dunedin and a different, more hardcore alpine landscape to distract oneself from other peoples' driving, which is important during two hour's worth of narrow, madly sinuous cliff-side blind corners.

(Keeping It Real Tourist Advisory- while the Arthur's is undeniably beautiful, it's not a cycleway at all and the number of obviously inexperienced cycle trip peeps trying to negotiate this zero-margin route was fucking crazy.  If you're coming here on a bike tour expecting a mature, Euro-style infrastructure and driver consideration, you're shit out of luck.)  

Soggy weather shut down any attempts at documentation so you'll just have to image a bunch of heavily-wooded tilt thrust mountains.  

Left- Kea, the local hoodrat parrots that hang around tourist areas on the Arthur's, waiting to jack your pies, steal your shiny objects and peel the rubber fixings off your vehicles. 

Think really hardened, brazen café sparrows crossed with those bastard temple monkeys and throw in a penetrating cackle at your expense.  We fed them the slightly slimy sausage rolls from the Arthur's Pass Café (Keas are omnivorous, not discerning) as a punitive measure but they were all like whatever, ate them, burped in our faces and went off to start shit somewhere else.  Tangentially, R says the coffee at AP Café is fine; while I find the pies gravy-heavy and pedestrian, my hot chocolate didn't kill me and because I am a a dirty sleaze bag, I noticed they had a tall dark drink of coffee-guy with a Scottish (?) accent and confiding manner cue Hannibal Lecter fava bean sucking noise.
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Right- The Pohutukawas (poe-hoo-too-car-wha), in full bloom when we arrived.  Strong sunlight fuzzes up their brilliant crimson to an almost hallucinogenic extent.  They're somewhat cheesy introductions from the North Island, dominating the popular imagination in the way northern conifers have come to symbolise a generic xmas in Europe.

My sister's place is an old weatherboard  miner's cottage sitting between this long stand of post-glacial hills and a yard that peters down toward the beach.  She went down the all-white road during its last interior do-over including floors, which pains me.  I do like its déshabillé-ity; she's sort of over it.

I could photograph these hills all day.  The hypnotic density and textures of their cloaking vegetation is sometimes difficult to credit even with the naked eye.  

​Wekas stalk the flax swamp at their feet, crossing the road to raid gardens and get into the rubbish, replacing feral cats which in olden times were possibly some sort of local delicacy.  Lol.  I didn't see any and did not enquire.

Sparkle, the ancient pig dog and Rita, my final niece.  2.5 years and a full dose of ham under her figurative belt.  She likes masks, the same books over and over, picking all the flowers and getting her own way.  Don't we all?

She is the Wizard of No, blasting those that displease her with the majestic power of her manual directives, committing all five fingers of power to her anathemas.  I made her the red tigon mask and call her on her bullshit when she's bitching at bedtime.  We get along fine.

Settling in to the spare room.  ^ An example of the fairly high-grade local junq.  I usually hit the charity shop hard but it was fucking closed this time.

Xmas day comes and goes. Only the strong survive.

And now we make party.  Badminton party.  We haven't played for 20 years and never in a borrowed fucked up chicken mask.  Just following orders.

Full moon through the dying cabbage trees in the back yard.  The Tasman Sea is eroding this part of the coast, regularly inundating the rear of these adjacent properties and salting up the water table.  Residents are stuck between spending remedial money they don't really have on houses that might not have a future anyway and someday writing the whole neighbourhood off, which will probably happen in my lifetime.  Local councils are impoverished by the death of coal mining and our national representatives are a pack of depraved arseclowns, so I don't envy their plight.  

The offending beach, to the north and south.  It is so peaceful and benign in its rapacity.

Felix is a hardcore beach tweaker; sand and water are his amphetamines.  He does not stop.  

​Ever.

Sparkle is similarly moved by this environment but dignity and arthritis intervene these days.

If the beach looks empty, it's because it usually is.  Avoid the clichéd destinations and New Zealand offers almost endless scope for turning up your nose at other tossers and going somewhere else to get the whole place to yourself.  

Below right- the West Coast is a geological orgy.  Local rivers and beaches serve up an endless selection of marble, agate, schist, quartz, nephrite, bowenite, pyrite, micaceous shit and other lithic porn for all your pointless stonehoarding requirements.  We never leave without a large bag(s) of tumbled precious.

Stone deity and offerings, a recent innovation.  Local stone carver installation, not traditional Maori religious practice.  

Not sure it's working.

Let's go down the road a wee bit.

Dozing Standardbred, the local trotting breed.

Unimpressed by our lack of vegetable offerings and/or firm excursion plans. 

Cottages; always so cute when you're not the ones shuffling buckets around under the leaks or nailing new bearers to the timber turning to dust under the front room or cussing out the rat nest in the toilet wall or I've made my point.  

​We love fucked-out old hoopty places, will probably always live in one and find new houses generally about as appealing as the refrigerated corpses of strangers dead of unknown causes.  New carpet solvents and windows that form a seal make me anxious.  

​WTF curtains, rotting piles, timber beetles and lumpy walls 4 eva.

Sunset and the sandfly hour.  If you're heading to coastal New Zealand in the warmer months, check local sources for the biting insect situation > because that shit can literally make or break your stay and I mean literally literally.  Though there's no (known) communicable disease issue, they can be utterly intolerable.  

​If it seems like there's some sort of direct and highly ironic relationship between the scenic value of an area and the density of its sandflies, that's because there is- the little fuckers favour rivers, undisturbed forest and beaches.  

The west coast is infamous for its clouds of hungry Austrosimulium and this year we were treated to both local species, A australense and A. ungulates. which was awesome.

If you're reactive, you'll end up covered in a pox-like mass of red welts that swell and itch and burn and keep you awake as you scratch little ulcers into their surface because skinlessness is the preferable state.  I counted thirty-four bites around one ankle before reaching for the insect spray, and I hate that stinky toxic shit.  

​Singing black clouds were dancing around my head while I waited for the shot below.  I had to run back to the house before they took me away to meet their evil queen and/or persuaded me to resume smoking.

Part 2  H E R E- jellyfish and waterfalls; more obscure New Zealand. 

*   Photoessays   *   Selected Ravings- real good written-down thinkings   *   

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