| I can't lie; it's fucking great to live by the sea. I miss the middle of stinky old Christchurch (r.i.p) sometimes but nothing really beats this coastal shit.< Our chariots await and they are chariots of fire. I bought some red Chucks in the midst of this current bout of personal turmoil to remind myself that no one is the boss of me and that I can dress as selfconsciously as I please as well as swearing on the internet. I think I wear them like an old person, but I'm not sure. I'll ask a real teenager. It was a beautiful morning and that meant it would probably rain so off we went. |
| > Looking good, Sawyers Bay. The inlet here is about a meter deep on average and when it's calm we get a lattice of perfect reflective and slightly rippled water, usually at its best when we don't have a camera handy. Sawyers Bay used to be covered in podocarp forest but this was largely milled; the tree cover you see here is regenerating scrub. | 
|
There's a nice representative patch of native flora including some relict old growth surrounding a walk called Graham's Bush extending up that valley to the centre right. We'll blog that trip one day. Note the hideous industrial eyesore to the centre left; we have Port Otago Inc. to thank for that largely pointless excrescence. It looks like it's gleaming; maybe you can polish a turd.
| < This is the view looking toward a hidden Dunedin that was featured in the recent Night Monkeys post. > Due to both a near-critical canine mass and its general shabbiness- slash-extreme disreputability, Port Chalmers used to be known as Dogtown by snooty Dunedinites (sup, haters). It remains very much a dog fiefdom; things will go better for you here if you can throw a slobbery stick on demand and tolerate regular sprays of hair-laden secondhand seawater. | 
|
We left our dog at home because he is an unpredictable jerk in public and experience counsels us against attempting to suppress his desire for world domination/cyclist chastisement whilst carrying expensive camera equipment.
^ This enormous Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) is about two metres across at the base. > At the first turn there is a lookout opposite Harbour Cone, which manages to look both boobtastic and somehow flat-chested at the same time. It lies across the inner channel above the township of Portobello. It's about 400 m high and is a remnant of the gigantic shield volcano that used to sit like a cowpat over the entire region. | 
|
Above: Pivot slightly to the north of the abovementioned cone at the same spot and you're into this view of Otago peninsula, Quarantine and Goat Islands, from right to left respectively. Yes they're sort of concatenated in this pic but life is full of challenges and I prefer clouds to topographical distinction so your expressions of anger and confusion are pretty much falling on deaf ears. This is why I'm not a parent.
| > A few more degrees to the north and you're looking past Goat Island and along the road toward Back Beach itself. Hey. Ho. Let's go. Downhill all the way. Just like everything else. 
| 
There are no goats on Goat Island. < Looking northward up the harbour; the little lumpy knob in the far, far distance is Taiaroa Head, home to the only Royal Albatross breeding colony on a mainland in the whole wide world. A perverse choice, really, given the extent to which they are catalogued and fussed over and monitored and gawped at by the various interest groups that've grown up around them. But then I'm not an albatross. Maybe they like the attention. |
| > We're fascinated by the pointy white object that seems to move around Quarantine Island and have long debated its true nature. If you know what it is, please don't tell us. I want to keep believing its a retreat for radioactive cyclopian hippies and that if I swam past at night I would hear them chanting and see them glowing faintly before they began throwing sheep at me. | 
|
We're almost at Back Beach, but I'm not going to post pics of it. There is neither an object nor an end to this journey, until we get hungry and go home for lunch.
| < A stone waka or canoe assembled by a local artist some time ago. It is completely revealed only at low tide. Below: the flowers and drupes of the feral passionfruit that festoon the wilding daturas and eucalypts on the slope above the shore. They're nominally edible but pretty bland really and massively shitaceous (don't ask), so I wouldn't if I were you. | 
|
| 
| 
|
| < A visual guide to our local aquatic flora and fauna purveyed, in part, by Big Oil. Mobil must've nearly gone to the wall with this next-level educational shit and I just won't feel right about this til they can pay their lawyers, so just quit your whining, Nigeria. Hope the couple posing so candidly amongst all those phlegmatic invertebrates knows how to scrub crude off a kid. Maybe Mobil has something on YouTube about that. |
| > Lol. Putting the tramp back in tramping. The tracks around Back Beach are narrow, wooded, discreet and convenient, and the whole area faces away from the township itself, like a shaded little lap; the behaviours elicited by these regions of secluded neutrality form a concise if not exactly flattering summary of the more important human imperatives. More worldly habitués have probably noticed a certain level of ambiguous activity, homo and hetero, pedestrian and vehicular and especially at night, although we've stumbled upon midlife men in knee socks, hotpants, a whole lot of CK One and slightly foolish expressions loitering with a definite purpose at 3.30 in the pm. Which is laudably enthusiastic, if nothing else. We could tell you a few stories about the Rangi Park track, too. I'm completely down with the motivation (who hasn't wanted to wordlessly fuck a stranger on a boring tuesday afternoon?) but I just can't with the wardrobe and the furtive dramatics. Can I love the sin but not the sinner, or would that be awkward? 
| 
< Algal bloom- BFA(Hons). 
|
Above right: Monterey Pines all the way home. Hopefully there'll be a decent crop of mushrooms elbowing their way through the needles after a few days of rain. We collect a number of delicious species from this slope but it's also home to quite a few toxic ones, so we don't recommend it to the dufus shroom virgin. There's also a fair chance we might fall fifty metres onto the pointy rocks at the foot of the cliff. That's natural selection for you.
RSS Feed
