Photoessay: Aramoana beach, Otago, New Zealand

Despite its sometime-popularity, we still like Aramoana Beach at the mouth of Otago Harbour.  On a weekday you can find yourself pretty much alone on its pastry-coloured arc, companioned only by the distant, couchant forms of lounging Sea Lions and lilting squads of terns, their gazes turned forever on the water beneath them.  On the other side of the bay stands the Albatross colony and well, fuck-all else, really.  

The surfers are usually more intent on the other side of the beach that stretches westward. Dogs are allowed.  There's not much broken glass.  

​Small pleasures.

< One of the more sightly examples of Aramoana's polyglot housing stock, which runs the material gamut from code-compliant modernity to venerable tin-clad fuckery.

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.

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