Xmas Holidays, West Coast of New Zealand 2015- Part 4

Just thought I'd post a few outtakes and miscellaneous scenes from this trip, since I've been in a pretty low mood all week and couldn't really summon the energy for much else.  You can find the start of this series here.

Above: the mighty stand of flax (Phormium) flowering in the wet ground across the road from my sister's place.  These monster plants are easily 3m tall and the spikes almost twice that. On this side of the ranges, this stand would have been seething with Bellbirds and Tuis, but we saw very few near inhabited places.

Above right: more bovine action.  My sister's hand-reared calves.

Looking out toward the eerily vacant Tasman sea from Granity Beach.  Australia lies some 400 clicks westward and you can almost hear the blowflies.  Below: take a bite of peach, baby.
​R working what his mother gave him on the Charming Creek Walk.

Above: we went on a drive past Karamea (not recommended if you get carsick) toward the Kahurangi National Park.  This is the mouth of the Heaphy River; the titular track running through the park emerges just around the corner.  A beautiful place with a nice sheltered campsite and an incredibly scenic beach that arches for miles down the coast into the Karamea Bite (below).

Sandfly shit gets real here, though.  You'll wish you'd never heard of the place on a bad day.

Kahurangi National Park also marks a shift in climate (slightly warmer) and native vegetation toward this distinctive faux-tropical look, with Nikau palms emergent through the busy, glossy Tasman-region bush.  That's faux-tropical.  You can still die of exposure in the mountains or swamps just a bit inland from here if you're unlucky and/or stupid :)  There were 22 different hazard warnings on the Kahurangi Park DOC site last time I looked.

Progress-loving types want to bulldoze a fucking highway through all this so that arseholes in rental vehicles can top out the speed limit and crap on the side of the road in the course of their potential 48-hour budget loop around the South Island. To the edification of us all.  

One can only hope that the hatred currently being accrued by freedom campers in other touristy areas will knock the wind out of this fuckwitted proposal.  It's not that we're keen on the sociopathic superyacht cohort either, but we are sick of watching travelling douchebros and gap year skanks rolling out of their stinky cars-slash-accommodation to rock a piss and dump their KFC on the verges around our own town and, indeed, outside our house.  I opened the curtains to that delightful spectacle the other day.  Nasty motherfuckers.

You guys would have a much better time in Australia. 

It's the big brown place over there.

​Above: remnant and regenerating forest between the coast and the Stormy and Fenian Ranges.

Time to go home.  We took some shots from the car on the way back through Arthur's Pass.
​The one above was the best of an indifferent bunch, but there's a few worth looking at.

Above: I think this is Mount Sunday, scene of some of the incredibly boring and protracted white person shit in the LOTR films.  Could be wrong, don't really care.   

Above and below: the white cliffs near the Rakaia river bridge on the other side of the mountains in Canterbury.  The Rakaia is a pretty impressive braided river running down out of the Alps that we will one day get around to exploring.  

Below right: homebake not-rod.  I think they thought we were laughing with them, but this was Oamaru so their parents were probably related.  Those retarded... flames?  I'm just guessing.
​My first thought was psoriasis, and now I'm itchy.

Mustard and mallard blue meant we were almost home.
​We had a nice time in our mean-spirited way so I hope we've managed to share that around.

*   This series starts here   *   Photoessays   *   Selected Ravings   *   Read the Book   *

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