We had a visitor for a few weeks who is leaving today. We were supposed to travel around much more than we did. Never mind! You can see a lot of the country from the car, just passing by. Here a few impressions I took on the way up to the North. I love to see the country flying by. I certainly have to get out more. That’s my resolution for the next few month…. summer is on its way too :)
I can not remember ever having been so void of thoughts as I am at the moment. All I can think of is what shall I cook for dinner to feed the troops and I desperately need to clean the house, it’s spring. But absolutely no thoughts beyond the chores. This sort of freaks me out. Particularly as I normally don’t think about daily stuff at all, it just seems to happen on the fly. For a week now my head is packed tightly into cotton wool. I wonder when the cloud will lift.
This is an image of the Hokianga Harbour taken last weekend. Yes, we do have an amazing scenery in New Zealand – It is particularly pretty when the sun is shining :) Hope the weather lasts over the next weekend.
I need to get back into the habit of writing daily, otherwise my blog has a good chance of fizzing out….
We are planning to go up North for the weekend to visit family. The place is very remote, there is no cell phone reception (goodie, goodie, goodie!) and Internet is still dial-up. I assume we will be playing Monopoly at night. That’ll be fun. Of course I hope I will have some quiet time to take new photographs as well. It’s time for something else – no more birds and flowers :)
One of my current design jobs is a label for a honey jar. When I was looking through my images, I found this one of a busy bee working away, bum up, head down! Ah, it so describes my situation. This week was just chaotic. I didn’t even get round to writing my blog, but I am slowly catching up – phew!
The honey I make the label for has an interesting story: the hives are located on the balcony of the Townhall in Auckland. They only produce a hundred or so jars a year and I would like to know how it tastes. If you know Auckland, you certainly wonder where the bees can find flowers. Auckland has a lot of parks, but not really around the Townhall. This part of town is mainly concrete. I have learned that bees can fly 3km for food if need be. Poor little things.
I didn’t get around to writing yesterday. I am in a bit of a shambles at the moment.
In New Zealand there is this ad on TV against high speed driving, which has the punch line: “The faster you go, the bigger the mess”.
I am currently well past my comfortable speed and, yes I can confirm, the mess is getting bigger. There is only one way out… slowing down and working through the pile.
In my post yesterday I mentioned the ark we have parked in our front yard. Here is a picture of it. It is such a New Zealand thing to have a boat in the garden. Sadly you don’t see it quite as often as you used to. It was such an expression of the relaxed life-style we used to have… Still, many New Zealanders have life-time projects on the go: Restoring cars, doing up houses, building boats…
This one here is a beautifully hand-crafted wooden catamaran, built by hubby. The image is a few years old, when she had just moved back into the garden for an overhaul. It was taken in the back yard. In the meantime, a bit closer to re-launch day, she has moved around the house to the front. And she will move back into the wonderful Auckland playground, the Hauraki Gulf, before summer, to make room for our next big project…
Oh, this winter is starting to get to me. It is raining, raining, raining. Alright, this is not quite true. In the morning when I make breakfast it looks like a really nice day, but by the time I’ve finished the clouds are back and it is raining again. The light is dull and grey.
I come from a cold winter country, with thick layers of snow, but I was never this cold in Germany. The houses there are well insulated. In New Zealand insulation is just starting to become more widespread. Old men walk down the road in the middle of winter in shorts and gum boots. Okay, the temperatures are generally above freezing point in Auckland, but they must be measuring it in wind-still corners. There is nothing between here and Antarctica and blasts from the South can freeze the proverbial off a brass monkey.
Thankfully the worst of winter lasts only a month or so. So it should be over soon. My magnolia tree already has buds, the first sign of spring. Hurrah.
I find it difficult to capture the essence of the thermal fields. Disappointingly, the resulting images look like proof of a very careless industrial site. Something you could take to the environment court to get the place shut down. But it is all natural and just a reminder that we are only here as guests. Nature has its own mind!
Places like this must have inspired all the stories about the Devil being smelly and appearing in a cloud of smoke. It is very eerie. I am sure he lives somewhere around here.
We went down to Rotorua last weekend to show our visitor the geysers and mudpools. It is definitely a “must see” place on the New Zealand agenda. It smells like rotten egg and bubbles and steams everywhere. And no, this image is not photoshopped! This is the colour of the lake, which is called Devil’s bath. The colour stems from it’s richness in minerals, particularly sulphur. However, it can change colour depending on the ambient lighting. We were lucky, we experienced the water looking this poisonous lime green.
The area was already a “tourist” destination in the 1800’s. Travellers made the trip from Europe to New Zealand to see the Pink and White Terraces, one of the natural wonders of the world. The journey took several months, so in those days it certainly wasn’t a mass destination. Even coming down from Auckland, now a 3.5 hour drive, was a week long adventure. Starting with a steam boat and then through relatively inaccessible terrain, by horse, dinghy and on foot.
They terraces were destroyed by a volcano eruption in 1886, buried under a thick layer of debris.
In and around Rotorua one is constantly reminded that the earth is still active. A little bit further down the country, sixty-odd kilometers away from where we were, Mt Tongariro had a little spew on Monday night. The volcano is visible in the distance in the image below. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen next. Yesterday I heard on the radio, Mt Tongariro could do three things: Either nothing else, or it could continue similar volcanic activity of the same strength, or it could explode big time.
Mmmhm, I could have made this prediction myself.
dedepuppets 