Travel Blog

We went back to Tawharanui and hiked all over the place. And, as spectacular as was the scenery, with the wind-whipped ocean a deep turquoise, the hills bright spring green and the forests a deep Winsor green, the highlight of the day was the birds.

We did a fair amount of walking, part of it out on pastures in the 25-30 knot wind (well bundled up), and part of it in bush. The forest near the point is a very young monoculture of ti trees (rather boring, yet affording shelter from the gale), but the forest in the creek valley is wonderfully rich and diverse. We saw great vistas of rugged sea stacks, we lunched while watching gannets, and we dawdled back along the creek, binoculars at the ready .

Tawharanui is a great place to see birds. A peninsula, it has been fenced off from the mainland, and all of the invasive predators - rats, stoats, etc. - have been trapped and eliminated. Several almost extinct bird species have been re-introduced and are now thriving. Many cannot survive outside of the park. They leave, they die; it's that simple.

We had the great pleasure of hearing and seeing quite a few of these rare specimens. We even saw the two native species of parrot, one big, and brown, the other eye-catchingly colourful. A visiting birder (the only other person we met all day) explained some of the programs and tried to lure in the elusive and very rare robin. (No luck, though there are several nesting pairs in the park.)

On the way back to the car, I sat on the beach and did a quick sketch. It may have been a great day for birding, but it wasn't quite as good for painting... Oh well, all in all, it was a great outing!

Tawharanui Beach

The one downside of the day? We were having such a great time that we didn't start home until after 4:00 pm, and by then the gelato place was closed!

Grey day today. It wasn't bad for a while this morning, so we took advantage and walked the loop around to what I refer to as 'Tui Row'.

The Tui is a great, slightly-larger-than-a-Robin-sized bird, mostly black with dark blue on its shoulders and two prominent white tufts on its throat. It looks like it has a fluffy white bowtie! As fun as it is to see, it's even more fun to hear. This little guy chatters away at a mile a minute, and no two of its sounds are alike. They range from clicks and clucks to bell-like ringing. Tui Row is alive with their calls, and the dawn chorus down there is truly amazing.

We made it home just as the first few drops of rain started to blow in. It never did get really wet, but the wind picked up to 20-25 knots, about par for the course. Not terribly springlike.

Looking up the Valley 1

(Note that there's still a bit of blue sky.)

Looking up the Valley 2

(Going downhill.)

It was another windy day today, but I refused to confined to the house. I wrapped a scarf around my head and neck - geekiness be damned! - and went out for a walk. When it blows like this, the harbour/river mouth is very turquoise in the sun with dark patches of shadow. I did a quick sketch, again trying to work swiftly and loosely. I like the looseness, but it's not nearly intense enough.

Mahurangi Harbour

That's Mahurangi West across the water... West, but it's actually south of Mahurangi East. To get there is quite the drive, You have to go north and west to Warkworth, then head back south and east. By car, it takes at least 40 minutes. I imagine that you could row across in 20 minutes or so.

TODAY'S TIDBIT

One of the joys of being here is seeing all the weird and wonderful plants that grow everywhere. Not only is this a very benign climate, there seems to be very a deep overburden. Lots of soil, though I don't know how rich it is.

Here's the flower of one plant that started blooming a couple of weeks ago. The leaves look rather like Yucca, and there are anywhere from one to four great spikes that look a bit like dinosaurs:

The day was a throwback to July. Sudden, heavy squalls with sheets of rain blowing sideways across the valley, broken by sunny warm spells, all in the space of a few minutes. It makes for a very interesting vista, but it doesn't work for outdoor field sketches.

I'm trying to loosen up the little paintings. (Ideally, I should be working BIG, but that's rather difficult to do when you're packing your kit along in a small daypack. So I'm simply trying to sit farther back from the little piece of paper and not get too precious.)

Sky, Sept. 5

Gosh, those clouds look really innocent, don't they? Who'd have thought that they had all that driving rain hidden away inside them?

TODAY'S TIDBIT

Have I mentioned that Kiwi men wear shorts all winter here? Usually with gumboots. It makes sense if you're going to be outside in the changeable weather. With shorts, you don't have wet trousers clinging to your legs after each heavy downpour. If you start when you're a kid, you'd get used to having bare legs even in the colder weather. And Kiwi winters aren't really that cold. Mind you, I'm a wimpy Canadian, so I can't imagine wearing shorts in this stuff.

Too windy to paint outdoors. The sky was quite bland with very few distinct clouds, and I guess I just needed to do something different. It turned out pretty bland and boring nonetheless, but at least I was playing with paint. (I think it was just that kind of day. I used to hate Sundays - a holdover from boarding school, when all we did was go to mass, study and write letters home.)

If I was going to do an imaginary fish, at least I should have made it REALLY imaginary, don't you think?

Here comes the rain from across the valley.

Went for a walk in the morning and ran into some lovely people. I had already met her at one of the 'women's get-togethers' and had heard a bit about her husband. Well, he's just as nice as she is, and he's a birder to boot! He gave me all kinds of great information about local birds, including the aptly* named 'Morepork' - a small owl not unlike our Barred Owl. He's also going to be lending us some bird books while the couple are away in Europe over the next several weeks.

In the afternoon, I tackled more skies. Hmmmm.

The clouds kept changing far faster than I could paint. I don't mean that individual clouds were moving; I mean the cloud patterns kept shifting from light on dark, to dark on light, and back again in mere minutes. As well, I don't have the skills to get the edges right, though I'll keep trying. (Not only does practice make perfect, it's all about process anyhow, eh?) Funny thing, though. The skies are still a struggle, but I do think that the LAND part of the pictures is becoming more painterly. Ha. Ain't that so true? Very Camino-ish. Life answering the questions you forgot to ask.

*Guess the call of this little owl. Yup. MORE PORK. We'll have to make a point of listening at night.

Spring starts on Sept. 1 here. I guess they don't wait for equinox on the 21st. Yesterday, RNZ played all kinds of 'spring' music from Vivaldi to Vaughn Williams to whatever. It was really quite nice.

Speaking of spring, Victoria, BC had worse weather than us today. It must be rather hard to go from 30C to 15C with showers virtually overnight. We, on the other hand, are heading out of winter and seeing lots of sun. Yes!

Triplet

The herons are coming in for the night. The White-faced herons, which are smaller than our Great Blues, love to come into the field in the evening.

TODAY'S TIDBIT

Twist ties are a very rare commodity down here. They don't skimp on the plastic bags, but there are no twist ties anywhere in the produce section.

Today we went to Mangawhai Heads. That's pronounced MANG - a - fie, by the way.*. Another amazingly beautiful place.

Getting there was interesting. We headed north on Hwy. 1, the main/only highway north of here. We took the turn-off to Mangawhai. Turns out it was only the first turn-off, and it definitely took us the scenic route. But we got there in the end, and it was well worth it.

There's a great circle walk. You can go in either direction, but you need to account for the tides because half is on the top of the cliffs, and the other half is along the shoreline, some of which is impassible at high tide. No problem. We arrived with at least four hours of accessibility.

We did the shore bit first. It was a mix of glorious, hard sand, bouldery beach, and rough volcanic rock. Thank goodness we had on our hiking boots. (Mind you, it sure was tempting to take off one's shoes and socks and walk barefoot.)

The sand beach had the most amazing patterns of pale gold overlying black, glistening sand (magnetite, perhaps?) Gorgeous.

When we got to the turning point, it was up, up, up to the top of the cliffs. (Think the bleak back staircase to Mordor, but without the bleakness. It was a really good workout for the legs.) Then a lovely walk back along shady glades and open clifftops with incredible views. All told, it took close to three hours, but it was well worth the effort. We may very well go again!

Mangawhai Heads

TODAY'S TIDBIT*

"Wh" is pronounced "f". Must be from the Maori.

I worked outside today. Not in some exotic place (that's for tomorrow), but right here in the garden. The climate here is quite a bit warmer than Vancouver Island, and therefore the veggies that one can grow without a greenhouse is rather different. And rather than parsnips dug out of the snow in winter, there are far more exotic things. For example, here's one of Jude's garden plants:

NZ Winter Veg

It's great having these spicy peppers. I've been throwing them into my curries for some extra pizzaz. Yum. Though it's rather hard on my hands. The skin where I sometimes get a bit of eczema stings like mad. Ha.

And I finally put some cattle into one of the sketches. I usually don't include animals. Partly it's because I'm not great at capturing their 'gesture', especially with a largish brush at such a small scale. And, in this one, I got the perspective/placement wrong. Oh, well, the point of doing these fast sketches is to loosen up and not be precious.

TODAY'S TIDBIT

Apparently, a lot of New Zealand's sheep herds are being traded in for beef cattle. China is NZ's major trading partner, and the Chinese want beef, not lamb. I wonder what the change will do to the landscape. It's pretty well already denuded of native trees, thanks to the depredations of sheep. Will cattle make any difference? Better? Worse?

We seem to be getting one bad day and then one good day. Today, we got everything all in the same 24 hours - several times over. Relatively clear when we went to bed last night, pouring rain and windy when we awoke, sunny intervals this afternoon, then grey again.

After seeing some lovely field sketches by Alison Watt (boy, can she draw!), I decided to attack my own sketches a bit more quickly - and, hopefully, more loosely. Lightly go we...

Olive Grove

I maybe should have put a bit more thought and planning into the composition and the distribution of lights/whites. The clouds don't have to be exactly where I saw them when I began. After all, by the time I've finished, they've disappeared and most likely the sky has completely changed!

TODAY'S TIDBIT

Unlike BC, where the speed limit on any stretch of road is tailored to the engineering and conditions of that particular bit of pavement, here in NZ there are just two speeds: 100 kph on the highways and 50 kph inside the towns. If you are driving along a road that passess through villages, there will be a speed sign at the beginning of each town - a circle with a 50 inside. However, when you exit the town, all you usually see is a cirle with a slash across it. This means, "Resume speed". Ironically, the symbol looks an awful lot like the symbol that is used for 'Do NOT... whatever" back home.