April 2016 – Page 2 – Where is Phil now?

Lord of the Forest

Wednesday 30 March 2016 – Northland, New Zealand.

As this New Zealand trip is a large part of El and my holiday allowance for the year I snuck a few days away for just the two of us amongst the family and friend visits. Family and friends are a crucial part of my visits back to NZ and I really enjoy them, but after long flights and jet lag I find them stressful and draining as well – especially trying to fit everyone who wants to see us in to such a tight schedule. El and I were both looking forward to going away by ourselves for some R and R. Naturally I planned on squeezing in touring and road trips and sightseeing and as much as possible. I never learn.

I wanted to go up to Cape Rienga, the most northly tip of New Zealand, the only other time I was there was in 1975 – mum and I think so anyway. It is pretty much a new bit of New Zealand for both us, though I have been as far as Omapere before. It is a long drive from Auckland so I broke the trip up over three days so we could relax a bit and see a few other things on the way up, and down again.

It was a slow start to the day, we left mum’s place at 9:30 and after a wrong turn here, some incredibly bad traffic there and some stupid lane choices and getting stuck going the wrong way on a non-moving motorway it was an hour before we actually were officially ‘on the way’. I had elected to go up the western side of the island and come back down via the eastern.

By some sort of miracle, it was a stunning day, warm and sunny and perfect for driving. I have slowed down a lot on the last few years, Kiwi drivers are notoriously awful, not madly suicidal like some countries, just rude, arrogant and ignorant. I was that person behind the wheel. No longer; cruising ‘up north’ at a sedate pace was the order of the day, enjoying the reasonable quiet off-season, mid-week roads, and some great scenery.

Our first stop was Matakohe, at the Kauri Museum, we decided not to go into the museum as it was a bit pricey, but we did look in the shop and I took a couple of photos of some of the buildings outside. I have a thing for the old churches in Northland, I have a few photos from ‘back in the day’ kicking around somewhere. I was going to stop and take photos of as many as I could, but only managed to grab a few. They are quite unique, mainly built in the latter part of the 19^th century when Anglican missionaries flooded into the country, they are small, wooden painted white, often with a red roof. They look lovely.

The old Matakohe post office – also lovely. New Zealand’s history is not very old, there are no ancient buildings, but the ‘old’ buildings are quiet unique to New Zealand.

Heading further north we came across this wonderful old derelict church.

After a pretty reasonable, though quite expensive lunch in Dargaville we were soon heading north again up to the Waipoua Forest. The Waipoua is one of the largest areas of northland kauri remaining in New Zealand, and I was keen to stop briefly to see Tane Mahuta, New Zealand’s biggest kauri tree. The road north was surprisingly good, a lot of work must have been done here in the last few years, though it is pretty windy and we got stuck behind someone going really slowly and the Kiwi driver came out in me for a while and I was muttering and cursing for the ten minutes we were held up.

We stopped by the Waipoua River to take a couple of photos of the river and some of the other kauri growing.

After a leg stretch, we were back in the car and finally stopping at the entrance to the short path to the big tree itself, Tane Mahuta ‘Lord of the forest’. It is not a particularly tall tree at only 58 ft tall, but it is 45ft round and looks massive. It is quite impressive up close.

The tree is accessed via a board walk to prevent visitors from trampling too close to its roots, as the bush is quite dense the tree almost appears by surprise when you walk round a gentle bend in the path. I have been a bit obsessed with taking photos with a bit of flare in them but went full flareage here !

It is only a short drive from the Tane Mahuta car park to our final stop for the day at Omapere on the edge of the Hokianga Harbour. There was a viewing point at the top of the hill above the harbour so we stopped to have a look. I hadn’t really told El much about the places we would be staying and she was really excited to know that we were in a small hotel right next to the wharf in the bottom of the photo. What a view !!!

I had booked a room on the internet, but had not really specified any particular requirements, once we were there I asked if we could upgrade, for a nominal increase in cost to a beach view room, and thankfully we could. Wow ! out of the room, on to the ground level deck, across a small stretch of grass was sand and then sea. We could not be any closer. After nipping back up the road to the shop to get a bottle of pinot gris, I was togs on (NZ for swimming costume) and into the sea. My first swim in 18 months. It was cold, but not too bad, El watched…

Once dry and refreshed with a glass of wine, it was camera out and I took a lot of photos as the sun slowly sunk into the sea in front and to the side of us, the golden hour was truly golden.

The sky started off with a nice set of clouds and I was really looking forward to a great colour show once the sun dropped out of sight below the horizon.

However it was not to be, as the clouds slowly dissipated before my eyes and the wild red and purple sky that was in my head did not materialise. It was very special all the same.

A great start to our road trip, tomorrow is Cape Rienga!

There are dreamscapes and realscapes.

Saturday 26 March – Tuesday 29 March 2016 – Auckland, New Zealand.

El and I arrived back in London two days ago. With my body clock completely wonky I was fully awake at 5:30am so spent some time in Lightroom and finished sorting through all the photos I took in New Zealand. After staring at completely blank pages where notes should have been written in my notebook, I suspect that this post will be quite short. It is a wrap up of all the days between doing other things, things that I will write about separately; in the not too distant future.

Our time in New Zealand was short, we only have 12 days in the country and for five of those days El and I are heading ‘up north’ on a wee road trip. I am really looking forward to that, getting out of the city is something I always want to do when I come back, and showing El more of the country I call(ed) home is exciting too. Of course, I am really looking forward to spending time with family and friends as well. With such a short time I am not going to see many of my friends unfortunately, but I expect to be back in November and will make more time for people then. If I didn’t see you this time round – I am sorry.

After a shaky start to the weather since we arrived on Thursday, Saturday morning broke nice and clear. I have rented a car for nine days and El and I caught the bus into the city to pick it up. We left nice and early and I got a bit of record shopping done on the way, picking up a new compilation LP of material from an old Dunedin Flying Nun band The Stones – I have no idea how they got away with that name! I also got two LPs by another Dunedin based Flying Nun band, The Clean. One of the LPs is a vinyl reproduction of a cassette that came out in 1982 – ‘Oddities’. I did not know this existed and I was so happy to pick it up, the cassette copy I had is long gone and the title track is my favourite The Clean song.

After shopping we dropped in to my daughter’s recently refurbished cafe for breakfast and coffee. The place was pretty busy, though the food was fabulous, and the coffee was good enough to want to have two. Mel and her halo 🙂

After breakfast we picked up the car and headed north to Orewa Beach to visit El’s only New Zealand based friend, an ex-work colleague from London. We arrived a little early so parked up and went for a walk along the beach, stopping for a half pint in a small bar. It is Easter Saturday today, when I was a kid Easter weekend was usually the last weekend you would expect to go for a swim, so it was pleasing to see people in the sea today. Actually, to be honest it was just pleasing to see the sea, the beach and the sun!

We had a good afternoon with El’s friends, I was driving so it was light beer for me!

On Sunday we moved to stay at my sisters house for a couple of nights, we had a family lunch and I managed to sneak a few more photos of Mason Smile , it was a great lunch and good to see my nephew and ex-brother-in-law as well.

Four generations of Platts… (and a Wither Hills pinot gris :))

I love my sisters house and after a nice walk – which I covered in the last post, El and I slobbed on the couch over a glass or two of pinot gris – a wine we drank a bit of while we were in NZ.

The sunset was pretty good too!

Monday was another fine day, now we had a car we headed back into town again, aiming for lunch with some friends. Unfortunately I got the day and the time all horribly wrong and there was no one home. We drove down to the waterfront, and up to the viewpoint at Achilles Point with its great view out over the harbour, the gulf and Rangitoto Island.

Some wonderful friends of mine had a BBQ at their place with a few of our other friends along for the fun. It was great to catch up with people again, a short but brief catch-up this time, and one of only two opportunities to catch up with friends.

On Tuesday El and I went back into the city again, we had coffee at Mel’s cafe again – it was nice enough to sit outside this time.

We then crossed over the road to Albert Park for a walk around the magnificent old trees there, really old Pohutakawa and Moreton Bay figs, I love these venerable old guardians of the park. When I get back to London I am going to look for a course on how to take photos of trees, something I want to get much better at.

On the edge of the park is the Auckland Art Gallery, I always visit when I come back, and this time was no exception. We did not have a huge amount of time, so did a quick pass through. I liked this giant web from John Ward Knox, though I missed an exhibition by Fiona Pardington which I am a bit annoyed about, she is a wonderful photographer.

We had arranged to meet mum for lunch down by the old ferry building and once united with her we walked out to the Wynyard Quarter, a more recent development along the waterfront. To think, that not six years ago I used to work just around the corner from here…

It was a really warm day and we found a nicely shaded table outside one of the many cafes that adorn this section of the harbour side. Lunch was excellent, washed down with yet another pinot gris. After eating too much we walked out to Silo Park, I used to come here to take photos a few years ago, especially on foggy mornings – but there was none of that today. I still like the lines and shapes made by the old silos.

Street artist Askew One, painted some of C.K. Stead’s poem ‘Auckland’ on the side of these tanks as part of the broader ‘Tank Art’ project. The title of this post is the opening line of the poem.

The next day El and I headed off on our road trip and I will write about that shortly, but we did have an awesome time away.

Visiting one of my happy places, the Waitakere Ranges.

Sunday 27 March 2016 – Auckland, New Zealand.

Breaking with a long held, and slightly ridiculous, tradition I am going to post some photos taken over a few days, but in the same general location. Over the four year history of this blog I have pretty faithfully stuck to writing in chronological order. This vexes me mightily on occasion; especially when I have a photo I want to post ‘right now’ but there is a backlog of older things to write about so I can stick to my self-imposed fascination with chronological order.

This process change is a bit of annoyance as I had written a whole load of text over the past few days that followed the right order of things, so now I am going to hit delete and get rid of it. I am going to rebel against myself. Maybe this will be the start of something new – non-date based blog posts, change is good right ?

Mum, El and I had arranged to meet my daughter Mel and her partner DIckie at the Arataki Centre in the Waitakere Ranges. The ranges are pretty much entirely forest (or bush as we call it in NZ) and form the bulk of a regional park running along the western edge of the city of Auckland, separating the city from the Tasman Sea. The ranges are why I love Auckland, I lived on the fringes of the forest before I went travelling and moved to London. The Arataki Centre is the information hub for the ranges and quite a tourist spot, with some lovely views out over the national park.

El and I visited the centre when we last came to New Zealand, but this time we are going to do the 1.6km nature walk. I haven’t done the walk since the kids were small and we had a horrible experience dragging small children up a steep path amongst some trees – they hated it, and made sure we did to. I was hoping for a lot more now I am doing the walk with adults, even if one of those adults was originally one of those kids.

I have always had a love of trees, but this has become a bit of an obsession over recent times, especially the naked winter trees I see in England. New Zealand native trees are primarily evergreen, so seeing tree skeleton forests in wintery England is something I am really fascinated by. There would be no tree skeletons today. Early autumn in the Waitakere Ranges means a sea of green; there are very few colours in a northern NZ forest!

The nature walk is on the other side of the road from the information centre and there is an underpass to get there. This sign was at the entrance to the tunnel. A message we need to think about as cities expand into wilderness areas and we deforest our world in the name of growth.

The thing that stood out for me the most in the walk was the kauri trees. They are my favourite NZ tree and get to be very big over time, the largest remaining kauri in New Zealand is Tane Mahuta and I am planning on seeing it when El and I take a trip up north in a few days time. Tane Mahuta is somewhere between 1200 and 2000 years old, this tree is about 600. Stupidly I forgot to note its name, thinking the internet would supply it for me when I got home. It appears the internet cannot.

It is a magnificent tree, but looks to be suffering. The Waitakeres, and large areas of other native forests are inflicted with Kauri Dieback, a fungal disease which is killing both young and old kauri. Once a tree has been infected there is no cure, and a number of un-logged kauri groves have been devastated, it is terribly sad. The kauri is a tall, straight hardwood tree and covered the Auckland and Northland regions. They were hugely popular with European house and ship builders when they arrived in the 1800s, which resulted in almost all the forests being wiped out by loggers, with only a few ancient trees remaining across the northern part of the country.

It is a really nice walk, quite steep in parts, but it is short so overall it is not too strenuous, we took the small detour at the furthest end from the car park to the kauri knoll to see a few, much younger kauri trees. Not all hope for these trees is lost!

Dickie, Mel, me and El

There are a few other interesting things to see, perhaps if we had walked along the trail with tree names I would know what this rather interesting plant is called.

The New Zealand bush in the north island is sub-tropical, it is predominantly evergreen, and is pretty much entirely green in colour, there are very few plants that have bright flowers or berries.

The rata tree is an exception with lovely red flowers.

It was a very nice walk, and given we were outside for only a short time and it was not particularly sunny, it was all a bit hot and sweaty!

A couple of days later El and I had moved to stay at my sister’s house in Titirangi, she has only recently moved in and has renovated extensively, it is a lovely space to live, and is surrounded by immature kauri trees.

These three kauri are right outside the back door and the deck is built around them.

After the family had left after a very nice lunch El, my sister and I went for a walk around the block. (I will sneak a quick after lunch Mason photo just because I can. It is my blog after all)

A walk round the block where my sister lives is nothing like a walk round the block where El and I live in suburban London. There are some houses, she is very close to the city after all, but there is plenty of not-houses as well. Exhibition drive is a flat, gravel road that runs from the edge of Titirangi out towards the dams in the Waitakere Ranges. It is about 3.25km long, is closed to all motor vehicles and was a very regular running track for me. It is popular with walkers, and forms part of a good loop to walk from my sister’s house.

The road is used for service vehicles that monitor the pipes that run water from the dams to a nearby water treatment station.

The pipe runs fairly straight so there are lots of short tunnels on the way, when I was young you could walk/crawl through them, health and safety means they are all blocked off now.

The path is through a very scruffy, and regenerating part of the forest, it is a lovely walk, especially on a sunnyish day like today – and especially after a large lunch!

As the large trees were cut down a long time ago the lower level trees and scrub have taken off here and there are a large number of nikau palm and punga trees all along the walk.

I was looking for a bit of flare action through the nikau palm leaves.

I am fascinated by how the palm fronds appear to interlace with each other, forming patchworks of shadow and light.

I really like these roots, I think they are from an old macracarpa tree. I have photographed them before, may years ago, and I was pleased to see they were still intact, popping out of the bank below the tree, merging with the rock and the hard old clay.

We cut down a steep, and considering it is the end of summer, surprisingly muddy track down to a newer pipeline, and short cut back home. Not many people know about this section of pipeline, I found it years ago, when I was looking for short tracks to ride a mountain bike in this semi-urban area.

We were soon back at my sisters after another really enjoyable walk, in one of my favourite forests, and time for a glass of pinot gris before dinner.