For who knows what reasons, traffic has been worse the last few weeks, especially in the mornings as I’m trying to get to work. So, I’ve been leaving earlier and earlier to try and get ahead of the congestion. That’s not terrible… I’m usually awake anyway.
Some days I’ve been using the extra time for a longer swimming pool session (or a few minutes in the hot tub), and other times I’ve shown up at the office early to tame the email beast.
But on several recent mornings I’ve just taken a walk, something I’ve missed since moving to the new house and driving to work. Here’s a few pictures…
The old spiritualist society has turned into a boxing gym. I don’t know if boxing gyms are enjoying a worldwide spurt in popularity, or if it’s a local phenomenon… But you can’t swing a heavy bag around here without bumping into one.
Here’s a utility box painted by Paul X Walsh who I think is the best of the utility box muralists operating in Auckland today.
These cabbage trees are descended, supposedly, from the original cabbage tree which gave Newmarket its Maori name: Te Tī Tūtahi, meaning ‘Sacred Cabbage Tree Standing Alone’.
The sweetgum trees on this street were strangled by their previous metal frames. These new flexible porous mats should let them breathe a little better.
That’s Rangitoto, the largest and youngest volcano in Auckland. The early Maori saw it erupt… must’ve been something! It’s about 3 miles off shore, and forms an important part of the scenery.
I have been to Rangitoto before, but this time I wasn’t able to bring my camera. The photo above is from Wikipedia, but that’s about what it looked like on Sunday. I participated in a swimming event where we got ferried out to the island, and had to jump in and swim back to shore. Space for gear was limited, only whatever you were swimming in and the minimum amount required to keep warm while waiting for the start.
Although I have swum further on a Sunday morning, this was the longest I’ve ever attempted to go hard, in race-like conditions. Unfortunately, my electronic timing chip failed to record me getting out of the water, so the official results had me down as DFL — dead fucking last. But after an email with the timing people they updated the results so I take my place proudly in the bell part of the bell curve.
After a very nice lunch with my fellow swimmers (by coincidence at the same restaurant where my former clarinet teacher plays on Saturday nights), I only had enough energy to get home, sit in the hot tub for a while, and take a nap.
It was chilly and choppy in the water, and the complicated logistics of registering, taking the ferry, having gear shuttled to here and there, etc. all made for a long and not entirely enjoyable day. So, it’s an event that I can take off my bucket list, if I had a bucket list, but won’t likely feel an urgent need to do again. More importantly, it is another volcano to take off that list!
That is a picture of a dead rat, covered in flies.
Misty the mighty hunter brought that rat inside last night, meowing her usual call of triumph and waking us up.
Of course, at that time the rat wasn’t dead and so she and I had to chase it around the house for a while until I could get it into a Tupperware container. It was already grievously wounded.
In the middle of the night, groggy and buck naked, I didn’t have the presence of mind to put it in the freezer or figure out some other way to kill a rat without getting bitten. So I tossed it out onto the driveway, where it promptly expired. Not my most humane or most competent moment.
It has now been run over a couple of times, and the flies etc. will do their work pretty quickly.
Look up in the top right corner… first time I’ve noticed the 5G symbol. We don’t have the anti-Huawei sentiment here, so downtown Auckland is officially open for Chinese mind control.
Making friends is a funny thing, and you don’t always know how it’s going to turn out. After swimming near a guy most mornings we got to chatting a bit… which is to say he broke through from the quick smile and nod into whatever that next bit of conversation was. He’s obviously good at that kind of chit chat and has since introduced me to several others in the pool.
So now I have a new friend, which is especially nice when you’re a foreigner. He came to our housewarming party and we have an invite to brunch for some unspecified time. We’re of an age and have some business things in common and he’s always got interesting things to say or stories to tell.
So when he invited me to his annual Easter weekend swim off Waiheke Island, of course I’d like to join. The only catch is that it’s a nude swim, from a nude beach. Hmmm.
Well, there’s a first time for everything. Body parts have been exposed to the air, and lightning didn’t strike anybody dead. I met some of the other regulars at that beach, all very nice… they have quite a little community out there. Other than that one obvious thing that was different, it was a strikingly normal trip. Luckily it was pretty cloudy, so my biggest fear — of a really unpleasant sunburn — didn’t come to pass.
A week ago we joined Isabella and a couple of her friends at Taonga Moana, a choral event staged as part of the Auckland Arts Festival.
The name means something like “Treasure of the Sea”. There was a complicated storyline about migrating birds, and Maori gods, and pollution.
The music was beautifully executed to my somewhat experienced ear, but was too hard for me to truly enjoy. The forms and rhythms were mostly too abstract, the harmonies too complex. There was a video backdrop showing various images and words. Also too deep for me.
I would have loved to hear this performance and discuss it with someone who really understands choral music, and specifically modern high concept choral music. Was this show ground-breaking or derivative? An excellent example of the genre or merely pretentious? But not having such a person close at hand, I had to settle for my own opinion. Great singing, but not in service of an inspiring work.
After yesterday’s marine excursion I was in no shape to join my pod of swimmers for today’s rough and tumble adventure. The wind and waves were too high for me.
But we’d planned a post-swim BBQ and I didn’t want to miss that! So we went down to the beach and took a walk before joining the gang for brunch.
Here’s a pied shag drying off after his morning dip.
This bronze plaque at the base of a pillar caught my eye. I expected something about the Queen, or maybe a dedication of the beachside improvements including that nice walkway, or something like that.
But no… in an extraordinary act of self-importance, the North Shore Rotary Club would like to tell you how long the beach is! But not even that… they just want to tell you how far it is to their other plaque. Sheesh.
Armed with that information, we headed over to Christina’s house for the BBQ, where a good time was had by all.
Heading back from the post-swim BBQ (more on that later), we detoured a bit to visit Tank Farm. The picture above doesn’t quite do justice to how this looks in context… it’s a pretty dramatic half-mile hole in the ground! We appreciate the sense of humor in the cautionary sign, probably not official Auckland Council issue.
This is one of the oldest volcanoes in Auckland. It erupted about 200,000 years ago. For most of that time, it was a freshwater lake right next to the sea, but at some point the crater wall collapsed, allowing tidal waters to enter, along with a whole lotta silt.
It got the name Tank Farm because the US Navy started to build fuel tanks here in WWII for its planned assault on the Japanese. But the course of the war changed before the tanks got past the foundation stage, and now all you can see are faint round outlines along one edge of the crater.
One of my workmates is a keen fisherman, and he organized a charter boat yesterday for a few of us to go out and enjoy a day on the water doing manly things (or further deplete the already overtaxed fishery depending on your point of view).
It ended up being just four of us plus the captain. The boat, called the Westicles, was not the kind of big luxury fishing boat I sort of imagined. But with just us, a big boat wasn’t economically viable, so away we went.
Ah, the feeling of the wind in your face. And in your back and butt and shoulders as you hold on for dear life in 4-6 foot swells during the hour and a half trip out to the supposed magic spot.
Just before getting there, we spotted a bunch of birds who had obviously found the fish already. The shearwaters fish busily on the surface, while the gannets hover and then dive… quite a sight.
We pulled in close and deployed a drogue — which probably has a different name — to keep us drifting in a more controlled way.
The actual fishing was different than anything I’d ever done. The wonderfully light rods are rigged up with a big round weight painted like an eyeball, which slides freely on the line. There are a couple of hooks camouflaged in a sort of plastic hula skirt. You plop that into the water and let it drop to the bottom. Then you slowly reel it up just a few feet. If you get a bite, you just keep reeling… no yanking to set the hook. And if they haven’t bitten within a few cranks of the reel, you drop it down again.
At that first spot, we mostly got bites as soon as the lure hit the bottom, but many of them were too small to keep. And then after a while they just stopped biting… the whole group must’ve moved on.
We tried another spot, and another, and another, with little success. Now it’s getting onto 2 o’clock, meaning we should be heading in soon.
We tried one more spot, and it was marginally more active, and then we saw another group of birds not far away. Fish jackpot! We were pulling up fish as fast as we could… which is saying something because we were in about 150 feet of water.
We all got our limit of 7 snapper. I was King of the Boat for the 51cm fish shown above. By next week I will remember that length as 61, or was it 71? The captain kept saying it was an unusual day for the small size of the fish we caught. Supposedly that large eyeball jig should really appeal to big fish and less to small ones.
But, as John Bunyan said in Pilgrim’s Progress, “Behold how quickly Man’s triumph turneth to Guts.” OK, actually I just made that up. Remember that big luxury boat I wasn’t on? Well, on that boat, while you’re sipping Prosecco and nibbling on canapés , the hardy crew of islanders fillets your catch and gives it to you wrapped in butcher paper. Not so on the Westicles.
I haven’t cleaned a fish since living in Missouri 25 years ago. These ones were cold and slimy and had sharp spiny fins. At least now there’s YouTube, so I got some tips that helped a bit. Note to self: sharper knives.
Lee roasted a couple of the fish while I took a long hot shower. They were actually really tasty! And then moments after dinner was done I was asleep in front of the TV.
All in all, it was a good day, but if there’s a next time it will be on that other boat!
This parking garage at the University of Auckland’s Epsom campus is on top of what used to be a volcano known as Te Pou Hawaiki. That means Pillar of Hawaiki, Hawaiki is the ancestral homeland the Maori came from… but despite the similar name nobody thinks it’s the same islands we call Hawaii.
According to the field guide, it was the second smallest of all the volcanoes in the city before it was quarried out to become a World War II bunker, and then was used as the civil defense headquarters up until the 1970s.
It is just down the road from the Epsom Bowling Club, which is where we have band practice on Tuesday nights. The bowling greens are surrounded by lava rock retaining walls, which I suppose could have been quarried from this little fella next-door.
I think this is the last of the volcanoes I can walk to on my lunch hour, and I did that today. The first time I climbed that hill I thought that the Maori name was particularly funny, because I thought it looked like the word “puke”. But now I understand that it’s pronounced more like “poo-keh” which I guess is still a little bit funny.
The field guide told me that this volcano was a lot like the others that I’ve been to: it had been inhabited and covered with both defensive structures and food storage pits before the Europeans got here.
I can take this opportunity to offer a punctuation lesson… In the title, an American copy editor would add a couple of periods. However, here in New Zealand, all of those words like Mr Dr Mt St Jr and so on don’t take the period. I like the style, it’s a lot cleaner.
Another volcano so small you could be forgiven for driving right past it. it was bigger, 70m in height, but we quarried is all away. So in fact what I saw behind the playground was just a man made hill.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 