Southernmost parts

It's hard to to keep a sea-faring blog on course when those who are meant to be wiping salt spray from their faces and scanning the horizon are in fact darting in and out of arty cinemas, galleries and second-hand bookshops, more tuned to the surge of city traffic flow than the rise and fall of tides. The Frenchman Moitessier's memoir, Tamata et L'Alliance, is on hold, my bookmark stuck at about half way. Lately I'm inclined towards Virginia Woolf's writing, and in particular her diaries. My engagement with the Bloomsbury high brows of 80 or so years ago matches Alex's trading desk activities for intensity. Since I can't in all conscience drag those of you who still occasionally check into this blog expecting tangy tales of adventure into my dilettante's net, I've been silent.




However, we are not irretrievably lost to the lure of the wild . The picture above was taken at Martin's Bay, where the Hollyford river flows out in the Tasman sea, just above Milford Sound in the South Island of New Zealand. Close friends from Auckland had invited us to walk the Hollyford track with them, which we did at the beginning of the month - the pensioners' version of hiking, as Alex calls it, with a warm, welcoming lodge at the end of each segment, and minimal weight on your shoulders. Wonderful stuff. At the end of the first, long day's walk most of us were sodden through our Gortex  (the rain we encountered was a trifle, a mere shower, according to our guides who said that real Fiordland rain "bounces up off the ground" and prevents you from seeing). But the pay-off for penetrating this remote valley far outweighs the inconvenience of wet boots. The pix below do some, but not complete, justice to the beauty of the Hollyford..

Lake Alabaster (above and below)

Martin's Bay dunes

After the 3 day walk, our friends flew back to Auckland (something about work?) and we continued south by road. I had this irrational desire to touch the very bottom of the South Island, which I've never done before. Specifically, I wanted to go to Bluff, which meant staying in Invercargill, the butt of many unkind jokes and possibly the glummest and churchiest town I've ever visited. Sorry, Mr Mayor (Tim Shadbolt, ex-Auckland hippie turned local Southland hero). The baby tuataras in the Southland museum were as alert and lively as any youngsters in their glass cage, but I'd hate to find myself stuck in this neck of the woods for hundreds of millions of years as their lot has been

We walked to the wild edge of the southern ocean on a day when we estimated the wind Out There was blowing about 70 to 80 knots. It was crazy. Here I am hanging onto my hat and fooling around at Slope Point, technically the furthest south you can go on the NZ mainland at 46.40 degrees South.

I couldn't imagine how sailing ships in the old days navigated this coastline - many of them didn't, as it turns out. We learned that 100 ships were wrecked on the route between Melbourne and Dunedin before 1845 (NZ as a British settlement really didn't get going till about 1810 or so).

At the tip of the Otago Peninsula, near Dunedin, there's a colony of royal albatrosses. These are the birds of sailors' bad dreams, the ones which glide for hundreds of miles on air currents with their giant wings locked into their shoulders. Mostly albatrosses don't come this close to humanity to breed. They prefer desolate rocks in the sub-Antarctic. But about 30 km by road from Dunedin, we trained binoculars and cameras on this season's albatross chicks which squatted on an exposed grassy hillside waiting for their roaming parents to return to feed them.



The big birds came in from the sea following a fishing boat. Watching them trying to touch down in gale force winds beside their offspring (a pair of birds mates for life and has one chick every two years) was mesmerizing.  They lowered their legs like wheels on a jumbo, and if they were blown off course they aborted landing. The chicks could only watch. They're too heavy and ungainly to go anywhere at this age  (3 to 4 months), so much so that apparently they have difficulty supporting their own weight on their wobbly legs. They sit tight on their hillside in all weathers until one day, on nature's cue, they go on a diet which enables them to totter over to the edge of the cliff where they stand with their wings outstretched, and when a current lifts them up, off they go....for miles and miles, year after year, until they are prompted by who knows what to return again to this same place to choose a mate. It's quite a story.

I could come back to the South Island year after year too. In autumn especially, its lush green pastures and river valleys, its grand alpine passes, lakes and glaciers are more lovely than ever. We saw cruising yachts anchored near the commercial fishing and oyster boats in Bluff harbour. What about coming back by sea, I wondered. On a blue day, with Stewart Island faintly visible ((through and under cloud) and a gentle wind barely raising a swell, we walked from the famous Bluff signpost around to Lookout Point,  below which whaling boats used to huddle, keeping a watch for their great prey. I suggested to Alex that maybe one day we might sail through Foveaux Strait.  He looked sceptically at the calm sea. The next day, a big low moved up from Antarctica bringing freezing squalls and ridiculously strong winds.  The sea off the Catlins coast was churned up and surly. Big fat sets of rollers crashed against Slope Point's raggedy cliffs and threw drifts of fine salt spray up across the sheeplands. At Waipapa, where 151 people drowned in a shipwreck in 1881, the top layer of the beach was whipped along at waist height, and for days afterwards grains of sand leaked out of my jacket's seams. Only a day after I'd imagined I could feel the pull of Antarctica, I found myself asking why anyone would choose to sail the southern ocean in a small boat. That stuff was for the birds.