February 26–27, 2015

Late in the afternoon four years ago today I walked down to Little Manly Beach, which lies on the south side of a peninsula that juts into the Hauraki Gulf north of Auckland.

You can see that the nearer sea-eroded cliffs and shore already lay in shadow. That didn’t stop me from taking some pictures of fascinating formations, a few of which I showed here after I got back to Texas. Nevertheless, I went back the next morning—my last in New Zealand on that first trip—when the light came from the opposite direction, so I could have another crack at the interesting patterns. Below are several.

Green algae

Rock swirls

Barnacles

I planned to go back at the end of our 2017 visit but unfortunately heavy rains caused mudslides that blocked both roads that would have let us leave the Coromandel Peninsula. We lost a day and made it back to Auckland only a few hours before we had to go to the airport for our return flight to Texas.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Advertisements

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day in 2017 found us taking a long round trip from Paihia to two places even farther north in New Zealand. The first was the Te Paki dunes, where among the many pictures I took was one of cloud shadows moving across the sand.

Then we continued to the northernmost easily accessible point in the country, Cape Reinga. Below is a coastal view looking back south from there. The long leaves of the flax plants, Phormium tenax, point out (literally) which way the wind was blowing.

New Zealanders will have finished Valentine’s Day by now, so retroactive good wishes to you.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Rancho Guadalupe Dunes Preserve

Two years ago today we stopped along the Pacific Ocean in California at the Rancho Guadalupe Dunes Preserve. The first photograph shows you waves breaking toward the shore, moving white mimics of the dark hills fixed beyond them. The second picture show how an occasional wave made it over a rise on the beach and into a shallow depression, there to creep along with a frothy yellow fringe.

Walking away from the surf, I sought out patterns in the dunes and clouds:

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Blomidon Provincial Park

On June 6th, after the Evangeline-related things we did at Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, we worked our way north-northwest to Blomidon Provincial Park, which had been indistinctly visible across Minas Bay from Evangeline Beach. Occasionally there’d be a break in the clouds and a shaft of light would briefly light up the cliffs.

As much water as came up twice a day from the extreme tides in the Bay of Fundy system, a little extra came down from above.

We visited at a low enough stage of the tides that we could venture out onto the beach.

Notice the rock above in the shape of an elongated heart, and the rock below covered with barnacles.

Do you remember the pōhutukawa-like trees clinging to the cliff at Halls Harbour? At Blomidon I similarly saw a lone tree at the edge of a cliff that looked like it might not be long for this world. At least it was still upright, unlike a tree in Austin two years ago that kept living while upside down.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Evangeline Beach

On the cool (maybe 50°F) and overcast afternoon of June 6th, after visiting Nova Scotia’s Grand-Pré National Historic Site, with its exhibit about Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” Evangeline and I stopped briefly at nearby Evangeline Beach.

Notice the distant greenery in the first picture. Because our visit came at or near low tide, I was able to walk out for a closer look at those plants, which are underwater twice each day.

In addition to the lone rock in the second picture, some of the broad rock strata closer in to the shore caught my attention as well.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: the retrospective from a year ago concludes

Well, folks, it’s been fun reviewing some of the sights and sites that made our 2017 visit to New Zealand so memorable. I’ll admit it’s not hard to do that in such a scenic country.

Like the past several posts, here’s a last one from Cathedral Cove on March 7th. It’s something that Georgia O’Keeffe might have felt right at home with if you allow dried-out driftwood to take the place of a sun-bleached animal skull.

I’d planned to take pictures for one more day on this trip, and in particular I wanted to go back to Whangaparaoa, where I’d seen some colorfully appealing patterns on Little Manly Beach in 2015. Alas, even as we drove back to Whitianga from Cathedral Cove, drops began to fall (look at the dark sky in the upper left of the photograph), and the rain continued heavily all through the night. When we went to check out of our apartment the next morning to head for Auckland, the manager told us that so much rain had come down that both roads off the Coromandel Peninsula were washed out. We ended up spending an extra day in Whitianga with little to do, given the yucky weather. By the morning of March 9th, one of the two roads off the peninsula had reopened and we made it to Auckland with a few hours to spare before we had to check in at the airport for our flight home. Adiós, New Zealand.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Tunnel Beach

A year ago today we visited Tunnel Beach a little south of Dunedin. In addition to the man-made tunnel through the rock that allows people to walk to the side of the headland that’s shown above, weather and waves on the other side have created the natural tunnel shown below. Some good wave action was in evidence while we were there.

And look at the colors provided by minerals, mosses, and lichens in one of the shaded areas that was behind me when I took the first photograph:

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman