21 Oct: Too Much Scenery!

We set out today to tour the Banks Peninsula, a big geological asterisk that sticks out of the broad coastal plain like a big... well, you pick a metaphor. Anything that goes "ker-splat" will do.

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The reason the route ends in a different place than it started is, we didn't like the RV park we were in, and decided to try another across town.

It's obvious from the map that the peninsula is the heavily eroded remains of some large volcanoes. Once they must have been tall cones like Taranaki, but now they are a mess of spoke-like ridges, few higher than 800m (2500'), with long deep bays between them. The ridges are steep, and there are trails and skinny twisty little roads all over them. (Open the map in another window and zoom in to see.)

That much we could tell from the map. What the map doesn't tell is how freakin' gorgeous this is on a bright spring day. We're driving along narrow little roads like this one—

which, fortunately, have almost no traffic—and every time we can safely stop (and fairly often when it wasn't really safe), we stop to look and take yet more pictures. So, here are samples of what we saw.

License plate: BLKBTL.

After a while, even gorgeousity gets repetitive. We drove 170km (105mi) in a 9-hour outing and by late afternoon we just couldn't take any more. The afternoon light flamed the grass and trees into that amazing fluorescent backlit green it gets, or there would be a ewe with lambs silhouetted against a water vista, and we'd say "Oooh, we gotta shoot that... Nah. drive on." It was just too much! You could fill your camera with hills and bays and sheep, and then how do you sort them all out afterward?

There was one different thing. We broke the trip in Akaroa, a little Mendocino-like village at the end of the road. There we had tea and checked out what was supposed to be a fun sculpture garden, and it was. A woman named Josie Martin, an artist, bought an old house and started to restore it. Starting the garden, she unearthed a lot of old china shards and decided to use them to mosaic her front stoop. That got her into sculpture and mosaics and it sort of took off from there...

The piano body is full of succulent plants.

There's quite a few more pictures in the slide show

But the camera doesn't really capture what the eyes see. Here is a bonus panorama that comes closer, 1.3MB to download then scroll through it.

On the way home we decided we were saturated. Too much to look at; too much frustration from trying to capture all the scenery and knowing we weren't really getting it. We had planned a long excursion into the southern alps tomorrow, but the weather is iffy and we are bushed. So instead tomorrow is going to be an easy day of putzing around Christchurch.