Daily Photo: Aimless strolling in Port Chalmers

And so on to Port Chalmers. I arrived in the early afternoon under bright sunshine. The day was clear and warm, and the streets were full of people happily wandering from shop to shop, enjoying a day of aimless strolling. For a while, I did much the same. But when I’d run out of shops to wander in and out of, I headed down to the port and followed a footpath around a small peninsula-like headland to an area known as Back Beach. Here, boats lay scattered across the glass-still waters of the bay like resting shorebirds, their quiet reflections anchored beneath rounded, emerald-green hills. An old, moss-covered wooden jetty stretched gently out into the turquoise shallows, ageing gracefully in a world of quiet, peaceful obscurity.