The Manuka Gorge
Back in April I was travelling through to Arrowtown when the autumn colours were doing its thing. On my way I pulled the car over while driving through the Manuka Gorge. The road through the gorge twists and turns as it passes by Mt Stuart and links Milton to Waitahuna and beyond to Lawrence and Central Otago. In winter it’s quite a treacherous road covered in snow and ice while in autumn it’s filled with colour.
The gathering twilight above the Dunedin Law Courts
A hushed calm took over the evening sky. As the sun dropped below the city skyline, a hypnotic dance of colour came forth, turning nearby buildings into silhouettes. Across the street, only the gothic style, Scottish baronial architecture was visible in the fading light. As I walked, the evening traffic navigated their way through the city streets as day transitioned into night. In the absences of the city street lights that were yet to take hold, shadows took hold as the evening hues started to fade from sight, giving way to the imminent night.
The stillness of dusk on the Pineapple Track.
In the stillness of dusk, the world seemed to pause as the sun slipped below the horizon, leaving behind a mesmerising hue of deep blue and fiery orange. The sky, vast, unyielding and endless with the last sunlight stretching upwards. Below, silhouetted against the glow, plants swayed gently, their outlines adding a ruggedness to the serenity. Far off in the distance, tiny pinpricks of light hinted at civilization. But here, above the hills of Dunedin, quiet, solemn, and captivating nature was in command.
The Hydro on the esplanade.
It was early evening and I had been wandering for some time. Eventually, I came to the Esplanade and strolled along the seafront, the buildings bathed in the soft glow of street lights, their warm light spreading halos across the deepening blue sky. The shark bell stood slightly imposing, sentinel over the promenade, a poignant reminder of a time when shark attacks seemed an altogether common occurrence in a bygone time. Nestled into the hillside beyond, the suburb of St Clair sparkled faintly in the background, adding a cozy touch to the urban serenity. It was one of those evenings where time seemed to slow in a silent sort of way.
The billiard room at Olveston
It’s only in recent years I’ve grown to love the 120 year old stately home of Olveston. Like so many locals, for years I both ignored it and simply forgot it was there. However, last year I decided to reconnect with the place and went on a tour of the grand house. When construction of the house was completed in 1907, the four storey building featured reception rooms, a library, a kitchen, downstairs guest rooms, a galleried hall rising from the ground and to the upper floors which also served as a ballroom. There was a billiard room, a card room, numerous bedrooms, with the top floor being servants’ quarters and the basement serving as a large laundry.
However, the entire time I was there, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why on earth the billiard room had been placed on the second floor. This seemed a little strange to me. If for no other reason than it seemed completely impractical. If we speculate for a moment that on a lovely Dunedin evening, when his family were entertaining guests with a fine meal with music, all the activities would be taking place on the ground floor. After a while, if for example the men wanted to retire to a separate room for brandy, billiards and cigars as was the custom, they would have then needed to head upstairs to the billiard and card room which is located right beside the bedrooms. Keeping this in mind, doesn’t the proximity of the billiard room to the main bedrooms seem a little close? Personally, and this is just me, I would have thought it would have been much more practical to have the billiard and card room on the ground floor of the house and as far away from the bedrooms as possible. At the very least this would have avoided the need to place extremely large steel girders beneath the floorboards to take the weight of the Olympic size billiard table which weighed over an impressive two tonnes. But I’m not an architect, so what would I know!
Sunrise over Tomahawk Beach
Recently, there have been some extremely lovely sunrises here in Dunedin. While I don’t know the exact science behind what causes a colourful sunrise, I believe it’s all to do with light beams coming into the earth’s atmosphere and hitting molecules. Then, something happens with blue lightwaves becoming shorter while red, orange and yellow lightwaves become longer while moving through the atmosphere. Of course, I could always be completely wrong!
Dawn on Tomahawk Road
There’s a moment in the early hours of the day, that is quite delightful. It’s before the sunrises and light floods the sky in the hour before dawn. As the darkness of night lifts and surrounding objects start to take shape, when the blue hour takes hold, a silent hush fills the new day. It’s quite a magical time in a nothing much is happening sort of way.
The Catlins River near Tawanui
After arriving in Owaka, I continued south on the Southern Scenic Route, State Highway 92. I turned right onto Catlins Valley Road, right onto Morris Saddle Road, then left which eventually brought me to the Tawanui Camping in the Owaka Valley. From there, I found the beginning of a walk along The Catlins River. Like everywhere in The Catlins, it’s an amazing place that’s incredibly peaceful and serene. All spots in The Catlins seem that way, they hold a majestic quality that’s hard to describe. While walking along The Catlins River, I passed through an exotic forest that’s filled with all sorts of amazing ferns and silver beech trees right beside the wonderful river.
Ross Creek in Dunedin
The other day I posted a photo I took of a spider web with raindrops in Ross Creek. Well, this is the photo I was working on directly before I spotted that spider web. It’s taken with one of my less-used wide angle lenses that doesn’t get taken out and about as much as it used to. To give you an idea of how quickly the water was moving, this image was taken at 0.5 seconds. That really isn’t all that long for a water image where you want to show movement which means the water was moving through at a pretty quick clip!
Spring in the Octagon
Doesn’t the Octagon in Dunedin look lovely on a bright spring day? Yet, not long after it was first laid out in 1846, the site sat largely derelict for a long time. During that period the large Bell Hill separated the city to the north and south of the Octagon. It wasn’t until Bell Hill was substantially excavated that the two major early settlements to the north and south of the Octagon were linked that the area rose to prominence as the city’s central area.
Street Art by @hugovandorsser and Screaming Rooster Studio
For something different I wanted to see if I could capture a long exposure image during the day time. I made my way down to Vogel Street here in Dunedin and set up my gear under the overbridge that runs through former Jetty Street. Under the bridge, a painting which is part of the Dunedin Street Art trail by @hugovandorsser and Screaming Rooster Studio made a good backdrop as I waited for slow moving cars to pass by.
Spider web with raindrops at Ross Creek
The other week when we had all that rain, I went out in search of photos involving water. However, instead of walking the streets of South Dunedin and photographing houses that were flooding, I headed for some of the Dunedin bushwalks. One of those that I spent some time in was in and around Ross Creek from the Leith Valley entrance. In this area of the bush several small rivers run through the valley before connecting up with the Waters of Leith. I arrived to find the usually sedate stream had become inundated with water after nearly three days of heavy rain. It was while I was photographing one of the many bends and drops in the stream that I noticed a nearby spider web that was catching some of the rain drops that were falling through the canopy.
Corner of Tomahawk and Oakland Street (Out of the morning chaos comes bliss)
I emerged from my doorstep into the early morning light of a new day. Being spring, dawn was starting to break significantly earlier than it had a month ago yet, the mornings were still cold enough for heavy layers of dew to develop overnight. Having not been awake long enough to claim I was functioning to any high degree of cognitive skill, I headed off into the breaking dawn trying to work out what the heck I was doing up at such an hour, when I was actually on holiday. Then, I reminded myself. The light is always more interesting at this time of the morning. Exactly what I was looking for, I wasn’t too sure. So, I set up my tripod at a random intersection and waited for cars to drive past, creating a lovely long exposure effect. It was while I was waiting on one of these 25 second exposure shots that I decided I really was looking forward to a cup of coffee.
First light over Tomahawk Beack in Dunedin
Today marks a significant milestone for my daily photoblog from a Small City which I’m delighted to share with you. This is my one thousandths consecutive daily post. That’s one thousand days without missing a single day. One thousand days where at 6am (mostly) a different photo has been posted. When people ask what my blog from a Small City is about, my response is that it’s a photoblog about discovering small towns, forgotten points of interest and the curiosities of my island home. It’s about interesting and amusing stories told through words and images about life in Aotearoa.
In fact, when I started my purpose was to improve my photography through becoming a better writer. After all, it’s one thing to be able to take a photograph, it’s a completely different skill to be able to use words to create an ongoing narrative. I actually did a very rough calculation along with 1000 unique photos, I’ve written over 150,000 words!
So, to those people who keep coming back, thank you very much for sharing my creative joy and please share it among your friends. I sincerely hope you keep returning because I very much enjoy the creative challenge. It’s kind of like having 5 minutes of escapism every single day. Or to put it another way, 300 seconds escaping from reality or everyday matters.
Stain-glass window at Dunedin Railway Station
Aren’t stain-glass windows amazing? To think, we can thank both the Romans and Egyptians for becoming experts at creating objects made from coloured glass. While looking at this one in Dunedin at the Railway Station, I began to speculate about the person who had the idea of making a window out of it. I like to think their thought process went something like: ‘You know what, if we put that see-through coloured stuff in that empty space where the wind comes through, we might really have something.’ I wonder if they knew it would catch-on as much as it has!
Tulips at First Church
Before all that rain fell, the weather in Dunedin was actually rather fine, The preceding days had been warm, sunny and perfect for enjoying the delights of spring. For these reasons, and others that I can’t remember, I found my way into the central city in search of signs of spring. Upon arrival at the historic First Church, I discovered a delightfully elegant flower bed of tulips lining the entrance to the grand building.
The NGV in Melbourne
Whoever designed the National Gallery of Victorian (NGV) in Melbourne sure had a lot of fun. It has, what is quite possibly the most outstanding floor I’ve ever seen, a stain-glass ceiling in the Great Hall (which I didn’t get to see due to not being invited to the Christian Dior event that was on, how rude!) and a wall that contains a waterfall at the entrance. How crazy is that! I had such a blast photographing inside the building, it was so cool. The place was so busy that no-one minded that I sat on the floor and photographed people walking past. I still want to return to photograph the stain-glass ceiling, one day I will!
Howth Peninsula and the Baily Lighthouse
In Ireland, while making my way around various points, I stopped off at Howth Head. Located northeast of Dublin, Howth sits on a peninsula and has some wonderful coastal walking trails. One of which takes you past The Baily Lighthouse which has had a signal light shining from it in some way shape or form for over three hundred and fifty years. Just think about that for a second – three hundred and fifty years, that’s an awfully long time! In fact, the first light signal was built on the point near Howth in 1667 and was replaced by the Baily Lighthouse 1814. With multiple tracks to choose from, I spent a few hours strolling some of the various coastal paths which certainly have impressive views. I only wish I had more time to explore them. However, as the afternoon ran on and I became short of time, I realised I hadn’t allowed myself enough time to actually make it to the lighthouse, so I returned to Howth in search of a pint of Guinness to imagine what it might look like.
The Melbourne Skyline
The wonderful thing about Melbourne is how walkable the city is alongside the river. Much like Brisbane which has the Brisbane River running through it with South Bank looking across to the CBD, Melbourne has the Yarra River. If you’re into walking and cityscapes, then you can have a great time walking along the River Esplanade beside the Yarra River getting all sorts of photo opportunities of Melbourne’s skyline. One day I’ll return and photograph it at night, which will present a completely different set of challenges.
Hong Kong’s Jumbo restaurant in Aberdeen harbour
It’s always interesting to read news articles about places you’ve been to. So it was with interest that I recently read about the sinking of Hong Kong’s famous Jumbo restaurant back in 2022.
Having been an icon and major tourist attraction of Hong Kong’s Aberdeen harbour since it opened in 1976, the famous floating restaurant has entertained Kings, Queens, Presidents and been the location for many major movies. Sitting at nearly 80 metres in length and with a capacity of more than 2,000 the restaurant was the main feature of the Jumbo Kingdom which also featured the Tai Pak Floating Restaurant and the Sea Place. Styled in the form of an ancient Chinese imperial palace, the Jumbo restaurant sat in Aberdeen harbour for 44 years. However, despite its place in Hong Kong’s culinary history, the floating restaurant had been unprofitable since 2013. Then, when Covid hit the region in early 2020, the restaurant was forced to close and by 2022 it had accumulated losses exceeding HK$100 million. As the future of Jumbo’s looked bleak, several proposals were put forward to save the famous restaurant, all of which came to nothing as potential investors were deterred by the high maintenance cost and a potential government bailout also failed. So, it was announced in May of 2022 that the restaurant would move away from Hong Kong for repairs and storage in an unspecified destination until a new owner took possession of the vessel. In June of that year, the Jumbo floating restaurant was towed out of Hong Kong where some time after it hit rough weather in the South China Sea, started taking on water, eventually sinking near the Paracel Islands to a depth of over 1,000 metres [3,300 feet].
The oddest thing about discovering that the famous Jumbo restaurant had sunk was realising I had photographed it only two months before it closed in March of 2020. What a curious thing it is to know that only two months after taking this photo it was closed to the public and then two years later it would be at the button of the South China Sea.
Saigon Street in Hong Kong
Hong Kong really is an interesting place, particularly if you’ve never been there before. Just wandering the streets can be an overload for the senses with all the sights and sounds that greet you from being in the world’s fourth most densely populated region in the world with over 7.4 million residents. Once you’ve spent the day ambling the city streets or visited the wonderful contrast between old and new in the Aberdeen Floating Village you can head into the numerous night markets that awaken after dark and become a hive of people. Of course, then there’s also the Symphony of Lights show that luminates Victoria Harbour each evening. But, then again just navigating the airport can be an interesting experience in itself.
Ross Creek during torrential rain on Friday morning.
Water of Leith near George Street on Friday morning.
Here’s a statistic for you, yesterday Dunedin had its wettest day in over a century. Three times the usual rainfall expected in October fell in the city in just 48 hours causing 38 road closures. It seems that the Metservice got it spot on with their heavy rain warnings earlier in the week. That really was a significant amount of rain that fell and was definitely a highly unusual event. Now, remind me again what sunshine looks like?
The Water of Leith in flood mode.
Friday 4:40pm – Time to review! Here in Dunedin it started raining early yesterday morning and now some 30 hours later it’s still going! State Highways are closed to the north of the city, to the south of the city, many communities are now cut off and many local suburbs are in flood mode. A state of emergency is in place in Dunedin and Clutha while there is heavy flooding in Waikouaiti and Palmerston is completely cut off. All over the region there are landslides and rivers bursting their banks. Just another spring day in Dunedin.
Water of Leith after torrential rain
Friday 6am – So a red alert heavy rain warning with 120 to 150 mm of rain was released. Then warnings from the Metservice, travel warnings from Civil Defence, snow in the Lindis Pass, rising river levels, surface flooding, land slips, sandbags being filled and warnings of flooding in low lying areas.
The Sampan boats of Aberdeen in Hong Kong
While I was in Hong Kong I visited Aberdeen Harbour which is famous to both locals and tourists. The area is incredibly well known for its floating village and seafood restaurants that are located within the harbour. It’s also home to the Tanka people, who used to live on boats in the harbour and are closely linked to the fishing industry. During my time there, we travelled around on a traditional sampan, which is a flat bottomed fishing boat that originated from China. The Tanka people lived on them and while they were used on the rivers and coasts to transport people during the day, they also doubled as shelter at night. Nowadays, most are used to ferrying curious tourists on tours like myself. Although I passed on the seafood restaurants.
Lake Wanaka towards the Haast Pass
Is it possible to take a black and white landscape photo without channelling a wee bit of American photographer Ansel Adams? He truly is one the great’s of landscape photography and forever changed the way we view the world around us. If you’ve never heard of him you should look him up, you won’t be disappointed! This image I took on route to Makarora, beyond the northern tip of Lake Wanaka which leads into the Haast Pass and later on the West Coast.
Alexandra in winter
I was heading to the Lindis Pass via Tarras. However, as I wanted to capture the early morning light through the pass, I decided to spend the night in Alexandra as this would allow me to get there in the morning light. Rising early, I ventured up to the Alexandra lookout that sits on the hill overlooking the town. It was a typical winter’s morning with the temperature sitting below zero and smoke from early morning fire’s drifting across the valley. In the distance, the first rays of sunlight took hold of the surrounding hillside. I spent a few moments taking in the silence before heading in the direction of Bendigo and later on the Lindis Pass.
Portobello Post Office
I went for a drive on the Otago Peninsula, looking for boats. Dinghies to be exact. I had an idea for an image that involved an old dinghy gently drifting on the tide. However, I quickly came across two problems. Firstly, it was far too windy for anything to be simply ‘drifting’ and secondly, I couldn’t find a dingy. So, to overcome these problems I stopped in the peninsula settlement of Portobello and photographed the former post office and general store building instead. If I’m being honest, I’m not entirely convinced it’s not a private residence, meaning I was photographing someone’s home! But, since the original building dates back to at least 1867, I’d like to think the owners would be lenient.
The Esplanade Restaurant
For something different I set myself a challenge. So, I went down to the Esplanade at St Clair, picked a spot and let the world pass me by. The challenge was to see what photos I could create while staying as close as possible to a single spot. This is the entrance to the well known local Italian beachfront Pizza Restaurant & Bar ‘The Esplanade.’ It advertises itself as a piece of Italy perched on the New Zealand beachfront in St Clair, Dunedin.
Morning light hits Speight’s Brewery
The historic Speight’s Brewery on Rattray Street, Central Dunedin is about to get a lot busier. The usual summer cruise ship season is due to get underway next month and Speight’s Brewery is always a popular location. Developed in 1876 when James Speight, while feeling a little thirsty, decided to see what would happen if he mixed a few malt and hops together. He then set-up a brewery with friends Charles Greenslade and William Dawson on Dunedin’s Rattray Street where it has been based ever since.
Otago Peninsula and Harbour Cone from Peggy’s Hill
It’s not hard to see why William Larnarch chose this spot to build his grand house and estate in 1871. The story goes that while out riding with his son, William Larnach came across a location near Peggy’s Hill which he immediately loved. After purchasing the land and much of the surrounding area, he then employed the well known architect Robert Lawson to complete the design. The site was then cleared and levelled, allowing construction to begin in 1871.