Erosion, time and concretion

The weather didn’t look promising for our sunrise shoot so the executive decision last night was to skip it and stay in bed longer. This was justified when we woke up and it was raining – always good to be vindicated.

I didn’t fancy another average breakfast at the hotel so I stayed in the room and did some research. Andy went off to breakfast; apparently the pancakes were good.

We checked out at 10am, and piled into the conference room. That’s a lie; there are only 10 of us and the room was huge. We started looking at three images taken during the trip and our tour leader showed us how to process them using different software to make them even better. This was followed by a few brave souls showing some of their images for some constructive criticism and some pointers on how to process them. We finished by watching a YouTube video of Portlandia.

We left Balclutha around lunchtime and headed for Dunedin. We passed a really cool little town which I’d spotted the last time we were on this road – Milton. There isn’t much to it but it looks both interesting and quirky. A few of slogans on building walls caught my eye. ‘BE HAPPY’ and ‘That’s the spirit’ being two of them. I wished we could have stopped there and got a bit of time to explore.

As happens with journeys like these, conversations in the van tend to get surreal. Today’s best line is that Fight Club is really about Buddhism. And don’t you want to get hold of a copy of it and watch it again now. We do.

At some point, we were driving along Greenwich Street. When we got to Dunedin, I noticed that our hotel is very close to London Street. Hmmm, there is a sense that this trip is coming to an end. Which reminds me… how’s the crowdfunding campaign going on?

So we had two hours spare in Dunedin– a luxury.

We used these to: get lunch at Potpourri (a weird name for a restaurant if you ask me). It’s vegetarian and food was simple but tasty. I had a salad bowl and a green smoothie and felt very virtuous.

I went to Countdown to get some supplies to get home; we’ve discovered an amazing brand of cereal bars and I can’t get enough of them. I met up with Andy in Strictly Coffee Company.

That took about an hour, so we went back to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Andy had a moment with his pencil sculpture) and revisited some works we rushed last time and then explored a couple of back streets. One of them – being the one where our hotel is – has an annex of the Art Gallery. Rear Window is a small window of what used to be a shop front. It contains rotating contemporary art, more often than not by local or New Zealand artists. How fun is that? The current exhibit – A Nest in Town – is by a Dunedin based artist called Motoko Watanabe. Made from textiles and organic materials as ‘an analogy for the architecture of the natural world’ (source).

At the appointed time, we met up with the group again and headed north to Moreaki. Initially, we were scouting the site for sunrise tomorrow morning, but as we got there, gaps appeared in the clouds and we had superb light. I pottered about and found my favourite group of boulders.

I had looked up a place for dinner and a bar to check out (we’re meant to try NZ whisky this evening) but we opted for the group meal instead at Ironic. Now… Andy enjoyed his meal, mine was just average. Not a great food day for me. Now, that’s ironic.

4.45am alarm call. See you there.