(Onamalutu isn’t exactly where we went yesterday, but it is close enough and the title should please Eva.)
New Zealand is full of beautiful scenery. It’s offset somewhat by having Australians as neighbours, but few things are perfect.
Anyway, rather than abuse our livers in any of the 70+ vineries (and growing) in this single valley, we made use of the AWD Legacy we’d hired and shot up the North Bank Road, and hung a right off the unsealed road into the Richmond Range. At about 3800 feet we parked the car and set off to see if we could find Lake Chalice.
The lake is about 1500 ft down from the carpark, and we didn’t make it all the way (because the thing about going down is that you’ve got to come back up: and if one of you has a stuffed knee it gets a little difficult).
But it was a lovely walk, through the mist and out into sunshine, with an inordinate amount of
and
and one or two
I managed to find a mountain peak and climbed walked up it
and the cloud lifted enough to see Lake Chalice:
On the way back we saw a familiar name,
and then again in the supermarket:
A good day, enhanced by the surprisingly responsive handling of the Subaru Legacy (and Kate’s white knuckles). Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the pig hunt and whether Henry’s Gee spot lives up to the hype.
I’m glad to see they’ve got a whole department devoted to conserving Gee, but I wonder which section is being sold off.
Was that a Digitalis?
Nice way to maintain your titular motif. So, did you kill the pig with your bare hands…?
Stephen – I suspect he used a knife. Bloodthirsty
AussieKiwiBrit.That round red-and-white fungus is very attractive… what is it, exactly?
I do like the title! I also like the….llama/alpaca/llamalpacanimal… peeking from behind the tree =)
I am not going to like the upcoming hunting post. At all. But I’ll survive. Unlike – no, no, I won’t be “that person”, sorry.
It was (and probably still is) a digitalis. The red and white thing is fly agaric, I think. Magic mushrooms.
Next to the Old Gee Spot beers is a bottle of Bintang. Lolz… It’s an Indonesian beer.
For the middle of bloody nowhere, there are a lot of different beers here. It’s great.
I can see how digitalis got introduced to NZ and escaped into the wild but is that really Fly Agaric? How would it get introduced, or is this evidence for further Viking voyages of discovery?
We have a serious pigeon problem in my back garden if you fancy keeping in practice.
Wait till I tell you about my prowess with a .22.
My father-in-law once killed a moose with a .22. He was going after rabbits and got a lucky shot. There’s a whole hilarious story involved that requires half an hour and some beer to tell properly – suffice it to say that when his daughter returned to the town in question after about 20 years away, people were still telling the story.
A moose? with a .22? Bloody hell. Don’t tell me—he bludgeoned it to death with the butt?
LOL! No, single shot, right through the eye.
And before you say anything, no, it didn’t walk off a cliff. Down like a sack of potatoes.
Was the elk called ‘Harold’?
What?
Harold, eye?
Ah, right. It was the elk bit that threw me off.
haha, we spread the magic around… although I don’t remember the Vikings ever going that far south (note to self, read up on viking’s activity).
It doesn’t really look like the ones we have here in the north though. A slightly bigger ‘cap’ and less white and more yellow tint of the “spots”. Ah well, you need to feed it to some animals or so and see if they seem to have fun before they fall down with liver failure…. (ehh… better get back to my bacteria 😉 )
Enjoy the beer! It sure seems like you miss that Gee fellow.
Cath – that is an astonishing story.
Note to those unfamiliar with “moose” – this is roughly the equivalent of killing an elephant with a handgun, or a rabbit with a peashooter. Or sinking a battleship with a bazooka.
Poor old moose. I feel sad now. 🙁
It was apparently very tasty – my husband was very very young at the time, but remembers it being cut up on the kitchen table, and then eating it. This was up in Atlin, on the BC-Yukon-Alaska border.
Moose is sooooo good (sorry Eva about the carnivor exclamation). Reindeer is also very tasty. (and before anyone asks, no it wasn’t Rudolf or any of the others) 😉
Im doing in wild relatives of India. any training r collaborative work is possible?
the pic r really good