Cribs & Clouds- Poolburn Dam; Part 2

 Catch-up

Continued on from Part 1

Along with peace & solitude (most of the time) Poolburn offers some spectacular Central Otago scenery which is often topped off with some fantastic cloud formations. 

Not only is the natural scenery awesome but there are also some very quaint & quirky cribs located around the reservoir. Cribs is 'lower South Island' speak for fishing huts or baches. Baches, to my overseas readers, is 'the rest of NZ' speak for holiday homes. Rustic holiday homes not those flash jobbies either. I am an avid photographer of cribs & baches and have built up quite a collection over the years. I love their weather worn character, many of them cobbled together with old & excess building supplies. Inside, old magazines & groaning bookshelves, discarded fishing tackle and collections of kiwiana kitsch banished from everyday suburbia. And all of them holding generations of memories & tall tales.

Following are a selection of photos taken during our two weeks at Poolburn.

On a very clam day the dam is a mill pond perfect for reflections and spotting those elusive jumping Brown Trout. 

If you click on this photo to enlarge you'll notice three busy men going about their fishing business (well two anyway). One of them, Danny, is an honorary Poolburn custodian. He may pop in to say hello and if you're lucky you may get invited over for a yarn & happy hour.

I have three favourite cribs & this is one of them. Actually I probably have more but these ones make great subjects. This little one is actually on an island.

The sky seems to be closing in on us with this cloud cover. Cloud like this never seems to stay around long, the sun soon burns it off if it's early morning or if appears at sunset (like this one) and it disappears overnight.

In between his fishing trips I asked David to take me in our Takacat inflatable on a tiki-tour over to the far side of the dam, up a long narrow arm that ends at Long Valley Creek (top right photo, below). It's a favourite place for fly fisherman but unless you have a boat, it's a very long walk. 

There's an abandoned house & large shed on a point at the entrance to the arm (top left & centre). I guess it will be left like that to disintegrate & slowly breakdown forever & a day. Up behind that ridge ahead of us (and believe me it's much taller than it looks) is where the LOTR film set was.  

On the way home I took a few more photos of the cribs on the east side of the dam...

...before we pulled into my newly named  'Southern Man Bay' to have lunch (check out the billboard on the front of the fishing lodge).

What a lovely little bay, there's actually a deep little bay on the other side of the crib too, check out the next photo. We sat on one of the rocky outcrops and had our lunch before heading back to the van.

   

This lovely golden hour photo of Poolburn was taken as I headed home from one of my regular sunrise vantage points further up the road. You can see the Southern Man crib and its surrounding bays in the centre of the photo. We came in from the left for lunch.

You'll have to wait for the last Poolburn blog to see some of the fabulous (if I must say so myself) sunrise & sunset shots I took but here are a few of the golden hour photos taken on my walk home. That's a small mown airstrip in front of the cribs at the back right.

This one really shows how much care should be taken to avoid the many islands & rocky points when a boatie navigates around the dam. David reported that the dam was lower than usual, the rocky tors that had sat just under the water on previous visits were more exposed on this one. 

There's still  a large section of the dam out to the right in this pano...

...including this area where we're parked. The road entrance to Poolburn is up at the top left and in the foreground it disappears over the hill and down below the dam wall and then out across the range. Did you spot 'Out There'? Click the photo to enlarge.

Here is #2 of my fav cribs. This one belongs to the Omakau Fishing Club and is most probably one of my favourites because it is very handy to where we park and I'm always passing by with my camera in hand!

It also appears in one of my iconic photos of a frozen Poolburn Dam, click the link if you'd like to read more about that visit back in 2015.

On this morning one of the occupants is fishing off the rocks in front of the crib. If you look closely you can also see another guy on the deck who also looks to be fishing for his breakfast from the comfort of his deck chair.

A perfect morning at Poolburn.

Here's a few more photos of the cribs, most of them are on our side of the dam. My third favourite crib is in the two photos on the top right. This tiny little crib ( it's actually the local station's shepherd hut) sits way up on a rocky outcrop overlooking the dam.

These ones are golden hour sunsets taken across the water from our camp site. 

Night falls on our tranquil lakeside camp site.

Between fishing expeditions- which weren't very fruitful on this visit- David set the koura pot (freshwater crayfish). There were plenty of koura caught but in the end we decided that for the amount of meat you get off them, and that's the big ones only, we had no need to dispatch them to the cooker (they taste a little sweeter than prawn but you can really only eat their tails). We just had fun catching & releasing them!

Another morning shot on my way home; this one shows me how insignificant we really are in the whole scheme of things, & especially in this beautiful Central Otago landscape (check for the van).

If you didn't know better you'd probably think this next photo was taken on the same day as the one above. It wasn't, it was two days earlier and at the other end of the day. 

When I saw those clouds forming just before sunset I raced down the road, over the fence and clambered up to a high point overlooking the dam. When I reached the top of the rocks and looked over the other side, I startled a mob of cattle below. 

They stood for a moment deciding what to do and then took off, thundering across the ground and heading for the far end, disappearing between the rocks never to be seen again. Later, as I walked back down one lonely cow came bellowing out from behind a rock stack obviously wondering where all her mates had gone. 

The sunset didn't amount to much but it was a great view of the dam from a different angle. I was also looking out for the Karearea/NZ Falcon I'd seen in this area on a previous visit. Sadly I didn't see him this visit, I suspect he would have been spooked by the LOTR Tech area which was nearby or that the wild cat we'd seen nearby had put paid to any nesting efforts and maybe it had moved on. 

And finally a few more photos of the cribs across the way.

And you got to love that morning golden hour...

To be continued...Part 3

Queen of the Castle- Riverstone Castle

Catch-up

I'd like to say give me Lockdown back but of course I won't, although I did love catching up on my blogs & photos during the down time. We've had a busy 10 days unloading two shipping containers and sorting furniture out at our new property in Twizel. 

It was by chance and not design that we left Glenavy on the last day of Level 3. Our property settlement had been deferred a month from mid April and we had a pre-property inspection arranged on the day after we left Glenavy. Travel was allowed for home relocations during Level 3 but we still felt like naughty children as we drove up the Waitaki Valley towards our new home base. And I'm sure we were the recipients of a few scowls from passing traffic. It's very hard to blend in when you're big and brown and 14 metres long with a massive photo on your rear.

We've had three days of thick fog and two heavy frosts since we've been in Twizel- what a welcome to Mackenzie Country! We're loving it so far, we'll be here for the next 4-6 months (in between short trips away) and then it'll be back on the road fulltime. ( If you follow my photography Facebook page- if you don't already- you'll find some real frosty photos there. It's where I post current photos). 

Now, back to catching up- mid Nov 2019

Riverstone Castle

From Moeraki Boulders it was just a short 60kms to our next destination which just happened to be the Glenavys Waitaki River Motor Camp. Does it look familiar?

This was our lovely Lockdown Camp with super hosts Anne & Joe. Who could have imagined we'd be back just four months later and spend seven weeks lockdowned here, and on exactly the same site too. The camp is lovely, with spacious grounds, grass sites and mature trees. There's an outdoor fire,  tables and BBQ for group or happy hour gatherings along with a well appointed kitchen and laundry.

Glenavys Waitaki River Motor Camp

Just down the road from the camp, in the rest area beside the Waitaki River, this beautiful but broken laburnum tree was flowering. I wondered how it came to be in the rest area, it's not the usual type of tree to be planted on the roadside. Laburnum are often planted to grow over large pergolas so that the cascading yellow flower hang down underneath and form a beautiful tunnel over a walkway. Many famous gardens such as Kew & Bodnant Castle in Wales (which we've seen), have a laburnum arch.

During Lockdown we walked through this rest area regularly to access a walking track through a pine plantation alongside the river. The laburnum tree was bare and unremarkable, a tree you wouldn't give a second glance to.

Five kilometres from the camp in the other direction is South Canterbury's east coast and the mouth of the Waitaki River. The Waitaki River is a well known salmon fishery and there are three fishing villages, two on the south side of the river (which is North Otago) and this one on the north side (actually I think it's four if I include the small village behind the camp). Many of the baches/fishing huts have permanent residents, others are used during the different fishing seasons.

There's a great lookout at the end of the road just past the fishing camp. The river has a lagoon behind a long and shingle bank. Residents from the camp and other visitors launch their boats into the lagoon below the lookout, and then head down towards the mouth of the river.

They pull in just before the fast flowing waters of the river and walk over the shingle bank to the mouth of the river with their large scoop nets slung over their shoulders. It's whitebaiting season and they'll take their turns at the river mouth scooping for the tiny little delicacy that heads upstream each spring. 

I zoom in on the area where the mouth of the river is and can see that quad bikes are the vehicle of choice if you live in the fishing villages on the south side of the river. 

But fishing isn't the reason why we have stopped at Glenavy. Just five kilometres down the main highway from our camp is the award winning Riverstone Kitchen and the magnificent Riverstone Castle.

Riverstone Kitchen

We've been here before, back in 2014. We wanted to have a special meal at Riverstone Kitchen but unfortunately our timing was out and it was closed for a week for staff holidays. I added it back onto our 'must do another time' list and here we were- albeit five years later- to tick it off the list again.

Riverstone's gift, homeware & garden shops and extensive gardens

But funnily enough it wasn't the restaurant that brought us back this time. It was a date with Dot and her castle.

Three months earlier I had managed to secure tickets for a tour through Riverstone Castle. We hadn't seen it since our visit back in 2014, and back then I thought if it's ever open for visiting I'd love to have a look. Check out my blog post from the last visit for more details on Dot & the castle. 

Dot rarely opens the castle to visitors and when she does it is usually for charity events and the tickets are snatched up very quickly  I don't usually buy tickets for events so far in advance but I decided this time we'd just have to arrange to be in the area at the right time. Living on the road you never really know where you'll be from one week to the next. (NZMCA members had the opportunity to tour the castle back in early March when the National Rally & AGM was held in Oamaru).

With our precious tickets in hand we waited near the gate at the back of the restaurant's large vegetable garden for our allotted time. 

We then made our way around the edge of the lake to the entrance courtyard (the castle has actually been built on a manmade island in the middle of a manmade lake, in the middle of what once was a cow paddock).

We pass the side entrance...

...and continue around to the front of the castle where we are to wait for the next tour to start.

It was a very warm day and with no breeze nor shade at the front we took a walk along the lake edge and through the gardens at the back of the house....I mean castle, while we waited.

There's certainly a lot of work gone into the gardens, some are well on their way to be established, while others are just getting underway.

Our group of around 20 people waited patiently at the impressive front entrance for the doors to open and it was a great relief to see that our tour leader was in fact the Queen of the Castle, Dot herself, famous pink hair and all. Dot doesn't always take the tours although she tries to do a good portion of them as people are keen to meet the lady behind the dream. Unfortunately for us (but not for Dot I guess) no photography is allowed inside the castle. 

What can I say, the inside is as spectacular as the outside. So, so many beautiful things to look at and absorb; antique furniture, chandeliers, paintings and ceiling artworks, china, crockery and stunning flower arrangements at every turn along with many items you'd expect to find in a castle; suits of armour, helmets, medieval weapons, swords and banners. The large conservatory dining room was set out for a family dinner and was a visual feast with Christmas decorations on the table, around the outside and overhead.

Once we completed the tour we were directed down into the dungeon to wait for the stragglers to catch up. And from there into.....well that would be telling, but lets just say we exited out that opening in the bank of ivy on the left (above).

I thoroughly enjoyed the tour and Dot was a very gracious host. And contrary to his initial protests about not needing to tour the castle, David also enjoyed the visit. So much so that he gave Dot a little thank you speech as we were all gathered upstairs around the grand staircase. She was a little taken back that someone had thought to thank her for opening her amazing home to all and sundry. 

Afterwards I walked to the far side of the lake to take a few photos looking across the water...

...just as the fountain began to play. I am so pleased we made the effort to check out Riverstone Castle. 

After our tour, we made our way to Riverstone Kitchen where we had a booking for lunch and we finally ticked that off our bucket list......not just the once either.

During Lockdown Level 3, Riverstone Kitchen opened for takeaways so of course keen to have someone else cook dinner for a change and wanting to support a local business, we called up and ordered Butter Chicken & Slow-cooked Lamb for dinner. The meals were excellent although I had to do a little preparation beforehand.

The next time it was for my birthday dinner and I decided that there wouldn't be any preparation on this occasion so we ordered freshly cooked fish & chips (sole) with no preparation needed! And it was delicious.