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

A Riot of Colour- Fields of Tulips, Southland

Catch-up (October 28, 2019)

From Cromwell we headed back to Southland to look after our Winton family's house and cat while they were away for a couple of weeks. I was very pleased to find out that our visit coincided with an event that has been on my bucket list for a very long time.

On just one day a year- Labour Day- Triflor NZ Ltd, an Edendale tulip bulb exporter opens up one of their large paddocks for the public to visit and view an amazing display of flowers. The flowers aren't for picking though, they will cut and mulched and the bulbs will then be harvested soon after the open day.

It's 54km from Winton to Edendale and as I wanted to be there when the gates opened at 10am, I was up and ready to go well ahead of time.  I zig-zagged my way across Southland and was delighted to find several paddocks of colourful tulips along the back roads, about 20 kilometres before Edendale. I was ahead of schedule and had time to stop and photograph them as well.

There was plenty of parking at Triflor headquarters but it was filling fast when I arrived just before 10am. The event is used a fundraiser for the Edendale Presbyterian Church, Edendale Scouts and Wyndham Lions Club; there was a small market in progress inside one of the sheds and a queue forming for the guided tours (gold coin donation). 

Several small passenger vans took visitors on a tiki-tour around the local area; along country roads and down farm tracks and past many of the tulip fields that can't be seen from the road. Dairy cows, looking a little out of place beside the mass plantings of vibrantly coloured tulips, watched curiously from the other side of fences as the procession of vehicles passed by.

Five companies lease or own 350ha in Southland, growing and exporting 175 million tulip bulbs every season. Trifor, the largest company, have 100ha and exports around 55 million bulbs each year. Several companies lease land from local dairy farmers or swap land use with them as the bulbs need to be grown on rotation every 7-8 years. 

About 80% of the bulbs are exported the United States and the rest to Holland, Norway, Finland and Russia. Southland has excellent soils, good rainfall and cool weather which are all required to grow high quality tulips bulbs. 

The bulbs are harvested during January & February and sent to the northern hemisphere where they are raised in hot houses and timed to bloom during the northern winter when flower prices are higher.

Visitors to the open day aren't allowed to pick the flowers and they also need to stay near the beginning of the rows so the bulbs aren't damaged.  When queried as to why the flowers weren't picked for sale to the flower industry in NZ or exported, the grower answered 'Who wants 170 million tulip blooms?' and "When did your partner last buy you a dozen tulips?' 

The rows of blooms are inspected for imperfections and odd colours and those bulbs removed before harvest.

Although some unusual ones may make the grade. The 'cauliflower' looking tulip in the centre of the mosaic below was one such bulb a few years ago. It's protege have been painstakingly cultivated each season and now there are several short rows of the plant. 

It wasn't a surprise to see that not many people were stopping to admire it though. The brilliant colours of all the others by far and away overshadowed the muted tones and odd shape of this quirk of nature.

It was hard to choose a favourite colour, they were all stunning but I loved the deep wine colour of these ones. I imagine that they would be a very popular colour for bridal bouquets.

How to stand out in a crowd.

And talking about crowds, dozens of people had arrived at the sheds by the time our tour van arrived back at the display paddock, the large carpark was full and many vehicles now lined the narrow country roads outside the farm. Over a 1000 people visited the farm this year, the largest crowd ever.

Inside the shed the queue for the tours snaked back and forward across the floor and a lot of visitors had opted to walk straight down to the tulip paddock. And in fact, as a photographer, I would do this next time. The tour was good but there were no photo opportunities and it was over an hour before we came back to the display. 

There was still plenty of room for me to take photos in amongst the visitors taking their ultimate selfies or photos of their children dressed in their Sunday best.

There are many migrant families working on dairy farms in Southland & Otago and I know that bright colours and beautiful flowers are a feature in their cultures. I'm sure many photos of treasured grandchildren were sent to families overseas that night.

A Riot of Colour

If you haven't already, click on a photo to enlarge it and then use your direction arrows to scroll back & forward through the photos, the colours are just spectacular (or perhaps it's just me, but I can't get enough of looking at this amazing sight).

Of course I photographed each and every row and from several different angles until I finally reached the far side of the field and when I turned to head back to the sheds, there was still a mass of people arriving.

Further to the south the weather looked to be about to take a turn for the worse and I wanted to check out a couple of the paddocks we'd seen on our tour earlier in the day. Our driver had pointed out side roads where there were tulips that could be seen from the road.

This sea of pink took my breath away, what a fabulous colour (and possibly my new favourite) and as you can see I couldn't get enough of them. Anyone want 50 photos of pink tulips?

But I lingered a little too long at the pink tulip parade and when I next looked up I could see the weather front was just about on top of me. There was one more field (actually two) that I wanted to see before I headed home, this one of white tulips when the rain started to fall...

...and one back near the main road where the heavens opened up and all hell broke loose. I managed to grab a few shots but not before getting a total drenching in the heavy downpour. 

Afterwards as I passed Triflors on my way home, dozens of people were still arriving, walking along the road in their finery and without umbrellas or wet weather gear. Others were struggling back to their cars, some parked over a kilometre away, looking like drowned rats. It was such a shame the day ended liked that but I was so pleased I arrived early.

Several days later I was back in the area and thought I'd look in on the tulip fields (as you do) that I hadn't had the time to check out when it was raining.

These reds and oranges were very vibrant, it was just a pity I could only stand at the side of the road to take photos. Given half the chance I'd have been in their amongst it again.

I also stopped at the Triflors display tulip field, this time at the other end to where we'd all been just days earlier. A dairy herd was slowly wandering back to their paddock after milking, along the track we'd been on the other day. Even though I knew what the outcome was going to be it was still quite sad to see that the de-heading machine had been through and most of rows of glorious coloured tulips had been unceremoniously chopped!

Petals & broken blooms lay in the furrows between the plants. It was such a sorry sight to see after such beauty but at least they had had their one day of glory.