Windy Tops

Tag: suburbia

  • The Shaky Isles

    I won’t make too much out of the recent effects of Seddon’s seismic activity on Wellington, at least until it gets any worse. Yesterday afternoon I was traversing through part of the Tinakori Hill, trying to determine how long it’d take to walk between the CBD and Ngaio. There’s still quite a lot of tree-fall and other storm damage up there, and elsewhere around the town belt, from that storm a few weeks ago, which made it interesting.

    On this occasion I coincidentally ran into a friend from the Wellington Tramping & Mountaineering Club (Michael L). We were chatting for a few minutes, and the ground started to shift in a way that either of us could have perceived as general dizziness if we’d not confirmed with each other that it was an earthquake. Neither of us knew if there’s a protocol of what to do in an earthquake whilst in a forested area—maybe a worthy topic for another discussion—and then it stopped. Later, when I bumped into a woman walking her dog as she played on a smartphone, I was very surprised to discover that the shaking had been measured as magnitude 6.9 although it was later revised to 6.6. Somehow I’d felt nothing compared with what I’d have expected that to feel like.
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  • Completing a Kaiwharawhara Stream Walk

    It’s good to read (via The Wellingtonian and Stuff) that some positive effort is being made to open up a small section of land on the harbour side of Wellington’s incoming motorway. The article doesn’t mention it, but the beach being referred to is, I think, just around the corner from the harbour outlet of Kaiwharawhara Stream. Although it’s public land, this stretch (here’s a map) has been almost completely cut off from public access thanks to the barrier of 4 lanes of moderate speed regular traffic on the old Hutt Road, 6 lanes of motorway, 4 railway lines, and some Centreport land in the vicinity of the Interislander vehicle loading area on the south-western side. Presently, the only legal way to access the coastal section is from the sea.

    Several years ago, I made an effort to walk the greater part of the Kaiwharawhara Stream, down from the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary (aka Zealandia), through Otari Wilton’s bush, a feast of suburbia and Trelissick Park around the Ngaio Gorge. It’s a very nice and relaxed journey which tells a story of history and local ecology. For me, it was rather frustrating to discover that after all this, the entire thing ends behind an ugly and impregnable industrial wall, just before the stream enters the harbour. The stream flows underneath all of this and through a channel between the various commercial/industrial properties, but sadly no provision has been made for any practical form of walking access.

    If an access way can ever be created so that people can see where the stream finally enters the harbour, it’d make it possible to have a nice sense of closure for the journey.

    3051254847_476a627851-6943208
    Goodbye, Kaiwharawhara Stream!

  • A miscellaneous Belmont and Hutt River walk

    Yesterday was fairly sunny, as winter days in Wellington go, and I found myself on a fairly miscellaneous wander through parts of Belmont Regional Park and (eventually) Lower Hutt.

    [map:https://93a12629bf06.ngrok-free.app/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/20100821-dry-creek-hutt-river.gpx%5D

    4914661094_cd27972517_m-9061377
    One of at least four Kereru that were
    very noisily flapping around near the
    road at the Kelson entrance.

    I thought I might catch a train out to the Dry Creek entrance to Belmont Regional Park (most easily accessible from Manor Park Railway Station), and see where I ended up. It wasn’t until after I’d bought my day-rover ticket that I remembered many commuter trains in Wellington are being replaced by buses right now, at least on weekends, while they’re continuing various line upgrades. So I hopped on the Rail Replacement bus to find that due to various road layout issues, it wasn’t going to stop at Manor Park railway station. Instead it’d drop me at Silverstream (the next station along) and I’d then have to look for a “dinky little purple bus” to get back to Manor Park. It turns out the dinky little purple bus wasn’t very well synchronised with the other buses, and the person driving it had never been to Manor Park Railway Station before. Myself and the other poor guy on that bus eventually ended up in the right place, well over an hour after the train-bus had left Wellington.
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  • Daywalk: Wellington to Whitby via Belmont Regional Park

    Yesterday I went for a walk, a week after returning home, to try and get back into the swing of things. It first took me to Ngauranga (I needed to buy something from LV Martin), but then I just kept on walking. It turned into quite a nice day, although by the end I had a couple of blisters on the soles of my feet, and ache in a few places. I think this is symptomatic of me having been a few weeks without much exercise, but hopefully I’m on the way to loosening up.

    I found a new way into Belmont Regional Park that I’d previously not known about, heading up through Granada North where there’s a new sub-division going in, then just following the roads until they fade away. In hindsight I think I might have accidentally crossed about 50 metres of private land (hopefully no more), which I realised upon emerging at the end of someone’s driveway, so I’m not 100% sure if there’s a complete public access corridor going through there.

    [map:https://93a12629bf06.ngrok-free.app/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/20091122-wellington-to-whitby-via-belmont.gpx%5D
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  • Windy on the Skyline Walkway

    I had the second half of an afternoon to kill earlier today, and went for a short walk down to Otari Wilton’s Bush, not far from where I live. Somehow I ended up on the Skyline Walkway, maybe because I forgot to stop and turn around, but it all worked out okay. This morning was calm and sunny, but by now there was an increasingly strong nor-westerly in the air, which makes sense given a southerly’s due here soon. (ie. Air circles around low pressure systems clockwise in the southern hemisphere so it was characteristic that the wind was coming from the north-west right now… I’m slowly getting better at this, heh heh.) I’d left my camera at home, but took my GPS and so ended up with this map.

    [map:https://93a12629bf06.ngrok-free.app/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/20091003-skyline-chartwell.gpx%5D

    Along the ridge-top of the Skyline Walkway, the wind was really starting to blow — not to a leaning-against-it level, but certainly enough to cause the odd stumbling. It also wasn’t enough for the turbines over at the Makara Wind Farm to be switched off. The area’s full of high-tension power lines, and they make a major racket when the wind’s blowing through them to that extent.

    Funnily enough, I notice that Erick Brenstrum recently wrote a short piece over on the Met Service Blog about ridge top winds, and how they operate.
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  • Wellington Harbour bottle caps

    Earlier today I walked around Oriental Parade and up over the Southern Walkway, and hopping off at Kilbirnie before spending about an hour sitting under the northern end of the runway at Wellington Airport, watching the planes struggle in. It was cold, but the bank below the runway offers some partial shelter from the southerly with passing phases of rain, and it was bearable for a while with about four layers and a balaclava.

    What surprised me as I walked back towards town was the number of bottle caps washed up on that part of the beach around there. There were barely any plastic bottles, but there were thousands of bottle caps. They were typically the variety that comes from soft drinks and bottled water, the latter of which I think is a bizarre, inefficient and pointless thing in New Zealand, but perhaps that’s a topic for another post.

    I suppose the bottles must separate and be carried somewhere else with a different make-up and density, but apparently thousands of bottle caps end up right here. Putting thoughts about lazy thoughtless polluters and the hypocrisy of New Zealand aside, I’d love to know more about the physics of what’s happening here.

  • Workplace dizziness

    Lately I’ve set myself an informal rule at work whereby if I want to visit the junk food floor (for the primary purpose of obtaining junk food), I have to take the stairs there and back. I figure this fits in nicely with the posters that have appeared around the workplace suggesting that people take the stairs more often. So far the stair-climbing is okay, and probably a couple of times a day now, I’m working on developing the most efficient technique to balance myself when going up and down the stairwell between the 6th floor and the 14th floor. Even if irrational, evil sugar habits feel much more justified. What I didn’t expect when I set myself this game was that I’d come out of it each time feeling dizzy.

    It’s just around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around. And that’s only the first half of it. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced this when walking in the outdoors.

  • Kaka in Central Wellington

    I was walking home this afternoon and spotted a Kaka climbing around in the low branches of trees on the north side of Anderson Park near the Wellington Botanic Gardens, which was very cool. I thought it was a Tui as I approached until it became clear it was too big, and I ended up watching it for about 10 minutes before it flapped away towards Bowen Street.

    It’s the first Kaka I’ve seen since one about 6 months ago around Cone in the Tararuas (not counting a visit to Kapiti Island), and only the second that I’ve spotted near Central Wellington. It’s one of the great effects of having the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary just down the road.

  • The right to walk from A to B

    I’ve found it interesting reading about the events in Auckland over the last few days, during which several thousand protesters broke through police barriers to walk and cycle over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. This was against the wishes of the New Zealand Transport Agency, which operates the bridge for vehicles only and had told the group they couldn’t walk over the bridge on its 50th anniversary. The protest was arranged by the GetAcross campaign, although the organisers claim they never asked people to break police barriers.

    I’ve never lived in Auckland and it’s not a place I know much about, but I was very surprised to discover that it’s not actually legal to walk over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. After all, if it’s illegal to cross the bridge without a vehicle then it seems like a very long way to walk between St Mary’s Bay and Northcote Point. Google Maps tells me that it turns a 7.1 km walk straight over the bridge into an estimated 12.5 hour 60.8 km walk, complete with warnings from Google Maps about possibly not having adequate footpaths along the way! Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of Auckland could confirm if this is accurate? It seems very strange, though. Several other bridges that come to my mind all have free walking routes — these being the Sydney Harbour Bridge (in Sydney), the Brooklyn Bridge (in New York), and the Manhatten Bridge (also in New York). Not having something similar for an iconic bridge in a place such as Auckland seems to be a confounding oversight!
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  • Recreational impressions of New Plymouth

    I’ve been back in Wellington for a week now, but I suppose there’s one lasting impression I wanted to express about Taranaki and specifically New Plymouth which I’ve now visited quite a few times over the last several years. Even when I haven’t gone tramping, I’ve always found it an easy place to get around and to enjoy walking. New Plymouth was recently named the winner of a Top Town competition in North & South magazine, and part of this decision was thanks to the recreational opportunities. I’m skeptical of these kinds of lists on principle because to me they feel like publicity stunts that get attention without much cost, but I do agree that New Plymouth has a lot going for it. There are plenty of places to escape the asphalt and the one and only shopping mall, and to enjoy natural surroundings.

    For outsiders, the obvious nearby recreation area is Egmont National Park, which has the usual range of back-country huts and trees and mountain scenery. Within New Plymouth, however, there are a lot of places where it’s possible to go walking.
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