crazyscot

I had hoped to have posted about our holiday over Christmas by now, but I have had a number of things clamouring for attention.

It was very much the holiday of lost opportunities. ( Read more... )

I had been contemplating writing something up to mark the anniversary (this Wednesday) of the big quake that took out half the CBD. The other day the Press (our regional newspaper, Christchurch and South Island) solicited people's memories of that day. To my pleasant surprise, they found mine interesting enough to publish!

• Special feature section (mine's under The Future - scroll down)
  
• My article itself

( This is what I submitted, for posterity. They very lightly copy-edited it for publication. )

We were cycling round the University of Canterbury campus this weekend, when we came across this marvelous piece of what I presume must be academic eccentricity.



That's a coal pit behind the fence; it's adjacent to what I presume is the (a?) main campus boiler. Won't someone please think of the ducklings?

Nights spent away: 4
Sandfly bites: 8 (at last count)
Lakes circumnavigated: 1
Glaciers walked on: 1
Waterfalls collected: 1
Things bought: jade pendant
Things made: knife

An action packed five day holiday, and no mistake. Where to begin? ( At the beginning, of course. There be pictures. )

Merry Christmas! Thinking of all our friends and family in distant places.

I understand that the UK news is dominated by the Euro situation, so most readers won't have seen much if any coverage of NZ's latest woes.

Poor old Nelson, a city of some 45000 at the north end of South Island, has just had 260mm of rainfall - over three months' worth - in 48 hours. The surrounding hills, up to twice that. There are landslips all over the place, communities cut off, a few hundred homes damaged or destroyed, a lot of lucky escapes, and some pretty devastating footage. (News montage.) Here in Chch we've escaped the worst of that system, and while it did pee down for a while this morning it's not a patch on Nelson.

The past year and a bit have not been kind to NZ. The Christchurch quake series; the Pike River mine; the Rena oil spill; and now this.

Phew.

Just got back from my mandatory two hour mountain flight. Not to teach me how to really fly in the valleys, y'understand, but to give me a feel for it in case I ever get into trouble. (On reflection, this makes it sound a bit like being strapped into a chair and told I will appreciate the mountains!)

When we got to the foothills, the instructor asked me which way the wind was blowing. North-easterly, I ventured, given that was what it had been on the ground? Bzzzzt! Thank you for playing. That was on the plains some 50km away. Here was in the mountains, the wind was doing its usual thing of flowing over the hills from the west. He went on to demonstrate just how predictably different the wind is; it flows rather like water, and his local knowledge took us to some different effects. All the while we were flying up and down valleys, below the level of the (sometimes cloud-shrouded) mountain tops on either side, getting much closer to the cumulus granitus than I have ever been before...! I kept instinctively wanting to fly up the centres of the valleys, that being as far away from the sharp pointy bits as possible, but that is usually the wrong thing to do; you fly on one side, so that if you should decide that you need to turn around, you have the full width of the valley to play with. There were optical illusions aplenty; the flattish valley floors often misled me into thinking they were level, underlining the need to keep on top of where the real horizon would be.

Next step will be my BFR, and then I'll be able to apply for my NZ license!

rustica and I had this conversation the other night where we ended up listing all the wonderful things we could think of about NZ in an attempt to try and entice people to follow us.

So, four months since we set sail, so to speak, where are we? ( Read more... )

Monday just past was the Labour Day public holiday; like Easter in Blighty, the long weekend heralds the start of the summer season for many.

( We went to Kaikoura... )

I was wrong the other day... it seems I do need to cover the NZ low flying and terrain avoidance syllabus before they'll let me convert my license. In fact there are some manoeuvres in that course that are covered in the BFR, so yesterday I spent a good hour or so in our local low flying areas.

Wow.

Here the normal minimum height for flight is 500' above ground level - similar to the law in the UK - but that's relaxed in the LFAs. I wouldn't normally dream of flying so low, but knowing what to do is one of those skills that could save your life if you're boxed in by terrain and/or weather.

We fly at slow speed at low level. ( Read more... )