My return to Auckland this morning began by pushing a kayak into the water.
Paddling on the stillest of waters in the earliest light has a serenity you cannot find in an Auckland commute. Itās still pretty good when the wind gets up.
We have been in Matai Bay in the Marlborough Sounds, which you reach after making your selection here.
Welcome.
A trust has taken this hut into its care for DOC. It is lovingly tended, with abundant firewood for its most excellent stove. It is also currently provisioned to the highest quality with an unfinished bottle of Jim Beam and more notably an Ardbeg with an intoxicating aroma even to those of us who no longer fall upon such things. I suggest you get in quick, this offer cannot last.
Beryl, who makes visitor greetings for the Trust, had asked us if we might be able to take a few photos to colour up the website and Facebook. Happy to oblige.
Chris hauls some driftwood.
Dave adopts his customary stuff-the-sawing-just-give-it-a-boot protocol.
Hazel boots up the lighting system.
Place like this, you get yourself settled and then you get back out onto the water.
These kayaks are like hot knife through butter, altogether more sleek than the two Karren and I have back home. Theyāre good enough for tooling along our shoreline but this is a whole other gear. Weāll be taking these ones down WhÄnganui in October, assuming the imminent new DOC booking site takes the strain and treats us well.
Such a place this is, though. Twice this year I have been in places of astonishing tranquility, so very still and quiet because this kind of landscape is more indomitable than most.
Paddle away from the noise for a while, and you reorder your lifeās proportions. I recommend this for pretty much everyone. How might things improve, do we think, if there were a Time-Out for absolutely everyone?
Of course we actually just had one not so long ago, for a great many of us, unless you were a temporarily-appreciated essential worker. So good it was, to flirt with a quieter gentler way.
But then, just as the story goes in Paradise Lost, the snake starts whispering. In this admittedly strained and tortured metaphor the Snake is played by Mr Simon Bridges and Mr Mike Hosking-Hawkesby-NZMeMeMe. It is soon followed by a veritable cavalcade of the selfish. And now here we are.
This is paradise, though.
