travels with janne

Mmmmm! Never have I enjoyed the culinary aspect of a holiday as much as when I travel to Corsica. It is just about impossible to eat a meal that doesn’t taste good in Corsica. Dishes with fancy names and far-fetched combinations of ingredients are not to be found here. Instead, you are treated to refreshingly homey and incredibly tasty Corsican charcuterie and cheeses and freshly caught seafood delicacies.

Every day is a yummy adventure. Wild pig lovingly stewed in red wine and myrtle, creamy brocciu (an Appellation d’origine contrôlée cheese made from fresh ewe’s milk) mated with mint in a scrumptious omelette, plump, fresh mussels in cream and Noilly Prat, intensely delicious golden-red fish soup, mouth-watering sausages and cured pork tasting of a life spent eating wild chestnuts and acorns, the most delicious white fish (called St. Pierre? or St. Jacques?) I have come across in a long time, and AOC honey that smacks of the fragrances from the lovely and wild maquis.

A lunch overlooking the beach in Girolata, a lively food market in Ile Rousse, a minty omelette in a tiny mountain village and creamy mussels enough to feed an army in a restaurant by the sea in Calvi…who said diet? Just eat and enjoy!

I am not a geologist and rocks do not rock me. However, I cannot help being fascinated by the shapes and forms of Corsica’s stony landscape. The whole island is one big rock and exploring it must be a geologist’s dream come true. In fact, it is a dream for anyone who enjoys nature. I view the rocks from an aesthetic angle and see faces, gnomes, men, creatures, smiles, skulls, sand dunes, bones, giant’s footsteps and fingers. Such a wonder this world is!

I have no idea how the island was created, but I admire the enormous forces that have pushed and pleated and shifted and cracked the rocks to create this beautiful gem set in a turquoise sea.

A hike in the Calvi area and a refreshing boat trip to the Scandola Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, provide lots of good rocky adventures.

Impossible to photograph but easy to store in our primal memory bank of smells is the fragrant aspect of Corsica. The minute I step into the maquis and smell the countless wild herbs, I am brought back to when I last visited Corsica over 20 years ago. Wild rosemary, mint, myrtle, thyme, lavender and a whole lot of other strongly fragrant flowers make hiking in the maquis a thoroughly enjoyable sensory experience.

Flowers being what they are, they don’t only smell good, they also look good. The delicate little blooms are a lovely contrast to the hard and stony settings in which they are found. June is the perfect time of year to enjoy the colours, forms and fragrances before the flowers wither away in the drier and hotter summer months.

Butterflies abound, flitting from flower to flower to feed or performing sexual air acrobatics in partnership with their mates. Bees are also busy, gathering pollen and returning home to the hive to produce Corsica’s characteristically intensely flavoured honey.

With this last, 13th entry on my New Zealand blog I would like to thank Aotearoa (New Zealand or “The Land of the Long White Cloud” in Maori), for being so lovely, for making its nature so accessible, and for its friendliness. The landscape is incredibly varied and multi-faceted with snowy mountains, earthy rainforests, pristine beaches, dramatic rockscapes, green-hilled farmland, tumbling waterfalls and rushing rivers. In the company of my travelling companion I drove 4430 kilometres, took 1697 photographs (60 of which I inadvertently deleted, including those I had taken of the world’s rarest penguin – arrgh!), and packed and unpacked my suitcases 14 times – all of this about 12.000 kilometres and 12 hours’ worth of time difference away from home.

I have tasted home-baked Bed & Breakfast bread with great pleasure and accidentally choked on the salty waves of the Pacific

My body has felt the steadfastness of an ancient kauri tree, bobbed like a cork on alarmingly large ocean swells in the company of curious dolphins, felt at one with the gentle waves of the Tasman Sea, been cooled by the breath of glacial mountain air and been sizzled by a sun glaring through the Southern Hemisphere’s too-thin layer of ozone

I have listened to the earthy quiet of the rainforest, the raucous greetings of a nocturnal penguin homecoming, the pounding of the surf on the miles and miles of New Zealand’s coastline, a frightening haka and a hauntingly beautiful love song performed by Maoris, the bark and growl of seals and sea lions, and the wind chime song of the bellbird.

My nose has smelled tangy sea air, stinky seals and mouth-watering, tender New Zealand lamb chops.

And oh! The sights I have seen! No more words – look at the photographs and enjoy!

Petals and pebbles

Feathers and ferns

Blossoms and bark

Sand and snow

Stars and stones

Slopes and skies

Masterpieces tinted

By strokes of Nature’s paintbrush

In pastel hues of salmon and lilac

Turquoise and ochre

Charcoal and blushing pink

In Shadowland misty clouds hang low

Cushioning the peaks in soft mystery.

The mountains weep hundreds of tears

That nurture new growth and freshen the salty sea

From soaring peaks

To delicate blossoms

From earthy rainforests

To mighty oceans

The Land of the Long White Cloud

Offers up its wonders

Allowing us to admire,

Explore,

Immerse.

But also tapping us on the shoulder and telling us

That we are not the only ones on this earth,

Saying,

“ Take care.”

It is a very special feeling to sit outside and drink a cup of coffee while royal albatross from the world’s only mainland albatross colony circle elegantly overhead. With a wingspan of three metres they glide with snowy white grace on hot air currents, sometimes accompanied by their noisy but pretty cousins, the red-billed seagulls – that spend their time squawking, flapping their wings and landing beside us to check out the possibilities of gleaning some tasty crumbs.

Such traffic there is in the late afternoon when the birds come home to roost after a busy day in the air! It is like Heathrow Airport, with each bird cleverly finding its right spot, here on the most north eastern point of the Otago Peninsula. Also nestled on the steep ledges of the cliffs are spotted cormorants and in a tree that bravely hangs on to the rock for dear life are three spoonbill storks.

Another special privilege is getting up close to the world’s smallest penguin, the blue penguin (or fairy penguin). These shy little cuties that weigh a mere one kilogram and stand about 30 cm high, are nocturnal, so it takes a good deal of patience (and warm clothing) to experience them. I get into position on Pilot’s Beach, right behind the albatross colony, hours before dark and hang around in the company of a few seals and a few other tourists.

It gets darker and darker and chillier and chillier. Finally, I am rewarded. At about 10 pm several groups (called rafts) of penguins speed-swim and dive like porpoises in the water until they land on the rocky coast. They have spent their whole day out on the Pacific Ocean fishing and now it is time to come home. With their tummies full they check to see if the coast is clear before they waddle uphill to their nests containing their waiting partners and hungry chicks.

The little silhouettes pass so closely by me as I sit stock still in the dark that I can hear the shuffle of their tiny feet on the loose stones. Once the families are reunited, the nesting area echoes with the sound of penguins – a sound that is hard to describe but familiar to anyone who has seen National Geographic films from the Antarctic or other penguin hotspots.

The third treat of the day was seeing the world’s rarest penguin, the yellow-eyed penguin. These birds weigh about five kilograms and are much easier to see in the daytime. The only place they can be found is New Zealand and there are a mere 4000 of them. Watching them come up from the water, stomach surfing their way in to the sandy beach, and then clambering up the slope to get to their nests, is quite entertaining.

Even more entertaining is the show the sea lions put on the next day at a lovely sandy beach at Sandfly Bay on the south coast of Otago Peninsula. These huge rolls of fat are much bigger than New Zealand’s fur seals. They loll on the beach, half-buried in the sand. Occasionally a flurry of sand flies through the air as a sea lion flips wet sand over itself in an attempt to cool off. The big animals roll and twitch and scratch, trying to find a comfy position free of flies.

Further on down the beach a huge and masculine sea lion (bull?) comes dashing out of the water making a beeline for a group of smaller sea lions. It seems like there are a couple of cinnamon-coloured females and a couple of black sea lions that may be young males. They play-fight (or is it for real?), biting at each other’s throats, gracefully twining necks with each other and showing muscle. The big male, obviously boss of the lively group, has his work cut out for him as he tries in vain to keep things on an even keel.

Many years ago the demigod Tu Te Raki Whanoa of Maori legend went to work on forming the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Working his way up from south to north, he used a magical adze but it took him some time to get the hang of it. However, by the time he had reached Fiordland, where Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound are, he had become quite an expert. He carved out perfectly shaped fiords with mountainsides rising straight and true from the water.

Today we enjoy the shadowy beauty of the fine sculpture that the ancient demigod created, a place where Mother Nature often keeps her secrets shrouded in mists and clouds and shadows. We sail into the wind, losing our own breath to the gale force gusts, our words tumbled and lost in the air. The grey skies lend a feeling of mystery and moodiness to the dramatic landscape. Waterfalls that are not there when the weather is sunny and dry now streak the face of the rock like tears.

The road to Milford Sound is steep, stunning and, at times, stark. Rivers engorged with icy snow melt and rainwater are bordered by swathes of colour: pink and purple lupines that grow wild and unfettered. At lower altitudes we walk through incredibly green rainforests where every tree and rock and slope is blanketed with a carpet of verdant moss.

We meet the cheeky keas, the only alpine parrots in the world. They hop about with an awkward gait that makes them look like they are lame. They land on the cars, munch on the rubber sealing and window wipers and make an entertaining nuisance of themselves in all their green finery. When they fly off it is with a flush of orange on the underside of their wings.

It feels strange to be standing in a leafy green rainforest looking up at snow-capped mountains. I don’t know if there are many other places in the world where glaciers and rainforests are so closely connected to each other.

We have arrived in another amazing place, this time the Westland Tai Poutini National Park, part of a huge Unesco World Heritage area encompassing several national parks. The most famous sights here are Franz Josef Glacier and Fox Glacier that both slide down lofty peaks in the park. The area also offers fantastic views of Mount Cook, Australasia’s highest mountain at 3755 metres.

This is an area with dramatic natural forces, a place of upheaval, growth, erosion and change. The land sits uneasily on top of continental plates that often shift and groan, and bash against or grate over each other. Hence the frequency of earthquakes and volcanoes. The shifting also causes Mount Cook to sprout an extra couple of centimetres a year on average – fast for a mountain. The glaciers are pretty speedy, too, sometimes trundling along at up to four kilometres an hour. That’s regular walking speed for us mere humans, but we don’t have to shift tons and tons of ice, snow, rocks and debris like the glaciers do.

The rain here is quite something, too. We have so far been amazingly lucky with the weather, having only experienced one single day of drizzle on the trip so far and that is despite the fact that we are now in the rainiest area of all. Last week here it rained 480 mm in 48 hours. The result was that many road sections were washed away, including 500 metres of the road up to view Fox Glacier close up. Roads disappear, rocks tumble down, pieces of ice fall and rivers engorged with freezing water tumble down the mountains, carving new landscapes. We humans are nothing in comparison, just little specks on the face of the earth.

Another humbling experience was our visit to the Pancake Rocks, an area just north of the glaciers. It is a geological wonderland (as is so much of New Zealand!), the secrets of which geologists still have to unlock. What is keeping them guessing is how the multitude of thin layers of rock were formed. The layers of “pancakes” have since their creation been eroded by the sea, creating pancake pillars and blowholes where the surf crashes and echoes dramatically.

In the midst of all this magnificence on a grand scale are the tiny or silent wonders: the delicate flowers, the sun-dappled ferns with unfurled heads that look like the top ends of violins, the bellbirds with their wind chime sounds, and the mirror-still lakes reflecting the mountains and sky.