At 3000 feet, cruising at 130 knots in calm conditions and with clear blue skies, you are in a different world to the one you left on the ground. You are away from all of the nasty things that happen at ground level, and down below everything is neat, ordered and in its place. The [...]
I’d been to the Edendale Crank Up before – two years ago when I was invited as a passenger on the Ferrari Owner’s Club annual run when the Italian marque was the ‘featured car’. Ferrari, a glittering (slightly misplaced?) jewel in an ocean of beloved old tractors, stationary engines, sheep shearing displays and other old [...]
Up until the mid-1930s, travelling around New Zealand was still an adventure. In fact, as late as 1950 when the Dicks and the Dickettes moved from Auckland to Dunedin, I can remember my father poring over his book of Shell Road Maps of New Zealand to try and plot a safe route for the huge [...]
The Waitaki Valley that links Oamaru to Omarama and the junction of the super-busy inland route SH8, is one of the last great ‘unknown’ drives and destinations in New Zealand. It’s puffed and panted along by a growing number of cyclists on the A2O cycle trail, their eyes fixed firmly on the spot two metres [...]
A glorious early spring morning and I’ve got the nose of the Blue Streak (my Nissan Pathfinder) heading up the Waitaki Valley and into the Lindis Pass. This is one of my favourite drives. The Waitaki Valley with its three interlocking lakes, burgeoning vineyards, dairy and sheep farms all hemmed in with snow-capped mountains, is [...]
Ned Slattery, ‘The Shiner’, was a swagman who marched the roads lesser travelled in Otago and Southland in the closing years of the 19th century. Allan Dick follows in his footsteps along one of those roads less travelled. If you look at a map of the South Island and contemplate it, you become aware that [...]
Ever since my first visit to Fairlie 50 years ago, I’ve had a mental image of it being the last outpost of civilisation before the great expanse of the Mackenzie Country. It was where the spread of early European civilisation stopped quite abruptly and said, ‘Whoa, we’re not going there …’ Fairlie is set in a [...]
Unless you’ve been there, you probably think of Westport as being wet and cold, and the victim of 10 rounds with that heavyweight champion of misery, Economic Downturn. Not a lot of good things have happened to Westport in the past quarter of a century: a forced stop to native logging hit the place hard [...]
R oxburgh is at the head of Teviot Valley on SH8 between Milton and Alexandra, at a point where the mighty Clutha River emerges from a gorge on its way from Lake Wanaka to the Pacific. The valley below is so broad that it’s difficult to imagine it really is a valley. There are three [...]
It was sometime in mid-1954 when our parents announced to the assembled Dickettes – brother Colin, sister Janice and myself, ‘we’re shifting to Brighton, we’ve bought that shop out there’. At that time there were five shops at Brighton, but I knew exactly what shop they were talking about. Since moving to Dunedin from Auckland [...]