Tag Archives: Scenery

Day 5 – Campiglia to (almost) Porto Venere and That Boat Ride Back

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Thursday 18 June 2026 – As was usual, we were offered two walks. The end point would be Porto Venere, a town at the southern end of a finger of land beside the major port of La Spezia, which itself lies south of the Cinque Terre National Park. This would be the departure point for a boat ride back along the coast. And, as usual, we opted for the shorter one, as (a) it started with a taxi ride up into the hills which obviated the need for the steep uphill climb on offer with the other walk in the (b) forecast temperatures of over 30°C. I therefore had the hope that our route would be largely level with only a bit (or possibly a massive amount, stay tuned) of downhill.

Some hope.

Anyway, Rebecca, Tomaso and all of we punters took the train to Riomaggiore, the furthest of the Cinque Terre villages. Rebecca took off up into the hills with the usual well ‘ard team, and the rest of us followed Tomaso. There was a nice echo of the Castellaners of Catalunya as we exited the station,

and I managed to get a shot which combined two elements of our Italian exerience:

Tomaso’s unwavering focus on being a guide; and a taxi rank that featured three taxis but no driver.  Eventually, a driver did turn up, clutching a focaccia or some such, and we all climbed on board so we could be taken up to Campiglia, a tiny village in the hills. The taxi dropped us off by a terrace of shaded tables which looked like it was made for sitting and drinking coffee at, and which offered a decent view over the surroundings. This, by the way, is the spot where the well ‘ard team would be walking up to and taking their lunch. This would be an ascent of some 500m over 6.5km, so now you know why we opted out.

Across the street from the terrace was Erbo Gianco, a place that outwardly seemed a rather unpromising grocery store

but which was actually a tiny miracle perpetrated in this hamlet in the middle of nowhere.

Luca, its owner, deftly prepared us focaccie for our lunches and coffee to help us on our way.

The shop is the single alimentaria for all of Campiglia, and, as well as supplying the villagers, is a popular place for hikers and other passers-by to stop for a break.

Coffee quaffed, we set off. We had a way to go, with the intriguing possibilities offered by the “Green Caravan”, a place where we could take our lunch and which might even be open to sell us something cold and refreshing.

On the outskirts of the village (i.e. in about 20 yards) we came across the local parish church, Chiesa Cattolica Parrocchiale di Santa Caterina.

It was open, so we looked in.

It had another of those processional crosses that we first saw in Bonassola.

If I understood it correctly, it’s not an active church, but is a popular venue for weddings.

The path led in a satisfactorily level kind of way

past the remains of an old windmill

and rather pleasingly downhill through woodland,

before reaching a fork, where we turned left on the Alta Via del Golfo (AVG). (AV5T is the Alta Via del Cinque Terre, the High Path that started way over in Levanto.)

Much of the path was OK,

except for the odd tricky bit.

Sadly, the basically level nature of the path was a temporary phenomenon. As usual, when you get to a decision point on these kind of hiking holidays, to quote Yazz and the Plastic Population, “The Only Way Is Up”.

We had, indeed, come down a fair way, as was shown by the view we got back towards Campiglia

which was revealed to be a bit larger than I had expected from the part we saw. We headed along a military road, through a quarry

where the local “marble” had been taken. It’s not real marble, meaning sedimentary limestone, but it’s a stone that polishes to a fine shine – dark with white veins through it. The rock we saw didn’t look that dark, and, although he hadn’t got his polishing machinery with him, Tomaso demonstrated  what he meant by wetting a small chunk,

which gives an idea of what the finished article might look like. In some cases, the veins are of a golden colour.

We were heading steadily and occasionally steeply uphill, and arrived at the high point, where I thought that, even though I didn’t have the drone with me, I’d indulge in a bit of aerial photography,

and we finally reached a view of La Spezia that had been threatening to become visible for the last few hundred metres of upward trail. And it really was quite a view.

The naval military area of La Spezia is huge;

everything to the left of and below the harbour bar in the photo above is the La Spezia arsenal – a town within a town. As well as the city, we could see across to the Carrara mountains.

The white areas are (real) marble, the posh Carrara marble that can be seen in posh places, such as the Sheik Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, which must singlehandedly have consumed a mountain or two from the range.

The path then became a pleasantly downhill dirt road,

suitable for vehicular access to the quarries we’d passed, and indeed we weren’t alone on the track.

We pottered along past a viewpoint which showed us that there was an island, Palmaria, at the very tip of the finger, and gave us a sight of the castle and church at the extreme edge of Porto Venere,

and, at closer range, a Scarce Swallowtail Butterfly.

It wasn’t that scarce, actually. There were at least three of ’em, and I was glad to get this shot when one perched, un-butterfly-like, for a few instants.

Continuing downhill, we came at last to the Green Caravan, which

was closed. A sign told us that it would open in a few days’ time, which was a fat lot of good. But we found some shady patches and ate our lunches there anyway.

The walking route from the Green Caravan, which is formally identified on Google Maps as “Gitana on the road“, to Porto Venere has an exceedingly steep downhill end section. Rebecca had mentioned that there were some 2,000 steps to go down and as far as I can tell, these took one down 250m vertical in one kilometre – that’s one in four. We said “bollocks” to that, and  Tomaso organised a cab to take us the rest of the way down. Thus it was that we arrived on the outskirts of Porto Venere.

Entry to the town is through a medieval gate.

Beside the gate are some mystery objects.

These are actually measures – standard Genoese units at the time – which were used to enforce fair trading.  If I remember correctly, on the left is one for wine, in the middle for olive oil, and on the right, one for grain. On the other side of the gate is a frescoed arch

and the town is – would you believe it? – very attractive,

though some sartorial choices on view  were less aesthetically pleasing. The town was also, delightfully, relatively uncrowded.

We had the chance to visit the church-and-castle that we’d seen from up in the hills.

The church is the Chiesa di San Pietro. We looked inside, of course. Entry is through a couple of magnificent doors.

and the inside is wonderfully calming. Remarkably there were very few people to intrude.

We walked back to the town,

which led past an intriguing tinkly shop.

and headed for the quay to board the ferry that would take us back towards home along the coast. This give us some decent departing views of Porto Venere and the castle

and then we had the chance – and the light – to take some photos of Riomaggiore, Manarola and Corniglia from the water, with the sun behind us. Forgive me here for a plethora of photos, but this was seeing the villages from a fantastic viewpoint.

Riomaggiore – New town to the left, old town to the right

Riomaggiore old town

Riomaggiore new town

Manarola

Corniglia

Corniglia

It made me think that we could have foregone all that bloody trekking up and down hills for days on end, and just taken the ferry.

Well, not quite, I suppose.

Anyway, we had to disembark at Vernazza in order to get back to the hotel in any kind of decent time, so we had another of those train journeys,

but got back to Bonassola with the feeling of great satisfaction about the day. Yes, it was hot and occasionally sweaty, but we’d seen some fantastic views and visited a couple of lovely places.

We had one more day’s walking as part of this trip, and it would be nowhere near the Cinque Terre, but much further to the north.  Perhaps it wouldn’t feature the sweaty toiling up and down hills that are such a hallmark of the Cinque Terre? Keep watching these pages to find out!

 

On our last leg(s) – the journey to Christchurch

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Sunday 22 March 2026 – Dunedin was our last stop on the tour of the South Island. All we had to do was to get ourselves to Christchurch and hold ourselves in readiness for our return flights to the UK. Because of the unpleasantness in the Middle East, our original journey back via Dubai had been changed so that our route was now (a) via Singapore and (b) a day later. Thus we would have two nights and one day in Christchurch, and a layover in Singapore’s Changi airport of some six hours: total journey time therefore 30 hours, including 24 hours in the air.

But first we had to get ourselves to Christchurch, a distance of some 360km. Despite Jane’s best research efforts, there wasn’t a whole host of things to do and see en route, but she did find a couple of interesting diversions on our journey.

The first of these was still just about within the Dunedin city limits – Baldwin Street, dubbed the World’s Steepest (driveable) Street.

It’s notoriously difficult to convey steepness, either up or down, in photographs, so I made the sacrifice of walking up the steepest bit so that I could bring you a dispassionate measurement of the gradient.

It’s not that steep the whole way; a section near the top is the steepest.

I walked up the road, but Jane took advantage of steps, which run up one side of the steep bit.

For fun, we did another way of conveying the gradient.

At the top is a seat, much needed by some of the folk that had got that far

and some info about the street

Of course, some people have to make getting up the street a real challenge, and there are a couple of plaques there which are nods to the “because it’s there” lunatic tendency of some people.

and there’s one rather charming record, by the water fountain there, of a successful attempt to climb the street by a young lad aged only 3 years and 4 months.

After that little workout, we moved on, leaving logging country for more pastoral landscapes.

There were some exceptions to the low-rise nature of the landscape; Jane took this photo as we refuelled near a town called Bushey.

The Glastonbury Tor lookalike at the top is the Sir John McKenzie memorial, by the way (he was a politician in the last half of the 19th century). The last two thirds of the journey is through pancake-flat landscapes, which are conducive to high-density cattle farming, something we had noted in a few other parts of the country.

As we followed the coast northwards, we reached a town called Moeraki. It shares a name with Lake Moeraki, but the connection is merely linguistic, if ChatGPT is to be believed; Both names come from the word “moeraki” in the Māori language, often interpreted as something like “sleepy sky” or “day of rest”. Anyway, this Moeraki is a beachside town and on the beach are some geologically very interesting objects: the Moeraki Boulders.

Although their formation is a matter of abstruse geology, it’s clear that they are a popular tourist attraction. They are “septarian concretions”. A concretion is a hard and compact mass formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles, found in sedimentary rock or soil. Septarian concretions are carbonate-rich concretions containing angular cavities or cracks (from the Latin septum, “partition”, referring to the cracks or cavities separating polygonal blocks of hardened material). Some of the boulders show this partitioning very clearly, indeed looking as if someone has taken a broken one and glued it back together.

There are some broken boulders on the beach, which also give an idea of the crystalline nature of the material between the compacted mudstone.

There are many intact boulders, most of them part-buried within the sand

and very popular for kids to play on and (sigh) selfies. There’s one which looks to have rolled off the cliff where it was formed relatively recently (in geological terms, anyway).

Human provided for scale

The boulders are spherical through the way they were created, over a period of some 65 million years and starting with a seed, which might have been a shell fragment. Mineral-rich water percolating through the mud deposited crystalline material and mudstone evenly so that it expanded spherically within the cliff it was building up in.  When the cliff is eroded away by the sea, the formed boulders then roll down to the beach. There are apparently other similar phenomena on the North Island as well as these here.

We might have then completed the journey to Christchurch with no further stops other than for coffee, for example at this accurately-named establishment

which had a very enticing array of cakes.

But Jane noticed that a place called Geraldine had a vintage motors and machinery museum.  I was taken enough with the name of the town, as well as with Herbert and Alma along the route; but the prospect of a vintage museum proved irresistible, so we stopped off to take a look.

The desk was manned by a volunteer called Bruce, who was very pleased to see us, and accompanied us as we went into the first of the halls, which was real veteran cars.

It turned out that he owned one of them

but was also anxious to tell us about many of the other ones, too.  He was a lovely chap, but we were quite glad when other customers came along and diverted his attention away from explaining all the cars there. There were some interesting exhibits, such as this Model T Ford

and this creation, which I’d never come across before, the Reselco Solocar.

We wandered around the other sheds: tractors,

with a very charming array of tractor seats along one wall

and some very elderly-looking examples;

Stationary engines;

Crawler tractors;

and models.

There were other sheds with various other sorts of machinery, such as lawnmowers, much incidental period stuff such as old cameras and household goods, and a model horse in the yard.

The last shed contained cars of a vintage that was much more my period

Vanden Plas Princess 3-litre R
Wolseley 6/99
Armstrong Siddeley
Vauxhall Veloxes

and a Jag I’d never come across before, an XJ40 (mislabelled as a JX40, I might add).

The place had the same amateur air as Brooklands Museum used to have before it got really popular; amateur in the good sense of love being lavished on the exhibits.

There were a couple of quirky roadside objects to be spotted en route – creative use of hay bale “marshmallows”

and, having passed Bushey (the name of a town near where I was born), we also passed Chertsey

a town near where we now live. But there wasn’t another roadside attraction to divert us and so we found ourselves at the Sudima Hotel in Christchurch, not far from the George where we’d stayed before (and would have again, had they had room for us). It wasn’t the Small Luxury Hotel that the George is, but it was a well-organised and comfortable room and the service was friendly and efficient.

During our free day in Christchurch, apart from writing this blog, my main task was to return the hire car. This had the potential to be complicated, as I had agreed, on taking on the car at Greymouth all those weeks ago, to return it to the airport rather than the city depot of the car hire firm. Our travel agent hadn’t managed to change the arrangement, and I couldn’t persuade the agent on the phone to Budget that I even had one of their cars, far less could make any change to its return location. So I drove it, via a refuelling stop, to the Budget city offices to discuss whether it was OK to just drop it off there. To start with, that was a very frustrating process because there was only one chap on the desk actually helping customers, but, for some reason, a couple of others drifting about Doing Mysterious Things that didn’t help at all reduce the queue of three people in front of me. The chap at the desk was being frightfully helpful to an elderly American couple who seemed to be having many troubles picking up a car; he even spent time explaining phone charging cables to the lady and helped her buy one from the machine on the premises. All this took about 20 minutes with the three guys in the queue and me exchanging ever more meaningful looks and raised eyebrows. I had just resigned myself to a long wait when a guy wandered in to the office with a key for a car he was returning and said “fuelled up, no damage; can I just leave the key here?” and the desk chap just nodded. So I followed this wonderful example, and got the nod from the desk chap that the airport/city dichotomy was not a problem, dropped the key off and hightailed it back to the hotel before they could change their mind. I haven’t received any credit card charge, so I am currently assuming that all is OK.

We treated ourselves to one more Decent Cocktail And Nice Meal at the George in the late afternoon, after which, to shake the food down, we went for a walk. Obviously. So we got a few more photos of Christchurch’s street art,

cafés,

handsome buildings;

Antarctic Heritage Trust HQ

scenes of riparian beauty,

and even a farewell wave from Robert Falcon Scott

before turning in for the night to get some sleep before the long journey home.

So, that was it for New Zealand. We’ve had a wonderful time, full of new experiences, sights and sounds; we’ve covered over 3,700km on largely uncrowded roads; and we’ve walked over 200km, including a couple of toughish hikes. The country is a delight for British tourists – well-organised for a wide variety of activities at a wide variety of accommodation types and it’s been a pleasure to be able to enjoy much of that variety. Slightly sadly, we head home; there will be no more entries on these pages for New Zealand. But fear not: we will be on the road again in about six weeks’ time and I hope to be able to bring you the exciting sights of our next trip here. Where are we going? Ah – you’ll have to keep in touch with these pages to find that out.

 

 

 

The Dunedin Line

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Friday 20 March 2026 – Once again, that we were travelling was borne in on us reasonably heavily, as an early alarm was needed to ensure we were up, packed, breakfasted and ready to be collected at 0720 to be taken down the road for an 0800 ferry back to Bluff.  The morning light was, erm, “interesting”,

and didn’t seem to be sending out omens for a good day.  However, it became clear that whatever weather was causing this light was moving away from us, as we had a calm crosing back to Bluff and sunshine for the rest of the day.  Our destination was Dunedin, 228km away, a journey which could be done in under three hours. Of course, Jane had other ideas and had found some diversions along the way, so we drove largely along the coast for about 300 kilometres and spent the whole day on the journey. A large part of the day was spent investigating sights in the Catlins, a very scenic and occasionally rugged bit of south east New Zealand.

We needed to get some fuel for the car, and Jane had noted that there was a fuel station and café at Fortrose, so we stopped at the Fortrose café and restaurant.  The initial indications were not particularly hopeful; these were the fuel pumps.

They strenuously resisted all of our candidate credit cards, so we decided that we could just get a quick coffee and find fuel elsewhere. The café seemed pretty rustic inside, but the coffee was good and the lady serving us, hearing of our lack of refuelling success, offered an arrangement whereby she used her card to cajole petrol out of the pump and we paid her back in the café. Presumably not the first time she has done this for a punter, and excellent service to go with the great coffee (yes, and scones).

Both vehicle and inner persons refuelled, we carried on,

and it was clear that we had re-entered logging country.

The part of the south coast we were driving passed the southernmost point of the South Island, Slope Point, so obviously we had to call in there. It’s a slightly strange location, with very clear indications as to which direction the prevailing wind blows in (though the conditions for us were calm).

The actual southernmost point

is not reachable by car; one has to park up by a rather ritzy visitor info centre

and cutely decorated loo.

Thence it’s about 500 metres, past a nice view or two

to Slope Point itself, where there’s a navigation aid of some sort

presumably to keep ships off the rather prominent rocks there. This is the selfie spot. We don’t do selfies, but we had to acknowledge where we were, so this is our compromise.

We may be at the southernmost point of the South Island, but, at 46° 40′ 40″ it’s not that far south.  By comparison, leafy Surrey in the UK is 51° north of the equator, so we’re closer to the tropics here than we are at home.

Our next stop took us from one curio, the southernmost point, to another – Curio Bay. This is home to a petrified forest, something I’m sure I’ve never seen before, though Jane swears I have. This is what a petrified forest looks like from above.

I’m glad there was an info board to show us the main features, otherwise I might have dismissed this as being rather dull. But the info board allowed me to see that there were some tree trunks lying down

so I hope that helps make sense of the aerial view. Looking closely at these trunks, one can clearly see evidence of a wood grain, which is fascinating within a stone structure like this.

Scouting further, one can find tree stumps;

in fact the whole area is littered with them – they’re the knobbly bits sticking up from the base rock.

The forest is some 180 million years old, give or take a year or two. The now petrified logs and tree stumps, from ancient conifers closely related to modern kauri and Norfolk pine, were buried by ancient volcanic mud flows and gradually replaced by silica to produce the fossils now exposed by the sea. The actual area of this forest stretches all the way back to Slope Point. Known fossil forests of this age are very few throughout the world, and this is one of the most extensive and least disturbed of them. They’ve put up a visitor centre, café and gift shop, mind.

Onwards, then: next stop Niagara Falls.

No, really; the falls are called Niagara Falls, although,

in truth they’re not that impressive. According to an info board, they were given the name by a surveyor with a sense of humour, and good for him, I say. The river there is actually the site of a couple of whitebaiting platforms.

Until researching this phenomenon, I hadn’t realised that “Whitebait” means very different things in different countries. Whitebait in New Zealand means something entirely different from what we’re used to in the UK. In the United Kingdom today, whitebait principally refers to young sprats, most commonly herring. In New Zealand, it means the juveniles of five galaxiid species which live as adults in freshwater rivers and streams. Four of these five species have been classified by the Department of Conservation as endangered, so the fishing of them is carefully controlled.

I was amused to notice, as we left the Falls, that precautions had been taken to remind any visiting Americans, who might have been taken in by the name, to take care as they drove on.

From Niagara Falls, we went to Koropuku Falls. We weren’t sure what to expect, but set off on the forest track that would lead us to them.

The track, rather nicely laid using lengths of tree fern trunks to make it passable even though it was very damp, eventually led to

an end point where there were no waterfalls, so it was a pleasant enough bush walk, but nothing that would have pulse of an Icelander racing. In researching the falls for this post, I found an entry in atlasobscura.com which rhapsodises thus:

“The Catlins region has a bounty of breathtaking waterfalls, the best is arguably Koropuku Falls— a majestic waterfall with an enchanting bush walk.”

Hmmmm…not our experience.

If you read to the end of the post, it finishes by saying

“Like most smaller waterfalls, the density of the drop depends on recent rain activity.” Other sites also are breathless in their adoration: “a true hidden gem“, “a captivating waterfall” and so forth. So our timing was a bit off, I suppose.  Visit only after rainfall if you want to see the falls as pictured on these sites.

We had hoped to visit the Cathedral Caves on our drive today, but time was not on our side. The caves can only be accessed at lowish tide, and that was earlier in the day – we knew this because its website gives clear times for access each day. We also wondered how the access would be managed, given that tide times change each and every day, and were rather impressed to see that it is managed handraulically.

We moved on, therefore, towards the next Thing To See, through countryside which showed less and less evidence of logging activity.

We had a brief stop-off at a heritage railway tunnel, the world’s southernmost railway tunnel, which was an amusing diversion, but, frankly, photographically somewhat challenging. Photo Nerdery alert: the phone does a better job than the Nikon of giving an impression of the tunnel

Phone
Nikon

Using someone else’s phone as a torch helps

One can clearly see the construction of the tunnel, which was dug in the 1890s using only picks and shovels – that must have been back-breaking labour! – and built with stone and hand-made local bricks.

The penultimate stop on this very peripatetic route was at Nugget Point. It’s named after the Nugget Rocks, and there’s a lighthouse there to keep ships away from them.

It’s a windy road to get there

and a somewhat up-and-down walk from the car park to reach the Point itself.

The Nugget Rocks make an impressive sight

and I was struck by the rock mid-right in the photo above, which appears to have a hole in it.  And indeed it does – waves wash up and travel right through it.

One wonders how on earth that happened.

Our final stop was at Sod Cottage, near Clutha.

This is a heavily-restored heritage site. Originally built in 1862, it was used as a dwelling, store and bar, servicing the travellers making their way to central Otago, probably seeking to mine gold there. It was later used as a school room. It fell into disrepair and was saved from total ruin, starting in 1970, and restored to what we can see today. The walls are two feet (60cm) thick and made of moistened clay. The interior is not accessible, but one can squeeze in through the (unlocked) front door and peek in through the mesh guarding the interior, which is dressed in period furniture and accoutrements.

So it was 6pm when we arrived in Dunedin, having been on the road since 9am – an absorbing nine hours spent viewing a wide variety of different sights and crossing the Catlins.

We had just the one day in Dunedin and we used it well; much to tell in the next post!