The Fog

After our abortive effort to take a walk on Otago Peninsula a couple days ago, we decided to walk a bit closer to home- Tomahawk Beach. The clouds were still shrouding the peninsula, but the beach was so warm that we pealed off our jackets and shirts and walked in our T-shirts.

Tomahawk Beach is a 15 minute drive from our house, near a suburb that hasn't really caught on for development. When we arrived we saw only a couple groups of people on the entire stretch of sand. However, as we walked its length and explored the caves at either end, we saw children playing, people walking dogs, a couple of kids with body boards in the surf, and several groups of teenagers.
By the time we reach the other end of the beach, the clouds had detected our presence and started to flow over the hills toward us. We climbed the steep sand dunes at the far end of the beech and made our way back to the car through the sleepy little backwater suburb of Ocean Grove.

By this morning, the fog had found us and engulfed us in the same lack of visibility we had experienced when we tried to hike on the peninsula. The lovely ocean view out our kitchen window was replaced by tendrils of wispy cloud drifting past.

The view down our drive which normally showed the peninsula across the valley was a complete white-out. Still, it is a lovely day and it isn't raining - yet.

Otago Peninsula

We decided to expand our daily walk a bit and explore some of the many tracks on the Otago Peninsula. Here's a view of our house with the peninsula in the background. Beautiful sunny day with a few clouds over the peninsula. However, 15 minutes into the 30 minute drive to the Sandymount track, we had reached an elevation sufficient to make our ears pop and completely engulf us in the cloud cover.

I turned on my lights, slowed down, and Karen proceeded to become car sick as we made our way through the thick fog up the winding roads to the track. We passed only one car on the road there, but in true Kiwi tradition, once we reached our destination, we found a dozen cars in the parking lot.

The sign points to Lover's Leap, the Chasm, and the Lookout. The first two were down the gravel road and didn't look near as appealing as the track leading to the lookout. Karen, still nauseous from the drive, didn't hesitate to inform me of the fruitlessness of walking to a lookout point in the fog, but we started out anyway. The trail led up through a tangle of gorse, which is a thorny noxious weed introduced for hedges by the English, but which has taken over the countryside. Karen was in shorts, so we didn't go far before we'd gone far enough.

We turned around and made our way slowly back down. Karen was anxious about twisting one of her titanium knees and we lamented leaving our hiking poles in the boot of the car. Anyhow, we didn't get much of a walk, but on the way back passed one of nature's many testaments to the wind in the area. Sorry Kansas, I think we've got you beat in the wind department.

Arriving back home, I took a parting shot of the peninsula. It still looks like a nice day for a walk.