Stars that Shine and Twinkle

You don't often see the Milky Way in England, too much light pollution, but in the NZ countryside the stars seem more and brighter.  Even on the edge of Russell you can see the Milky Way but I have poor visual/spacial awareness and am disconcerted by an upside down Orion.  Once you get him you have the Seven Sisters, Taurus, Sirius and Andromeda - but in NZ I don't.

Any way up, the Milky Way is a wonderful sight.  Hard to photograph so instead here's Henry Vaughan lines which almost do it justice:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;

We leave Russell the next day driving towards Dargaville through long stretches of agricultural (cattle) countryside and single street towns with old fashioned looking signs over shops very different from those in chic Russell.  One town, whose name I forget, advertises itself as having Hundertwasser Public Toilets.  I'm afraid we didn't stop to try them.  What the locals probably don't notice is that their shop signage makes an equally colourful picture.

The weather (day time temperature is rarely below 16°)  and the space, contribute to the presence of many makeshift homesteads scattered beside county roads.   A rainbow painted bus with a couple of sagging awnings can be a home,  a couple of containers with windows cut out or just a few straggling tents.  There are some small communities comprising little more than a collapsing wooden shack leaning against an old coach, with canvas draped over its edges along with a few sheets of rusty corrugated iron.  This would all be unimaginable in England though I suspect only because of the scarcity of land (and the weather).

Further south the land begins to resemble, to some degree, how the Lake District would look if the hills were allowed to spread themselves more generously across the land.  A hundred mile square Lakeland perhaps. Though similarities mask differences: the trees growing on the slopes are usually impenetrable bush which would require machetes and chain saws to cut through. Also you don't get many tree ferns in Cumbria.

In the midst of this we suddenly find ourselves next to Hokianga Harbour with it's beautiful blue water and vast sand dunes. 

The small boy in the picture just happened to be there - I didn't bribe him, honest!  Perhaps he is the dolphin boy; the hamlet where we stopped had, at one time, a friendly dolphin which formed a particularly close relationship with a local child. It seemed so significant that a statue was erected to commemorate the pair. Later the statue was moved from the roadside to a local museum and a replacement statue put by the road. Oddly the original child was a girl, the replacement statue shows a boy.  Make of that what you will.

Here is the big tree I mentioned earlier.  Kauri wood is massively protected - to see the tree you must first wipe your feet and then spray them  with disinfectant.  The picture doesn't show the scale of Tane Mahuta, it is wider than a bus, over 50 metres high and perhaps 2000 years old.

And then we stop at a new site.  Walking down the road we meet a woman picking blackberries. (remember it's autumn here).   When it gets dark we also scour the hedgerows, not for blackberries though: beneath a bridge, under damp ferns we find our own small Milky Way -several dozen glow worms shining brightly.

Not quite Vaughan's style but I'll echo W H Davies (with a bit of a bodge)

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stop and stare?
...
No time to see, .....
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.