The wild west beckoned yesterday. Not America’s, but rather New Zealand’s.

I drove the width of the South Island from Golden Bay in the northeast to Westport in the east in about eight or nine hours. Most of the journey took me through a beautiful scene of verdant forest. Green was everywhere, not only in the trees but more grass that I ever saw before. The grass came right up to the road itself.

While beautiful, this scene doesn’t lend itself to spectacular photography. However, sunrise on Golden Bay and sunset at Tauranga Bay did.

Golden Bay in the Morning

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My campsite was literally a few feet from this scene. Had I been thinking about tsunamis I would have chosen a more protected place, but again I lucked out. And then I tramped this beach in search of shells and photographed a few where I found them, as my friend Karen suggested by email a couple of days ago.

I Kept This One

A Green Shell Mussel, the Likes of Which I Feasted On a Few Days Earlier

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At the end of the day I reached Westport, where I got a campsite, but immediately left to visit the seal colony about 10 miles south. While I didn’t get any photographs better than I had before, I did capture this shot of the bay where they raise their pups.

Tauranga Bay

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But the beauty of the bay is not what attracts the seals here to raise their pups. Normally they breed and raise them on offshore islands, but they found a site just to the right of this view that we can look down upon but can’t approach closely.

The people here have the reputation of being different too from other Kiwis. This coast has the same frontier spirit that we have had in the American West and which still strongly survives in Alaska. As a westerner myself, I resonate with it.