For our Canadian fans, this time an item in English.

With a name like that it has to be good, and it is. Golden Bay in the northwest of the South Island, has a coastline of ninety kilometers consisting of white sandy beaches, tidal inlets, rocky outcrops of granite and limestone and a huge sand spit, appropriately named “Farewell Spit”, trailing off into the wide Tasman Sea. It’s our playground for the next month or so, lucky us. Now natural beauty is abundant in New Zealand, but this place has something special which I would define as: ‘highly liveable’. The climate is, as far as I can tell, unusually pleasant: warm with a light sea breeze, the light very bright even by New Zealand standards. Numerous lime, lemon, orange and grapefruit trees in the village we live in are testimony to this assumption.
The people living here have mellowed out along with the weather. Main street is lined with funky coffee shops and art galleries and many people bicycle along it instead of using their cars. There are yoga- and meditation classes and there’s a movie-theatre and a good local FM radio station like way back when. (Do they still have those radiostations in Canada?). Many bars have live music in the weekends.

Yesterday we drove out to Farewell Spit and walked for about three hours along the inside and outside beaches. The spit is a curve made of sand, about 27 kilometers long and maybe 1 kilometer wide narrowing towards its tip. The inside area is very tidal and as it was low tide, there were thousands of birds feeding. We saw many black swans, a white-faced heron, gulls, terns, godwits, and dotterels. In the distance you could see the mountains of the Abel Tasman Park. On the outer beach, on the way back it was stark, no vegetation only shifting sands and an endless ocean.

Later on, we had home brewed manuka beer in a pub full of friendly people.