This post follows up my two earlier posts about the wild Catlins region of New Zealand. I went through in a campervan at the start of June 2021. I visit the waterfalls, and list freedom camping sites. Information about freedom camping sites can be a bit hard to come by, so I have made the effort to identify all five such sites in the Catlins. I also describe other camping spots, including beautiful Pūrākaunui Bay, my favourite.

THE Lake Marian Track has lately become very popular, although tourist numbers are down at present because of Covid (so, if in NZ already, you should go there!). The track begins from Marian Carpark, one kilometre down the unsealed Hollyford Road from its intersection with the Milford Road, some ninety kilometres out from Te Anau. It now has a wooden gantry only 20 minutes in, from which you can admire the Marian Falls, which are really more like rapids. Even if you don’t do the rest of the track, you can still walk to the gantry . . . All in all, this is one of the best little short trips that you can do from the road in New Zealand! Indeed, the travel writer GirlEatWorld has described Lake Marian as “my favorite experience in New Zealand so far.”

This post takes a closer look at the New Zealand state’s longstanding historical unwillingness to make plans for Auckland’s growth.

A COUPLE of weeks ago we blogged about “the paradox of retrenchment in the face of growth.” We wrote about how it was practically an orthodoxy some forty years ago that the populations of Auckland, and of a New Zealand of little more than three million, were not going to get much larger. And how, for that reason, the government could give up on planning for the next million the way it had previously done.

And how, strangely enough, even now that we have twice as many Aucklanders and 5.1 million New Zealanders within our shores, and a huge catch-up required, investment to deal with past and future growth is actually being cut back by the Auckland Council.

In this post we’re going to dive a little deeper into the specifics of why New Zealand seems to have such a problem with planning for the growth of Auckland, its largest city, in particular.

(Note: some quotes appear as direct images of old book pages, and thus don't come out in the podcast.)

Featured image credit: The Auckland Multi-Linear Scheme as presented to the Auckland Rapid Rail Symposium, 1969, by the then chief planner of the Auckland Regional Authority, Frederick W. O. Jones. Cropped square for this episode as per the requirements of Anchor.fm.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/thinking-small-how-new-zealand-failed-auckland

A report from the front lines of the invisible war in New Zealand, a comparison with Mediaeval social distancing practices, and a visit to a secret oasis in the hills above Queenstown where you can still take your exercise and admire the views!

This is the Introduction to my ninth book of travel memoirs, 'The Scottish Isles: Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides (Part 1)', which you can buy as an audiobook with PDF images on Gumroad, or also as a Kindle or paperback on Amazon.

Will Queenstown revert to the animals? That's the question my editor sets out to investigate as the mountain resort town enters the second night of a four-week lockdown, with bewildered ducks wondering who will feed them, timid wild cormorants getting bolder and a little sparrow staking a claim to a streetlight!

In this post, I travel north from Oamaru to the similarly-named town of Timaru, stopping off at Waimate. If Oamaru is the 'whitestone city', Oamaru is bluestone (meaning basalt) and granite, courtesy of a nearby volcano named Mt Horrible. Perhaps the most remarkable attraction is the Te Ana Rock Art Centre, which showcases Māori cave drawings of the utmost amazingness!

Brisbane is Australia's third largest city. It's the hub of Queensland culture, offering glimpses of the past and of the future.

My fourth blog post on the Chathams. From Waitangi I headed north again, toward freaky lonesome volcanoes and wandering cattle. And then down south and around, through Kōpinga Marae and listening to a lecture at Kaingaroa, marvelling at the landscape all the way.

In this post, I visit the museum in the council chamber at Waitangi on the Chathams, and talk some more about the islands' fascinating history, with pictures. Who is that man in the photo? Listen on!

This is my second post about the Chathams. I posted it a day after hearing that the New Zealand Government had done a deal to recognise Moriori claims. I visit the grave of Tame Horomana Rehe or Tommy Solomon, the 'last' Moriori who wasn't the last, and talk about the fascinating landscape of the islands.

New Zealand has a North Island and a South Island, but did you know that there's an east island as well? More precisely, an archipelago called the Chathams. I flew there in January 2020 and went exploring. It turns out that this place is far more historically important than people realise! (The first of four posts.)

This is a post about Oamaru, an amazingly historic town in northern Otago, New Zealand. It's the home of the famous writer Janet Frame, and a town that's obvously had a lot of community investment over the years.

Auckland Council, New Zealand’s so-called Super City administration, has become known for at least four areas of failure in a decade. Why?

It’s time to question the approach of chief executives such as Jim Stabback and his predecessor Stephen Town, and their sub-chiefs in Auckland Transport, Ports of Auckland and Watercare, which all too often focuses on short-term savings and cuts.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of individuals. It’s also due to the wider incentive-culture of the public service today, which focuses on savings.

It’s also due to an older and more chronic weakness of New Zealand local government, in that those who want to put a stop to expenditure are always vocal in ratepayer circles.

Featured image credit: Auckland Light Rail, official image via Greater Auckland (2018). Crown copyright reserved.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/auckland-council-making-itself-redundant-paradox-retrenchment-in-face-of-growth

The Pigroot, which I've also blogged about, runs south of a great wilderness. To the north, there is another scenic drive, which runs through the the Lindis Pass and the towns of Cromwell, Ōmārama, Otematata, Kurow and Duntroon. This is about that road trip!

Adelaide is famous for its parklands, but Dunedin should be too. In this post I explore the city's town belt, the great belt of parklands that encompasses its downtown area. I visit historic Olveston House, in the town belt. And I also climb to the top of Mount Cargill (north of Dunedin) for a view over the city.

I continue my journey from the Pigroot down into Dunedin, visiting the oldest surviving farm in New Zealand and a bizarre warrior museum when I finally hit town.

In this post I describe spring travel along the 'Pigroot' road from Queenstown toward Dunedin. I stop in at the historic townships of St Bathans, Wedderburn and Naseby. In the next post I'll complete my journey, travelling south along the coast.

Timaru, New Zealand, used to be a Railway Junction. Why can’t main line passenger rail services be restored in the age of climate change?

This is the second chapter of my book Iran: Make Love not War – Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll on the Silk Road.  It describes where I went in Iran, and is a good overview of the book, which can be purchased as a Kindle or Paperback on Amazon (ASIN i.e.shopcode: B07W4W7FXR) and as an audiobook on Gumroad, at https://gum.co/dyrAC. The book has 283 images, viewable in colour for free on bit.ly/IranMLNWFlipbook.

This is the Introduction to my book A Maverick Cuban Way, first published in 2017. You can listen to it for free. 

The whole audiobook is for sale on Gumroad for US $9.99 at https://gumroad.com/l/Ouhrj. 

You can also see the photos in the book, 247 images in total, on this widget: bit.ly/MavCubanWayFlipbook. 

A Maverick Cuban Way is also for sale on your local Amazon website as a paperback and a Kindle.

In this podcast, based on a November 2019 blog post, I talk about the artistic and scholarly culture of Persia and its contribution to the survival of Persia, or Iran, as a nation over many centuries. Surprisingly enough, carpet weaving seems to have played an important part!

In this podcast, based on a November 2019 blog post, I travel to Raukkan in South Australia to pay my respects to the memory of David Unaipon, the polymath who appears on Australia's $50 bill.  I also talk about David Unaipon's life and achievements, against the odds, in an early-twentieth-century Australia where the lives of aboriginals such as Unaipon were often strictly controlled.

Adelaide, South Australia, is a very charming city. But sometimes you want to get out into the country. In this podcast, of a blog post I put up in November 2019, I go to the German-Australian town of Hahndorf, and then to the Warrawong Wildlife Sanctuary, to the Fleurieu Peninsula, and to the seaside towns of Port Elliot and nearby Victor Harbour

It was my amazing luck to hike the Banks Track at the end of January, 2021. It’s on the ‘wild side’ of the rocky, volcanic Banks Peninsula.

Billed on its website as New Zealand’s “original private walking track,” the Banks Track invites you to spend three nights on the remote south-eastern tip of Te Horomaka or Banks Peninsula, also known in Māori as Te Pātaka o Rakaihautū.‍

In spite of its proximity to a big city and the smaller, touristy town of Akaroa, the area through which the Banks Track runs is an incredibly wild one, especially once you get over the top of a ridge overlooking Akaroa Harbour and onto the slope that faces out to the Pacific Ocean: the Wildside, where penguins and seals abound.‍

The track, which won a Travelers Choice award from Tripadvisor in 2020, loops between Akaroa and the still smaller village of Ōnuku by way of a section of oceanic cliff-coast in the middle.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/walk-wildside-new-zealands-banks-track-near-christchurch-yet-remote

This podcast combines the fourth and fifth of my posts about travel in New Zealand in springtime. I visit Doubtful Sound / Pātea in south-west New Zealand on the 19th and 20th of September, 2019, taking an overnight boat trip and describing the things I see and do along the way. An overnight boat trip is a really good way to see the fiords of south-west New Zealand, as the weather is often changeable . The blog post is dated 22 December 2019 in the audio; part two, which I added to the first post to complete the podcast as part two is shorter, came out on the 29th. 

This is a further podcast in my Iranian series. It concerns the way that Persia, or Iran, has often suffered a form of cultural condescension at the hands of the West, for instance in the relative virtues of the Spartans and the Persians in the '300' films. Iran has also been invaded and occupied many times by outside powers, most recently in the course of World War II: a little-known episode which set the scene for the Battle of Stalingrad. The prickly attitudes of the present-day Islamic Republic can partly be traced to these humiliations. The series is also posted, with images, on my blog at a-maverick.com, and on Medium.

In this podcast, I talk about the serious global problem of phytophthora species being spread from one country to another. Phytophthora is a Greek word meaning 'Destroyer of Plants'. It refers to a kind of fungus or blight organism that thrives in damp soil. There are many species of phytophthora and when a new species is introduced, it is often devastating to the local plant community. Local phytophthora can also wipe out imported plants. The Irish potato blight, which caused a famine in the 1840s, was the result of a species of phytophthora. In this podcast, based on a blog post on my website, I talk about the destruction of native eucalyptus trees in Australia and native kauri trees in New Zealand, by what are probably introduced species of phytophthora brought in on things like muddy boots and imported plants in the days when biosecurity wasn't as strict. Other native species in Australia and New Zealand are affected as well.

This post is one of a series that I'm putting out this southern summer, 2019/2020, about the pleasures of travelling off the beaten track in New Zealand. Off the beaten track in terms of place, and time of year. For it's about a trip I made in spring, when when the weather's improving but there aren't many tourists about, to a place called Wanaka, on Lake Wanaka north of Queenstown. Among other things, Wanaka's the site of an oft-photographed willow, #ThatWanakaTree. So maybe it's not that far off the beaten track after all! But still, it's interesting to visit in the off season and to take some side trips to the alpine Matukituki Valley (which IS off the beaten track) and to the Snow Farm cross-country ski facility, which still has some snow to farm at that time of year.

A post about spring travel in New Zealand, when things aren't busy but the weather's mostly fine. I stay at a funky holiday camp with a lot of history and talk about local hiking treks.

New Zealand is a young country, but a country with a lot of history all the same. This includes the amazing lake steamer, the TSS Earnslaw, launched in 1912 and still going strong under steam power. This podcast is based on a blog post of the same title, on my website, which includes photos and videos.

I talk about how Adelaide is a supremely walkable city, ‘Designed for Life’, thanks to a farsighted early plan. I walk around the downtown and visit the old gaol, and talk about threats to Adelaide's livability as a result of road construction and loss of heritage buildings.

It had been really hot at Alamut, and the mountains semi-arid. So we went through green forests to the shores of the Caspian Sea, the strange inland ocean of central Asia, where people from Tehran go for their holidays.

Perhaps you've heard of the 'Old Man of the Mountain'? Hassan-i Sabbah was the real-life inspiration for the game Assassin's Creed. I visit his stronghold in the Alamut Valley, part of a historically rebellious and frontier-like part of Iran northwest of Tehran.

This podcast is based on the first of a series of blog posts on Adelaide (the capital of South Australia) and the region nearby. Adelaide is a spectacularly attractive city with massive inner city parklands, though many historic buildings are at risk. The region nearby is where nearly everyone in South Australia who isn't actually from Adelaide lives. It includes the aborignal community of Raukkan, historic settler towns and numerous nature parks.

AFTER my month on Rakiura/Stewart Island, I left for Whenua Hou, also known as Codfish Island, to work on track maintenance. Even in normal times, to stay on the island you have to go through quarantine, which I did in Invercargill. During the process, they checked for foreign grasses in my gear,so I had made sure to purchase new socks and wash down my pack and wet weather gear.‍

During the breeding season of the kākāpō, a rare flightless parrot that is active at night and sleeps by day, the rangers frequent the wooden walkways on the island for about two months, travelling between nests and monitoring the birds. Once they are nesting, volunteers camp outside the burrows and monitor the comings and goings of the parent. There are cameras placed in every nest to monitor the incubation period.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/whenua-hou-codfish-island-few-kakapo-left

In this post, I visit the ski resorts of Perisher and Thredbo in the Snowy Mountains area of the Australian Alps. The area's quite famous and historic (as in 'The Man from Snowy River') and the skifields are huge. I give out some practical tips about where to stay and how to save money by booking ahead, and share heaps of photos and videos and stories gleaned by talking to local people.

In this episode, I cross the border into Iran and travel to Tabriz, then on to the Alamut Valley. The first thing I see at the border is people smuggling cigarettes! In a small town on the border, I get told with a throat-slitting gesture that I must wear a hijab in Iran or be killed. This advice was overly dramatic for places like Tehran, which are fairly cosmopolitan (though you'd still get in trouble with the morality police). But it might have been true locally and I certainly wasn't going to offend anyone. Leaving the wild frontier with its smugglers and dire warnings behind, I had planned to head toward the Caspian Sea shore and see some old castles there, then travel along the beautiful, green shore of this inland sea to the Alamut Valley, stronghold of a legendary Mediaeval guild of assassins founded by Hassan-i Sabbah ('The Old Man of the Mountain'). But the roads in the north were too bad. Instead, we travelled along the main highway leading to Tehran, a road lined with pictures of people killed in wars defending Iran's Islamic Revolution: war dead who the Iranians called martyrs. The pictures were decorated with red tulips, which are the Iranian equivalent of the Flanders poppy.

In this episode, I cross the border from Turkey into Iran and talk about some of the practicalities of getting there, including visa issues and changing money.

This podcast is based on the first of a series of blog posts I'm putting up about a trip I made to Iran, in the Autumn of 2018. I describe where I went in the country and some of the issues it faces. I crossed overland from Turkey, and made my way to Tabriz, and from there to the Alamut Valley, the home of a famous guild of Mediaeval assassins, who took on the oppressors of the poor. From there I travelled to Tehran, with a side trip to the resort town of Chalus, on the Caspian Sea. Then I went on to Isfahan, a famous planned city; and then Shiraz, home of poets and (before the Islamic Revolution) of Iran's wine-makers as well. The Shiraz area is also where Iran's ancient capital of Persepolis and the associated tomb-complexes of Naqsh-e Rostam and Pasagardae are found. And from there, to the famous, Star Wars-like desert city of Yazd, with its wind-catcher towers that drag air through people's houses in a natural form of air conditioning, and its Zoraostrian 'towers of silence', where the dead were laid out for vultures. I talk about Iran's problems with drought and various forms of oppression and enmity, and its amazing ancient culture that comes through in spite of all that.

 This is an experimental upload of the first half of an audiobook of A Maverick Traveller, prepared using Animaker and Amazon Polly. A Maverick Traveller is the first of Mary Jane Walker's travel memoirs, first published in 2017 and since updated The Kindle and print versions contain 93 images and you can go to the sales link here. This audiobook episode follows on from Part 1, beginning at Chapter 25, 'Dictators and Dracula''. See also Mary Jane's website and blog. 

This is an experimental upload of the first half of an audiobook of A Maverick Traveller, prepared using Animaker and Amazon Polly. A Maverick Traveller is the first of Mary Jane Walker's travel memoirs, first published in 2017 and since updated. The Kindle and print versions contain 93 images and you can go to the sales link here. The audiobook ends at the end of Chapter 24 'All Roads Lead Around Rome' and the second half begins at the start of Chapter 25, 'Dictators and Dracula'. See also Mary Jane's website and blog.

The world's largest ecological reserve behind a pest-proof fence lies south-east of Cambridge, New Zealand, close to Hobbiton and the Waitomo glow-worm caves. It's the Maungatautari Reserve, also known as Sanctuary Mountain. All kinds of ancient and endangered species now have a chance to thrive on this island in the sky, rising up above the intensively-farmed plains of the Waikato. I went for a ramble on the mountain with the Auckland meetup group, Feet First.

THE small size of Oban belies its importance as Stewart Island’s only town and the entranceway to the North West Circuit Track where I was to be spending a few weeks volunteering as a hut warden, and also to the much shorter Rakiura Track, the southernmost of New Zealand’s official Great Walks.

The Māori name for Stewart Island is Rakiura, which means ‘blushing [or glowing] skies’ and is far more poetic in my view. It seems to be a reference to long twilights in these subantarctic latitudes, the aurora australis which can sometimes be seen from here, or both.

After catching a ferry over from Invercargill, I met Phil Brooks, the DOC manager in charge of volunteers. He took me through the safety checks, taught me how to operate the radio and detailed what was expected of me while at the Port William Hut, which I was to take charge of.

Oban is in a bay called Halfmoon Bay, just north of a much larger inlet called Paterson Inlet or Whaka a te Wera. The star of the inlet is Ulva Island or Te Wharawhara, an island that has never been milled and is free of predators, including rats. Ulva/Te Wharawhara is therefore a little piece of New Zealand as it used to be, or as near as is possible today, and is served by regular ferries as it is an open sanctuary, with walking trails. The island is quite sizable, more than three and a half kilometres long, so there is plenty to see.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/isle-blushing-skies-rakiura-stewart-island-north-west-circuit-track

Christchurch, New Zealand, has some amazing Lord of the Rings country to its north & west. You don’t have to go far from town to get there!

Looking at just one of these areas, the Hakatere Conservation Park, it's close to Erewhon, the setting of the English writer Samuel Butler’s fictional utopia Erewhon,but also an actual place.

This district includes an isolated hill with sweeping views called Mount Sunday, so-called because riders from several areas would meet up there each Sunday to swap news. Mount Sunday is otherwise best known as the site of Edoras in the Lord of the Rings movies. They say that this is one of the most remote Lord of the Rings sites that you can easily get to, and the whole area is Lord of the Rings country, really.

The Te Araroa Trail runs through here, and from Lake Clearwater you can venture along a section of the trail. And also do the Mystery Lake track, which runs along the edge of the stunning ravine of the Potts River for part of the way, and then via the Mystery Lake Link Track to the Potts Hut Track, which leads in one direction to the Boundary Creek Hut, and in another to the Potts Hut on Mount Potts.

In earlier times, a part of this area was also a major Māori food-gathering area, called Ō Tū Wharekai, (or alternately, in English, the Ashburton Lakes). The Māori name builds on the word for banquet hall or dining room (wharekai). The area is also one through which people used to travel on the way to gather pounamu or New Zealand jade on the West Coast, stocking up on food as they did so.‍

Original blog post: maverick.com/blog/the-foothills-of-the-alps

Banks Peninsula (near Christchurch NZ) is an eroded volcano with several harbours, historic ports, wildlife, and lots of hiking trails.

In its topography it resembles one of the Hawai‘ian islands, though naturally somewhat colder and bleaker. The biggest harbours on the peninsula are Lyttelton Harbour just south of Christchurch and Akaroa Harbour further east, on the south side.

The peninsula has two Māori names, Horomaka (‘foiling of Maka’), a name that refers to events during an ancient punitive raid, and Te Pātaka o Rakaihautū, meaning the storehouse of a famous Māori explorer of the newly occupied land of New Zealand, Rakaihautū.

Legends also have it, variously, that the peninsula was scraped up from a reef, or that the demigod Māui heaped stones over an evil giant or octopus that now sleeps beneath and occasionally cracks the land open when it stirs, a story that’s a little too close for comfort in view of the recent Christchurch earthquakes.

Over a long period of time the plains of Canterbury have grown outward toward the peninsula so that it is now no longer an island, just as debris from the mountains has also done at Kaikōura, another former island.

The Port Hills are full of parks and reserves, scenic drives in the form of the Summit Road and Mount Pleasant Road, and rock-climbing cliffs. They yield stunning views of the city and its port of Lyttelton, and there is even a scenic gondola. There are also various windswept hikes that you can do on the tussocky tops. Altogether, like many New Zealand cities, Christchurch is really blessed with nearby nature.‍

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/banks-peninsula-port-hills-christchurch

BETWEEN Blenheim and Nelson, there is a ruggedly beautiful area that extends from the Marlborough Sounds in the north-east to Nelson Lakes National Park, in the southwest, via the Richmond Range. To the west, and south, of this great triangular block of mountains there are the river flats and plains of Nelson and, on the Blenheim side, the Wairau valley.

Ironically, though Nelson and Blenheim are not far apart, the Richmond Range is a formidable barrier, as is its seaward continuation in the form of the Marlborough Sounds, a collection of drowned river valleys to the north of Picton. The Marlborough Sounds were once above sea level in their entirety but were invaded by the sea at the end of the last ice-age, with.the result that a series of sharp ridges and sharp-edged islands now poke up above the water.

One of the most special places you might wish to visit, on the coast near Blenheim, is the Wairau Bar, also known as the boulder bank or Pokohiwi, an 11 kilometre-long spit with a long history of human habitation.

Original blog post: maverick.com/blog/between-blenheim-nelson

NELSON is a lovely, leafy city at the top end of the South Island of New Zealand. It has a sunny climate, lots of old buildings both in wood and stone, and a frankly amazing abundance of hiking trails in the hills that overlook the town.‍

The locality on which Nelson was established is known in Māori as Wakatu or Whakatū: names that look and sound similar but don’t mean the same thing. All the same, Wakatu or Whakatū is routinely used as the Māori name for the modern city of Nelson. Lots of buildings and institutions in Nelson bear a version of this name.

Nelson was the first New Zealand settlement to be designated a city, as far back as 1859.

One thing you notice in this part of the country is that there are a lot of large, stately-looking trees even in areas that are not actually parkland. Trees that were deliberately planted a long time ago (if introduced), or that generations of otherwise axe-wielding colonists refrained from chopping down (if native), do now lend the the northern end of the South Island a special charm, both in town and in farming districts alike.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/nelson-town-history-trees

With an abundance of gothic stone architecture and a large pedestrian area, Christchurch, New Zealand, is like a quaint old city in Europe.

Indeed, I never get sick of visiting the thriving metropolis of Christchurch, or Ōtautahi, which is in fact now the largest city in the South Island, its current population about 420,000 overall. Much of its heritage has, thankfully, survived the earthquakes of a decade ago.

The river that runs through the city, named the Avon by the colonists, not after Shakespeare’s Avon but a river of the same name in Scotland, also bears the Māori name of Ōtākaro. The Māori name means ‘of games’, because children always traditionally played alongside it while adults gathered food such as flounder, eels, ducks, whitebait and freshwater fish from the river, its swampy surroundings and its estuary, which it shares with another small river called the Ōpāwaho, or Heathcote.

To continue, Christchurch has strong Antarctic traditions. The New Zealand, American and Italian Antarctic programmes are all based in Christchurch. The unique working museum known as the International Antarctic Centre, beside Christchurch International Airport, is definitely worth a visit.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/christchurch-gateway-antarctica-heritage-recovering-crises

The Taranaki (NZ) Around the Mountain Circuit turned into an epic for me!

I only got halfway before falling into a ravine on the way north and injuring myself, so the northern side will have to be written up some other time. But meanwhile, here are some thoughts on doing the southern side. Which is what you miss out if, like a lot of people, you only tramp around the northern side of the mountain, handy to New Plymouth, where the popular Pouakai Track and (Northern) Summit Route are located.

I decided to go up to Syme Hut, next to Fanthams Peak/Panitahi, which you can see on the left of the featured image. Then I hiked through all kinds of wonderful terrain, before getting lost on poorly signposted and maintained track and injuring myself, and needing to be helicoptered out.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/around-mount-taranaki