Sunday weather reprieve...

I am at my not-so-favourite café Zumo, but which is in a good position next to Commonsense Organics where I am buying some healthy stuff later. Their coffee is not always to my taste but the Sunday papers are there to read and there is a (fake) fire glowing to pretend to keep the customers warm.

The day is sunny and gorgeous and afterwards I decide to drive to the top of Mt Victoria where the views are magnificent across the Cook Staits and over the city of Wellington nestling on the bay.

How Kiwi parents prepare their kids for an adventurous future....

The Zumo fake fire....

A sad statistic in this rugged country, of lives lost and sometimes bodies never found....

More sucides happening than recorded ... they say it is getting to be more than serious as the young people take up the 'fashion' of ending their lives when they will.

Here is a weathered writer from South Otago feeling the need to be separate from the north...it is much like Scotland wanting freedom from 'tyrannical' England in the long-distant past (but also, ironically, today).

Below, on Mt Vic the meteorological map...

Next stop, the Antarctic!

Bella looking beautiful atop the mountain....

The view from Mt Vic facing towards the south island...

...and I am joined by some workers who are having a smoko at the top the mountain, music blaring and with several  bottles of Tui lubricating their senses. They are celebrating, like me, the wonderful weather after some awful wet windy days this week. 

 I decide on the spur of the moment to ring T and R in Melbourne as it was here we went on their visit last year. Miraculously Ronald answers the phone and he says they are both in good form, regretting missing me in Melbourne on my last visit 'due to lack of adequate warning' he says. I must say I did give them a short time-frame to work in with and they are always very busy, both of them.

So I leave them in the happy state of their memories of me in my eyrie in Wellington Heights, but from which I will be flying on in the space of six months from now. In the meantime I must make the most of this beautiful city.