Early in the morning, we packed up and made our way to the beach, on the west coast of New Zealand’s south island. 

Before travelling onto Nelson:

We needed to have breakfast. So first, we bought some food in town and then drove out to the nearest beach. For your information, Carter Beach is along the coast of Westport’s Buller bay.

As we looked around, everything looked calm and peaceful with the early sun straggling through misty-wispy clouds.  

After parking our cars in the allocated dune area, I first took a photo looking back the way we had come. And then another photo, walking through the dune grass and patchy undergrowth, we come onto the beach itself.

On the beach:

On New Zealand’s beach, you’ll probably find dry tree trunks and branches washed ashore. And you may find some were gather by the Moari and stacked with one pointer out. Apparently they are set a religious formation. 

On this beach there were only a few scattered here and there. So we chose some lovely big ones to sit on, to have our breakfast! I think we ate fish and chips, if I remember rightly in unprinted newspaper. And New Zealand’s fish and chips… are the best! 

We sat there on our logs and jovially teased one another playfully, as we ate, ever mindful of our beautiful surroundings and the sea softly rolling in. 

We had thought we were the only people there. But after a while we noticed some caravan vehicles silently parked just off the beach behind a dune ridge. No one was moving around there. 

That somehow reminded me that I wanted to get some photos of the dunes.  

Capturing the dune scenes:

So I wondered off on my own, while the others were still on the beach. 

There was a time when beach and dune scenes were popular. And I wanted to have a chance at painting one of those. Not only that I hoped I could get some photos of the flora and fauna to be found surviving in dunes conditions.

See the oil painting I did of the dunes:

 

When I saw this scene I promised myself I would paint it. 

My impressions:

What caught my eye was the abstract strength of the bold lines of the dark horizontal lines contrasting with the white of the sand in the foreground and the misty blue background. 

But if you look at this composition, you begin to feel there is a need for one or two birds flying above the dark area in the empty vast blue misty area! 

I would have put birds in it, if it had been imagined make-up scene. But in this case, I wanted the scene to be authentic of the rural area. And I don’t know of any birds that fly that high in that region! So I didn’t paint any birds in. 

Meanwhile:

While I was wondering around taking photos of the dunes, my husband was looking for new birds with his binoculars. 

Family had given him a book on New Zealand birds and all the time we were in New Zealand he had been writing up how many birds he had found in New Zealand. 

So unknown to me, our son was taking photos of a bird my husband had seen. This is the bird they saw together in the dunes. 

It’s a Western Weka, known as rails and swamp hens, as Rallidae. But it’s a flightless bird, so I couldn’t put it in my oil painting as flying, could I !! 

In my next New Zealand travel blog: 

Before we left, we visited another beach along the Buller Bay coast. And then on our way to Nelson and what we found and did there…