Great Barrier in pictures #2 Another dear friend visited from Golden Bay! Robina was here for four days last week – not enough for a catch up!! One highlight was viewing the almost-complete “S.O.S. Save Our Seeds”, the newest doco in her Localising Food series. This multi-year project has been documenting community food projects all over New Zealand with the objective of empowering communities with information and inspiration to grow their own healthy, enriching local food cultures. Find out more at localisingfood.com. Watching S.O.S. we found out about a whole lot of individual, community and commercial initiatives to save seeds in New Zealand. I never heard of a community seed library, set up in a public place, that people add to and borrow from, and I’m going to investigate starting one here. Another highlight of the visit was Robina reading Entwined Realities, the book Ro wrote in the spring to share an unexpected scientific reality that has severely influenced humanity's past and present, and will continue to control and undermine human history unless people understand the situation and cooperate to seek and implement solutions. The three of us talked together for hours about the book's message, what can be done to reverse the destructive trends unfolding on Planet Earth, and how we can share the book online and in hard copy with as many people as possible. A review of it was published here: https://www.litterareport.com/story/Entwined_Realities-The_Epic_Tragedy_of_Neanderthal_and_Modern_Human The last day of Robina’s visit had to be the most perfect, benign day ever, anywhere! The Barrier in all its glory! Even the sea was especially exquisite. Robina even went swimming with us! On that day, she could fully sense, experience and feel why we want to live here. Here are Ro and Robina at our place, and the ferry leaving from Tryphena wharf, taking her back to Auckland in ideal conditions for the crossing. Last month our friends Johnno and Anna went on a mission for us, to Golden Bay to collect the rest of our stuff, which was in storage. When we moved here in March last year, we only brought what fit in the car plus some boxes we posted up. Johnno and Anna flew to Christchurch, rented a van and had a bit of a tour on the way up to Golden Bay. Anna had seen very little of South Island before. It seemed very strange that they were in Golden Bay but almost no one knew they were our emissaries or surrogates! The only friends of ours they met were Purple, and Ute and Rolf at Takaka Infusion! And here they are arriving back on Great Barrier. It’s not that we’ve been reunited with our stuff though! Johnno and Anna only brought it as far as Ashna in Turua, at the foot of the Coromandel, and he’s going to put it into a truck box on a trailer and get it onto the ferry – one of these days! Many messages ago I mentioned that we’re keeping track of everyone new we meet on GBI and that we’d met our hundredth person. Now we’ve gone over 200, a quarter of the population! The 200th was a beekeeper who came to our door to let us know she’d put two hives on vacant land over the road. We gave her a chocolate heart as well! It’ll be a long slog to 300, if we ever get there! We had a couple of olive trees in Golden Bay, but birds got all the olives! Though birds are a problem for fruit trees and vegies here too, for some reason they didn’t get most of the olives on the trees near us. I always wanted to learn how to cure olives. I had the notion that it’s complicated. It’s not! In fact, it’s very easy. We did them two ways – in brine and in salt. The only slow parts are checking each olive, because only sound ones should be used, and making a slit in each to let the salt in. Then you just cover them in brine (which you drain and replace in a few weeks) or in salt. The salted ones are much faster. We waited the required number of weeks and sampled them. BEAUTIFUL!!! We’re looking forward to enjoying the brined ones in a few months. Facebook. I never thought I’d do it – I had my reasons and reservations, but I put them aside and took my first steps into it. I’m very glad I did! I set up a page, sent out and received friend requests, gathered in a nice big group and then posted nothing! I feel uncomfortable about it for some reason. However! My news feed is an ongoing gift! Wow! It’s WONDERFUL to receive all the thoughts, photos, videos, links, and personal news from a whole lot of people I know and love. Every day, they just keep coming, almost literally minute by minute! Some evenings Ro and I sit and scroll through the day’s posts, reading, checking out some of the links and watching some of the videos. And when we get back to where we were the last time, we say, “Thanks, everyone!” It’s like everyone’s minds merge into one stream of info, ideas and feelings. Very cool!!! One reason I decided to get onto facebook is to get the word out about Ro’s book, really a long short story. I created a page for it and prepared some posts, but I haven’t started entering them yet. When the time comes, when I know enough about facebook to use it most effectively, I’m going to ask everyone to please Like the Entwined Realities page, so a whole lot of people can find out about it. His book, which is based on very recent research findings, aims to alert humans to the fundamental cause of the multiple disasters unfolding in our world and encourage all caring people to develop responses that can finally and permanently reverse the tragic loss of our potential and the natural abundance of our planet. All the fascinating, and instructive, research and a whole lot of related information will be posted bit by bit on the Entwined Realities facebook page. The current presidential election process in the United States vividly illustrates the situation: Trump and Clinton are examples of why society and the environment are so out of our control, while Bernie is 100 percent for the people and a future all humans can believe in. For those unfamiliar with this extraordinary man, here’s a photo of a typical rally with crowds of tens of thousands, which are all ignored in the mainstream media, and the tiniest of video clips of him speaking: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bernie-sanders-american-people-hillary-clinton-lesser-evils/story?id=39280278 You can watch entire rallies online, or read about his long career as a lone socialist mayor, member of the House of Representatives and now senator, to discover for yourself why he is so well loved and why so many people are passionate that he is the world’s best hope right now for a just and peaceful future. Unfortunately he’s had a difficult and unfair process to navigate, with all the powerful control systems working to suppress him. No matter where you are, we hope that you too have been Feeling the Bern!!!
Here's the link to a free download of Ro’s book, whose message is right now is being played out by the contrast between Bernie and Trump/Clinton: https://entwinedrealities.wordpress.com We hope you read it!! If you do, we’d love your feedback. It can be read in less than two hours. Hey, did you know that each raindrop in a rainbow reflects only one colour, depending on the angle between you, it and the sun? On to the Dropbox photos! Today I’m sharing a link to the rest of the photos that Paul and Mary took when they were here for three weeks in February. I hope you enjoyed the previous lot! The new photos are in a folder called “Great Barrier Island #2” at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0b7938tlodk2sm2/AADNp81gZsdC9CAQ1fqr4FU5a?dl=0 Here are the descriptions: * Medlands Beach (two folders) in many moods, though the sea was pretty much in one mood the whole time Paul and Mary were here. Easterly winds meant waves, not swells, and they were just small enough that we could all swim. Well, swimming’s not the problem, it’s getting in beyond the breaking waves and then back to shore past them again! The south end is the calmest, and that’s where Ro and I usually swim at Medlands. * Surf lesson: Hard to try surfing without swells, but Johnno, Mary and Paul seized the moment and gave it a go anyway! * Other bits: That “dream land” rolls down to Palmers Beach. * Plants & trees and * Sea & sky & beach These photos speak for themselves! * Te Ahumata More adventures of Paul and Mary! This walk/mountain bike track follows the flank of Te Ahumata from the Whangaparapara Road to Blind Bay road, so they rode it in a loop from where we live. A 30-minute spur trail leads to the summit. On the way home, down Blind Bay Road, is the one of the few large kauri left from all the felling and gum digging of the past. Many young kauri are regenerating all over the island. * Tryphena The road follows the coast along the southernmost settlements on the Barrier – Pah Beach, Gooseberry Flat, Mulberry Grove – and ends at the wharf at Shoal Bay, where the ferry arrives from Auckland two, three or four times a week, depending on the time of year. Off the main road, unsealed Rosalie Bay Road leads up and up to the Windy Hill nature sanctuary at the top, and Cape Barrier Road ends at a track to the southernmost point on the island, where the tip of the Coromandel Peninsula is just 19 km away. Another unsealed road winds around in the other direction to Puriri Bay and remote Schooner Bay. To put the west side of Great Barrier Island all together in very general terms!, if you follow the coast by boat around the large headland from Schooner Bay you get to Blind Bay, then around more large headlands to Whangaparapara Harbour, and finally around some extremely large headlands, more like a giant peninsula, to Port Fitzroy, and then to some smaller bays further north. * Whangaparapara: By car, follow a winding unsealed road to a small settlement near a tranquil and picturesque harbour. We’ve watched some amazing sunsets right out our windows!
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