I just found this place so impressive.

To be fair I think all the guests had just left but the bloody photographer was keeping the lovely couple out in the cold. That’s until some pesky tourist started jumping around taking pictures and ruining the whole thing.

Good old New Zealand sheep farming. New Zealand has around 40 million sheep – 10 for every person – and apparently is the worlds largest exporter of sheep meat and cross bread wool. Although this has recently been overtaken by diary produce as the countries most important agricultural industry and money maker.

For me much of the countryside I’ve seen looks shorn, it looks like there’s something missing. Europeans only really started settling in New Zealand after 1840 and in a short space of time the remaining bush and forest was cleared and logged, making way for agricultural land. Unfortunately New Zealand had (and still has in small pockets) one of the world’s most unique natural habitats. As one of the earliest land masses to break away from the other continents its fauna was largely pre-mammalian. Instead of mammals and marsupials, birds and insects took their place and evolved in very unique ways to fill all of the different niches in the ecosystem. The flora is also unique having again evolved in isolation, and contains very ancient species such as the Kauri tree which can live for over a 1,000 years and grows to huge proportions. Human contact, first Polynesian and then European, destroyed most of this through the clearing, burning and logging of forests, hunting and the introduction of animals such as rats, stouts, weasels and possums that decimated the indigenous animal and plant life.

Although at least now it feels a bit more like home.

Coming as a tourist and traveling as a tourist in New Zealand I feel like I’ve been bombarded with images of the country’s beauty. Beautiful landscape photography. However I’m sure that’s not the experience the majority of New Zealanders have of their land, and while I’m sure those places exist its not what I’ve been experiencing for the majority of the time either. Both in what I see and in what I hear about the history and meaning of the landscape. Not that the country is a mess its just the living landscape is normally a bit more messy than those photographs and the life and history of it are not so harmonic.

Anyway here’s a place I found interesting. It could be any old lake in the mountains but then you notice there’s a huge slice missing.