pohanginapete

22 March 2026

Enrico's coincidences

Over a decade ago I sat on the verandah of the top storey of the Tiger Eye Guest House in Manali, listening to an Italian man explain the way the world really works. At the time, I couldn’t work out whether Enrico was a genius or seriously unhinged from reality but he was impossible not to like and I count the time I spent with him, relaxing on the verandah with a beer and a plate of veg momos, among the highlights of my time in India. One thing he said in particular has stayed with me.

“There are no coincidences,’ he insisted. “They’re against the laws of physics.”

Whether he was right or not, I’ve often wondered about that claim. Most recently, on an overnight walk to Iron Gate hut in the headwaters of the Oroua River in the Ruahine, two things happened that might be considered coincidental. The first occurred as I was about to leave the car and start walking. I’d been relishing the fact that mine was the only vehicle at the carpark, meaning I’d have the whole valley — and, most importantly, the hut — to myself, when a ute roared up and stopped nearby. A short, lively man jumped out of the driver’s seat and started talking. He and his wife and son had driven from near Wellington. Barry used to work for the New Zealand Forest Service decades ago and the conversation soon got around to photography. He’d known John Johns, the legendary NZFS wildlife photographer who, Barry claimed, worked exclusively in black-and-white. Perhaps that’s not surprising in that era but — here’s the coincidence — I was struck by the fact Barry mentioned it without knowing I’d recently been thinking hard about B&W photography.

The second coincidence happened as I walked out from Iron Gate hut the following day. Some time after leaving, I was thinking how I hadn’t seen or even heard a whio and how this would be the first time in many trips that I’d missed out on the delight of meeting these beautiful birds. I tried to be philosophical rather than disappointed but I’d become so used to great encounters with whio on my trips over the last several years that not seeing one left me eager to do another trip where I’d have a better chance of seeing them. The thought lingered but eventually other things distracted me. Just before the descent to Tunupo Creek I took a short diversion to look out over the deep valley from the top of a big, savagely eroded slip. I stood a metre back from the undercut lip, enjoying the sense of height, the sound of the river far below, the steep beech-forested mountainsides. A tiny bright spot at the edge of the water caught my eye and despite the distance I knew this wasn’t just another boulder. I saw it move slightly. A shag, perhaps? It moved again, and this time I was sure — I was looking at the bright bill of a whio. I started to unpack the camera and big lens for a closer inspection, and as I opened the pack I heard the whistle. The bird in the river was a male whio. I photographed it for the record and was about to pack the camera away when I saw something else moving. Checking through the lens, I saw another whio trundling across the boulders towards the male. The two birds swam a little way downstream and as I photographed and recorded a short video I thought how I’d had my meeting after all, from an unlikely place, almost at the last possible moment of the trip, and not long after I’d been thinking all opportunities had gone.

Coincidence? Probably, but Enrico would have disagreed, and I suspect he'd have been right.

River-bed boulder

turning into a whio
as the dawn light grows

Notes:
1. I'm working on a related post about black-and-white photography. Now, though, I'm about to leave for another three days in the Ruahine.
2. Those last three lines might look like a haiku but using that term is fraught as well as potentially a form of appropriation. I prefer to think of 'haiku' written in English as 'inspired by' haiku — as 'haiku-like things' (HLT) 🙂Besides, the obsession with form (the irritating 5-7-5 syllable count in particular) is not just based on a misconception of the Japanese form but, as the late Cyril Childs pointed out, is like 'focusing on the cage that surrounds the singing bird.' Yes, I often use the 5-7-5 pattern but only as an interesting and useful constraint.

Photos (please click the images to view a better version):
1. Astelia, stump, and rain at Maropea Forks hut in the Ruahine, July 2024
2. Young Red Beech forest at Triangle hut, Ruahine, February 2026
3. Male Whio whistling in the Pohangina River, Ruahine, November 2021

12 February 2026

A short walk in the ngahere

At the picnic table near the junction of the Tawa and Te Apiti tracks it was partly cloudy and almost calm. Cicadas were stridulating all along the Tawa track, which I’d chosen so I could walk the loop anticlockwise for a change and, besides, an annoying pain deep inside my left knee had persuaded me to choose the easier direction, ‘easier’ meaning very slightly longer but significantly less steep. The irritating pain eventually subsided, as I’d expected.

My first sight of the car park as I drove up depressed me: too many vehicles. I imagined the track swarming with people, with families, with yelling kids excited at being able to bash things with sticks and complain about whether they were there yet and wanting to know how much further and going quiet and sullen when they saw me approaching. I expected to have no more than a few minutes of solitude before meeting yet another person, or a sweating couple, or some old people inching along with walking poles and cheerfulness and I’d have to be cheerful and smiling too and say hello.

My misanthropy — or, rather, my expectation of being misanthropic — was unwarranted. I’d forgotten that if you happen to be walking in the same direction as most of the crowd, and at a roughly similar pace, you might not see anyone for long(ish) periods. In fact, it turned out even better. I met an elderly man (why is it so much more respectful to call someone elderly rather than old?) who was coming towards me on his way back to the carpark; he was so lost in his slow, poles-assisted plod up the final ascent that he almost walked into me — ‘Sorry!’ he said and I said, ‘No worries!’ cheerfully, both of us smiling, and I resisted the urge to say something like it was good to see him out enjoying the track because I was worried it would sound patronising (it would have). No one else until Tom’s Lookout: a young couple with daypacks and heavy lumpish Nalgene water bottles like high-tech caveman clubs were sitting on the seat and we exchanged hellos as I passed by. The only others I met during the half-hour walk to the table were three older (not yet elderly but getting there) people who’d just finished a selfie when I came up the track around a bend and into view. One looked disconcertingly like Shane Jones but he stepped aside and waved me through with a smile and I mentally forgave him for looking like Shane Jones (which of course was no fault of his — that is, no fault of the man who looked like Shane Jones — and I felt mean for having instantly been wary of him. I was glad he’d given me the opportunity to revise my opinion).

Then there was no one the whole time I was brewing and drinking Lapsang Souchong at the picnic table and scribbling in the notebook, at least not until a tanned, shirtless, glistening man with spiky greying hair walked past going up the main track. We nodded acknowledgment of each other through the shrubbery.

A few more people passed by, some plodding, a couple jogging. A middle-aged couple came up the Tawa track.

‘Lovely spot,’ the man said, pausing and looking at the table and my stuff spread out on it. He had a distinct Irish accent. I agreed it was a lovely spot. They carried on towards the towering metal figure of Whātonga, and I wondered whether they’d wanted to sit at the lovely spot but had been deterred because they wanted to respect my solitude and scribbling and tea-sipping.

‘There’s another table just the other side of Whātonga,’ I called out.

He turned and said something which I took to be either thanks or maybe explaining why they wouldn’t be stopping but he spoke so fast in his gentle Irish accent that I couldn’t catch what exactly he was saying, but his intonation and gestures were reassuring and happy and I felt better about not being thought of as the monopoliser of the lovely spot.

My misanthropy had by then mostly dissipated, although it almost returned when a short, bulbous man shuffled up and began talking to me in a voice possibly audible at the carpark.

‘Having a drink of tea?’ he yelled, and I nodded.

‘That looks like a good camera!’ he said.

I told him it did its job if I did mine, but he didn’t seem to understand.

‘Doing your journalling?’ he yelled, and I nodded again. ‘What do you write about?’

But before I could say ‘whatever comes to mind’ he was making suggestions: ‘The birds! The people you meet on the track!’

“Whatever comes to mind,’ I managed to reply, hoping I didn’t sound unfriendly. I smiled, just in case.

He was OK, though, and seemed genuinely interested in the people he met (he’d just come from explaining to the Irish couple how Whātonga had been vandalised then eventually fixed, and about aspects of the earthquake-proofing of the new bridge), and I was another person to be genuinely interested in. Also, I think he enjoyed the sight of someone enjoying what had, until he’d turned up, been some quiet time, and I found it hard not to appreciate his enthusiasm although I was getting desperate for him to move on. Which he did: he wished me a good day and shuffled on down the Tawa track, poking his walking pole at the ground in front of him like a one-feelered bug probing for morsels. The white noise of cicadas returned, punctuated occasionally by the notes of a tūī and the soft, high-pitched chattering of a pīwakawaka.

I had a chook in the fridge at home, waiting to be roasted, and I needed to get it into the oven. Responsibilities can be a pain sometimes but I still had plenty of time and roasting a chook hardly tests one’s organisational abilities or cooking skills. I finished the tea, packed away the pens, notebook, and stove and set off back to the car. When I turned the ignition on and the dashboard lit up, I saw the temperature was registering twenty-nine degrees[1]. I felt a twinge of empathy for the chook I was about to roast.

Notes:

1. Ngahere: forest, the bush. Here's the pronunciation.
2. That's 29° Celsius (84° Fahrenheit)

Photos (click to enlarge them):

1. Tūī in the ngahere on the Te Apiti track
2. The lovely spot back in August 2024
3. Pīwakawaka. This was on the No. 1 Line track, a little further north of the Te Apiti track.

22 January 2026

What is it like to be a riroriro?

One of the riroriro flew close and perched on a horopito twig to examine me. It had the gangly look of a teenager not yet bulked up into adulthood, although to describe even fully-grown adults of these tiny birds as ‘bulked up’ seems ridiculous so let’s just say it looked less rounded, more slender, and slightly scruffy, the way I assume I was when I was a teenager — and still am. I wondered about its apparent curiosity. Was I the first human it had met (unlikely) or was it deciding whether I might be delicious (definitely not) or perhaps it was trying to decide whether I was a potential threat or something that might provide food (plausible — I suspect it, like most teenagers, was perpetually hungry)? Probably it was just curious and trying to figure out what I was.

When I’d last visited Leon Kinvig hut just a few weeks ago, the riroriro that had been seemingly everywhere in November, disputing territories, singing threateningly at each other, scrapping among the tangle of branches of the recently felled red beech, were much less evident. I wondered whether they’d accepted their territorial boundaries and were now preoccupied with raising young, like the family I was now watching on the No. 1 Line track. Perhaps that felled beech, which had seemed so desirable, so worth fighting over, not longer offered such an attractive addition to a territory — the leaves, still healthy in November, had by January turned brown and crisp and shrivelled and probably offered little hope of fat caterpillars or other morsels.

But who knows what a riroriro’s thinking? Who knows what prompts its behaviour? It’s often hard enough to guess accurately what another human’s thinking, even when we think we know them well, so to guess what a bird like a riroriro — so vastly different from us, particularly in its ability to fully inhabit three dimensions — might be thinking must surely be impossible. We can imagine what it’s like to be a bird (or a bat, to acknowledge Thomas Nagel’s famous paper), but imagining requires filling in the gaps in what we think we know, and when the thing we’re trying to understand is mostly gap and barely any fact, it’s hard to be confident about what we imagine. I’d like to imagine that the teenage riroriro found me both interesting and nonthreatening but I’ll never know — nor, I think, could I ever know.

Notes:
1. Riroriro are also known as grey warbler; their Latin binomial (scientific name) is Gerygone igata. You can find more photos of them in my post about my November trip.
2. Red beech: tawhai raunui; Nothofagus fusca.

Photos (click to enlarge):
1. This is the one!
2. Gratuitous photo of the Pohangina river at Leon Kinvig hut, January 2026.

11 January 2026

Remembering rivers

At dawn I sit outside remembering how, earlier in the week, I’d walked over the Ngamoko Range to Leon Kinvig hut in the headwaters of the Pohangina river. I had two nights there to myself and sat by the river each evening thinking whatever came to mind. Now I sit in a city and remember how, sitting by that river, I’d remembered the week-long journey with Robb at the other end of the Ruahine in early December; how we’d walked up the Makaroro river one morning, following deer that had walked the same way only a few minutes earlier, and how eventually I’d seen something bright and moving in a pool at the end of the reach a hundred metres ahead — the bills of two whio, bright in the early morning shadow. We’d moved closer, carefully, and watched them until we grew cold then turned back to the hut rather than disturb them by trying to move past upstream. Robb was ecstatic. So was I.

At Kinvig I’d walked upriver to the old hut site early in the morning and, feeling cold and clumsy, had sat in the sun on the riverbank beneath a flowering Marbleleaf. Gradually, the world revealed itself: an iridescent black spider-hunting wasp that wouldn’t pause to allow a photograph; a big crane fly, Zelandotipula fulva, that, perhaps lethargic from the cold, did allow me some photographs; once, dancing overhead and out of sight, a butterfly I was ninety percent sure was a Forest Ringlet. Later in the day I’d see more and could confirm the ID but none of those beautiful butterflies would settle. Then, in the river, at the head of the rapids about 100 metres downstream from the old hut site, where the reach ends and the river curves towards the big slip … a whio. I saw him before he saw me — just. He whistled, climbed out onto a rock, whistled again. Back into the water, out onto a rock just a little downstream; more whistling and craning his neck. I managed a few poor record photos. He floated downstream and I followed a little way but didn’t see him again.

That evening I sat at the river’s edge with biltong and 12-year-old Glenlivet and the sunlight coming and going on the rapids until finally the sun slid behind cloud and crept below the ridge. I wondered why wild water is white. Presumably the bubbles, foaming, reflect the light? Something like that, but I’d never wondered about that before, but that’s what sitting by a mountain river does — you think about things you’d never think to think about elsewhere. But mostly you think of nothing; you sit there and eventually you realise time has passed. You become absorbed by the sound and the incessant, constantly changing movement of the water and your mind loses itself. Is that what meditation’s supposed to be like? I don’t know, but it’ll do me. Is it the same, watching the sea? Probably, but it’s been so long since I’ve sat alone watching the evening sea that I can’t remember. But a river is always going somewhere — downstream, to the sea — but the sea goes nowhere: the waves rush up the beach then slide back down, and even the tide changes its mind twice a day. How might that change the way your mind works when you spend time simply watching the sea?

The light had begun to dim and the malt had almost gone but I was reluctant to climb back to the hut and leave that beautiful river that will keep flowing long after I’m gone. Who else will sit here on evenings like this, letting their thoughts roam, waiting for whio?

Evening riverbed the sun still in its boulders

Photos (click to enlarge):

1. The pair of whio on the upper Makaroro river, Ruahine Forest Park.
2. Tītitipounamu (Rifleman; Acanthisitta chloris ssp. granti); female, near Leon Kinvig hut
3. Rapids below Leon Kinvig hut

03 December 2025

Forgetting

At the top of the No. 1 Line track I set up the rain kilt as a groundsheet with the little pad of closed cell foam as a seat and the camera holding it down so it wouldn’t blow away in the cool breeze. I took the stove out and set it up on the ground with the homemade windshield and got water heating for tea, and I sat down and reached into the bag for the notebook.

That’s when I remembered I’d forgotten to pack the pen roll.

You can get wild with yourself for being an idiot, but eventually you have to face it: you have no pens and can’t do the writing you were so looking forward to doing. It’s a good lesson in several ways, I suppose, but the best that could be said regarding my response was that I got over it fairly quickly. I still berated myself for being an idiot, for not paying appropriate attention to that uneasy feeling I’d forgotten something — almost always an accurate indicator that you have forgotten something and should check again — but, having forgotten other things on other occasions, I’ve learned to move on quickly and to look for a more positive way of looking at the stuff-up. Once, I forgot the tea; that time I tried brewing kawakawa leaves, with acceptable results. Another time I forgot to fill the water bottle and at the top of the No. 1 Line track there’s no recovery from that — the nearest water’s a long way off and without water how do you brew tea? Disaster! A good lesson in acceptance.

This time I rummaged through the bag in the futile hope I might have stashed a pen somewhere but I knew I hadn’t and soon accepted that I’d have to do the writing elsewhere, later in the day. But I wasn’t about to let that take the edge off the walk. I had the place to myself — during the entire walk as well as the drive up and down the road I saw no one; it was as if humans had vanished from the world — and a pheasant rooster had strolled across the road and disappeared into long weeds ahead of the car, and two feisty little piwakawaka had given me a delightful what-for a few minutes along the track, and, shortly afterwards, a smallish bird flitted into a tangle of branches on the side of the track. I peered at it, thinking it might have been a riroriro but it was too big.

It was a Pīpīwharauroa, a Shining cuckoo. I unclipped the camera, thinking surely the bird would do that frustrating thing of posing right up until the moment you’re about to get it in sharp focus. But it stayed while I managed a single photograph, then it flitted a few centimetres along the branch to where it was partly obscured by twigs. None of the three additional photographs were of an acceptable standard but I didn’t mind, and as I sat at the top of track drinking tea and not writing, I thought this had been a mighty fine walk after all.

Note: The Pīpīwharauroa or Shining cuckoo (Chalcites lucidus ssp. lucidus) is a subspecies of Shining Bronze-cuckoo. This subspecies breeds only in Aotearoa New Zealand, where it lays eggs in the nests of Riroriro (Grey warbler), and spends the winter in the Bismarck Archipelago, near New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands.

Photo: The first and only usable photograph of the Pīpīwharauroa. Click it for a better view.

07 November 2025

An evening by the river

The big beech that had been threatening the helipad had been felled by the crew who had cut the new track from the tops down to the hut and the tree’s canopy now lay partly over the river bank. A riroriro had set up a territory in the tangle of branches and was singing furiously and squabbling with another that also appeared keen on the prime location. I watched the tiny birds fighting and chasing each other and saw more riroriro on the far side of the river doing the same thing — on one occasion three birds were engaged in a dogfight so aerobatic that I couldn’t follow any particular bird for more than a second or two. We think we’re amazing because we can fly fast and high over vast distances but these little birds — just a few grams of feathers and aggression — make us look like lumbering oafs.

I turned away to watch the river, hoping a whio might appear but mostly just because watching a mountain river in the evening, with a comfortable hut waiting and no responsibilities, is one of the most meditative and peaceful experiences I know (although that seemed lost on the riroriro). You watch the flow for a while and then you realise time has passed and all you’ve done is sit there and that’s perfect. You lift your eyes and the far bank starts flowing backwards, upstream, as if your mind has to make up for all that time watching the world flowing downstream, and the slight giddiness feels like the first hit of getting high.

Clouds raced eastwards high overhead in the dimming sky and a cold wind swirled around but couldn’t get through my down jacket. I imagined Robb here with his nibbles (jerky, sharp cheese, olives) and his wee dram and his ecstatic enthusiasm and how if a whio appeared he’d become enraptured and almost mystical with joy and I’d know how he felt. If John were here as well, the evening might be impossible to surpass — just three old mates enjoying the evening and yarning in one of the best places in the world.

I thought of my sister, too. She’d never known places like this but she loved hearing about them. During one of our last conversations she’d asked me to tell her about my travels in India and I told her how I used to love walking down the back alley behind Main Bazaar to eat at one of the magnificently efficient little open-fronted restaurants opposite New Delhi Railway Station. The guys would recognise me and beam widely and look after me and I’d eat dahl and rice and a naan straight from the tandoor and watch the teeming crazy life on the street and I’d wonder why on earth I loved it so much when I loved evenings on the banks of a Ruahine river just as much. I didn’t say that at the time, and we didn’t get all philosophical or zen or whatever during that conversation, but now I think to compare experiences is to miss the point, which is that nothing compares to the moment you’re experiencing right now. She lay back, listening and smiling, and I hoped what I was saying reminded her of wonderful times on her own travels. Less than a week later she was gone.

The riroriro were still fighting and singing and the gorgeously clear river still flowed down towards the bend and on to the gorge and the wind still tugged my hair and pushed at the bulk of my jacket. I wanted to tell her about all of it and see that quiet, delighted smile again but that was no longer possible. I found myself wondering: what’s the point of these marvellous moments if you can’t share them with the people you love?

Notes:

1. Riroriro are also known as Grey warblers, although they're not warblers (some ornithologists insist on calling them 'Grey gerygone'). The scientific name is Gerygone igata. Here's the New Zealand Birds Online entry.
2. The hut is Leon Kinvig hut in the headwaters of the Pohangina River, Ruahine Forest Park.

Photos:

1 & 2. Both photos are of the Riroriro that had set up in the canopy of the felled beech.

11 June 2022

Tea and animals at dawn

At seven o'clock the blackbird flew in like a small dark missile and landed abruptly on the lawn, yelling quietly as he settled and clucking occasionally as he began his breakfast foraging. The pre-dawn light had just begun to illuminate the birch so its main branches gleamed like white gold; the sky was smudged with hazy clouds suffused with salmon and mauve and grey against the idea of blue. I'd wrapped myself in merino and fleece and thick down and I was drinking unsmoked lapsang souchong tea, savouring the biscuity flavour, and I was warmer than on any morning I could remember since discovering what had become a morning ritual. I can't say the ritual had been intentional: I'd simply begun to sit outside first thing in the morning and gradually the practice became more regular and I began to enjoy it even more, so, as the mornings grew darker and colder I continued to sit outside drinking tea. Eventually the days shortened sufficiently so I found myself watching the dawn arrive, darkness lightening, the sky taking on colour, the birch beginning to glow, the early bird catching the worm, ducks and pigeons and starlings speeding across the dawn, the drab and faded colours of the neighbouring roofs and walls and fences lit briefly with soft light like the elegance of a Joel Meyerowitz photograph. The whole time, a thrush sang in a leafless poplar. When the sun finally slid above the unseen horizon so direct rays lit the tops of the trees and the highest houses, the magic vanished; the colours lost their subtle spectacular elegance; the world once more became possessed by humans. I'd pick up the empty tea bowl and jug and the small blue sitting pad and the Traveler's Notebook and pen roll and go inside. The blackbird carried on hunting for worms.

Sometimes as I sat there next to the small wood-and-iron table by the back door I'd hear the click of paws on the vinyl floor so I'd get up and push the door open and a small whiskery face would look up at me and Guston would trot out onto the concrete pad. If rain was falling, or had recently fallen, he'd stand right at the boundary of dry and wet. He'd stay there as if making up his mind which was worse: the discomfort of getting wet or the discomfort of needing a pee. Sometimes, getting wet was clearly worse. If the lawn was dry, though, he'd be out there doing his rounds, sniffing his garden for evidence of cat-trespassing. Usually he'd ignore me until he'd completed his mission; only then, and not always, would he stop to greet me on his way back inside. I don't mind being ignored by animals, though: I like the reminder that they're not ours, that the attention we receive is a gift, that the value of a dog's affection (or a cat's) is because they can choose to ignore us if they wish. I love the lack of respect some birds have for us and wish we gave them more reason to consider us not worth bothering about, but, sadly, I can't see that ever happening.

From the farmland beyond the edge of town I heard a barrage of gunshots as ducks were shot for sport.

Note: Guston is a miniature Schnauzer. He's not mine but we get along famously.

Photos: 1. Next door. 2. The actual blackbird on the actual lawn. 3. The birch on a windy dawn.