I’ve wanted to visit New Zealand for as long as I can remember.  A small gap between business commitments in Sydney and Tokyo gave me the opportunity I’d been looking for, so the first question was North Island or South Island?  Everyone I asked – local friends and others – seemed to agree.  If time is short, head south.

My flight from Sydney to Christchurch landed after midnight.  After renting a car and finding my hotel, it was nearly 2am by the time my head hit the pillow, but I got on the road by 7:30, hoping to make the most of my few days on the South Island.  Driving south from Christchurch in mist and light rain, I passed sheep farms, vineyards, and the occasional small town.  An expensive speeding ticket from a remarkably polite policeman was the only excitement of the first few hours.  Things changed when I arrived at Lake Tekapo.  Although the low cloud and mist obscured the mountains, they made a beautiful cloak for the lake, and the view from The Church of the Good Shepherd was eerie and unforgettable.

Tekapao is the gateway to MacKenzie Country, a sparsely populated, wild, and craggy place.  I pulled off the road at the summit of Lindis Pass to take pictures of the snow-covered, misty mountains.  The weather continued to be uncooperative and it wasn’t until I reached Arrowtown, a pretty and historic gold mining town, and Queenstown that I started to get glimpses through the low cloud of the spectacular scenery for which the region is famous. By the time I strolled to Queenstown’s waterfront in the early evening, looking for somewhere for dinner, the clouds were starting to drift away and the views over Lake Wakatipu were gorgeous.

The next day was sunny, clear, and chilly, so I drove to Glenorchy, via 40 kilometers of the most beautiful mountain roads I have ever seen.  Although famous as the setting for many scenes in The Lord of the Rings movies, I found very few other visitors and had the wharf and the stunning views of the Humboldt Mountains all to myself.  My solitude continued for another 20 kilometers or so along an unmade road until I reached Paradise.  Can you imagine a more fitting place to end my few days in the South Island?

Sheets of rain fell the evening some friends took me for dinner at Sydney’s Opera House. The floodlit building, one of the most recognizable in the world, glowed in the darkness, making the massive bulk of the nearby Harbor Bridge look menacing.  The following morning the rain had cleared when I took the ferry from Barangaroo to Circular Quay just for the pleasure of passing under the bridge and seeing the Opera House drying out in the sunshine after the previous day’s flood.

Every visitor to Sydney is pulled towards its glorious harbor.  I’ve been to the city several times and no visit feels complete without a stroll past the Opera House and The Rocks, or a ferry ride to somewhere like Manly.  A massive extension to the Harbor is now underway as the former container port at Barangaroo is redeveloped into a new residential and entertainment district.  Enough of the work has been completed to get a sense of how the place will look overall.  My first impression wasn’t positive – the tall office and apartment buildings looked generic and undistinguished – but I should defer judgement until it’s finished in a year or so.  I hope it works out.  Sydney’s is one of the world’s most beautiful urban waterfronts and the developers are playing with something precious and iconic.

And, just in case you’re interested, that restaurant at the Opera House (Bennelong) was very good.

One day last week I hiked with my sons to Moss Force waterfall in Cumbria.  Near the top of the falls, we turned to look back along the Newlands Valley towards Keswick.   It was a rare sunny day in the Lake District and it’s hard to imagine a more beautiful view than the one of the wide valley we saw that afternoon.  No picture, especially one taken using a mobile phone, can do justice to the valley, but this at least gives some impression of it.

The Newlands Valley isn’t the gentle, rolling landscape that persists in most people’s imaginations of the “typical” English countryside.  This is a dramatic, sparsely populated place, closer in style to the Scottish highlands.  It’s tempting to think that extraordinary, wild places of this kind can or will survive without us, but the truth is that their enduring beauty owes something to careful stewardship, not just by individual farmers and local authorities, but also to organizations such as the National Trust and English Heritage.  Time and time again during the wonderful few days I spent in Cumbria, I realized how precious such places are and how much effort and investment continues to be needed to make sure that they’re enjoyed by (and protected for) my sons, their children, and future generations.

Under The Harrow is another one of those debut novels that comes garlanded with rave pre-publication reviews.  It struck me as a competent enough psychological thriller.  The basic plot and setting – the gruesome murder of a young woman in a small English country town and its discovery by the victim’s sister- is certainly well-worn territory.  If anything distinguishes it from a hundred other novels otherwise much like it, it’s the siblings’ secrets and complicated relationship gradually laid bare by the tragedy.

Much has been made in the reviews of the mature, precise, and controlled prose style, and it’s certainly true that Flynn Berry writes like a much more experienced novelist.  It will be interesting to watch what she does next, even if I wasn’t especially impressed by her first effort.