This is the place where the Otago goldrush started. There's still some gold there, but not enough to give up your day job for. Nowdays it's a secluded place at the end of a short track. There is a pond created by the frenzied search for instant riches, walking tracks and everywhere the descendants of the plants carried along as baggage by the miners for food, as raw materials and as reminders of home.
This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Comments
Did you take these pictures?
They are astoundingly beautiful!
Thank you for another wonderful blog post.
Cheers,
Julian.