Dipton: Day 5

Photo (c) Wynston Cooper 2014

The forecast rain didn't appear and instead we had a cloudless sky all morning and some wispy cirrus late in the day. We left Winton just after 9.00 with a small group of locals who accompanied us to the edge of town and then we walked on through the crisp autumnal sunshine Northwards across Southland. For the first couple of hours there were some refreshing bends in the road and three hours into the day's walk the first hill of the Hikoi. We stopped for lunch at 1.00 pm and then there was a series of relentlessly long straights before we completed the 30 km to Dipton a little after 3.00 pm. The little grocery shop in Dipton serves the largest and best icecreams in New Zealand. We struggled through their "single" scoop cone and contemplated buying a treble scoop one not so much to eat it as just to see what it looked like.

We were picked up, just as we were finishing, by Sarah Stewart, our host and taken to the farm she runs with her husband Chris on a hilltop above Dipton, looking North over miles of pastureland and forest to the far mountains. One of the recurrent themes of this trip has been hospitality. We have been treated with such generosity and we have stayed with beautiful people living in beautiful places. It has been humbling and enriching. We sat at dinner tonight, the four of us and Benjamin Brock Smith who had travelled down today, with Sarah and Chris, and also Chris' parents Garth and Adrienne who are well known in our diocese. The farm cooked meal and the wine and the conversation were all warm and generously plentiful and re-creating.

We have developed our walking pattern pretty well. We walk at about 5 kph: fast enough to cover the distance in good time but not fast enough to damage anything. We walk for 2 hour stints, and a couple of stops for rest and food is seeing us complete the day in around 6 hours. Tomorrow we head for Lumsden and the distance is shorter: about 23 km but there is a hill.

Comments

How To Walk 800 km

John is just walking the 80 metres back to his bike here, but you get the general drift. The question I get asked more than any other at the end of the Hikoi is "how are your feet?" It's nice that people care, but my feet have never been an issue on long walks. Good shoes and socks prevent blisters and cushion the effects of long distances on hard surfaces, but I have had other issues. When walking the Camino Santiago knees, Achilles tendons and shin splints have all at one time or another given me trouble. This time round, these have all been fine and I finished feeling as though I could just keep on going indefinitely; to Cape Reinga if needs be. Over the last couple of years I have learned 6 things that have made all the difference. Namely: 1. Footwear. On the Camino I wore walking shoes - Salomon in 2009 and Asics in 2012. A year ago I changed to full walking boots - Salomon Cosmic 2 - and the difference was instant and major. When walking more than 15 minutes...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder. One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

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It happens sometimes. I have a question or am pondering some conundrum or other and the right book arrives at pretty much the right time. In a session with my supervisor a few months back Paul mentioned an article by Rene Girard, whom I had never heard of. I read the article and over the past month have read two of his books, The Scapegoat and this one. I have another couple sitting on my shelf and they have elbowed all others in my to be read pile out of the way and sit firmly on the top. Girard has pulled a number of threads together for me: he has enabled me to rethink the atonement in a way which is consistent with an evolving Universe: he presents a view of scripture which is again consistent with what I know of science but is also faithful to the Bible as the Word of God; he has given me, for the first time in my life a theology (if that is the right word) of Satan which makes sense to me. Most importantly for me, he is consistent with my own lived experience of God's s...

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