I wonder if the energy I burnt cooking my contribution to Christmas dinner outweighed the calorie intake achieved? Hard to say, but the Boxing Day brunch probably tipped the balance the wrong way. So on Monday afternoon we set out for a mini-Heaphy (it’s coming, it’s coming) – walking from the Brooklyn wind turbine to the Hawkins Hill radar station.
Hawkins Hill is the highest point in Wellington, and the soccer ball globe of the radar station can be seen from everywhere. It doesn’t catch the eye as much as the wind turbine, for a long time the only one on the skyline. But it had always intrigued me as this remote structure, as incongruous in its setting as a lamppost in Narnia.
I know I’ve been away for a while, but has Wellington always been this windy? It’s been blowing hard ever since I got back. Down on Lambton Quay that morning, the northerlies were howling. I said to Dad, lets just go up to the wind turbine for the view, we don’t have to do the walk. When we got up there, the turbine itself wasn’t moving, which I should have taken as a sign. But the path seemed reasonably sheltered, so we started off.
10 minutes drive from downtown Wellington, and we could see a tui drinking out of flax flowers. The path, really a service road, was wide and easy to walk on, winding through bush and scrub with the occasional stand of macrocarpa. It followed the fence line of the Karori Sanctuary, which has been set up to encourage birdlife to flourish in the area. We were a little bit surprised to see some birdlife we weren’t expecting…
Halfway along, the path became more exposed, and the wind was shrieking like a steam train in the wires. We were trudging along leaning sideways so as to not give the wind too wide a target. I zipped up my jacket so it didn’t get caught by the breeze. Any rational person might have turned back, but if 50,000 litres of rain on the West Coast didn’t daunt me, a little bit of wind wouldn’t hurt.
Halfway along the path we passed a gentleman walking his three dogs. Usually on such an isolated path you would greet a fellow walker, or at least perform the wordless reverse nod of greeting. But no acknowledgement of our presence was forthcoming. We figured he must be the hermit owner of the crazy lego castle just before the radar dome, and probably doesn’t welcome anyone wandering on his territory.
Once we passed the castle, the wind got *really* hairy, and I held onto Dad to stop myself blowing away. But (anticlimax alert) we reached the dome ok, but decided to head back down to the car before we had a sitdown and ate our stash of Christmas cake.
