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Recipe: Food for walks
Eliana Gray shares a few trail-tested tramping recipes. We started the Rakiura Coast Track fresh off the morning ferry, by turns elated and nauseous from the late September strait. Beginning the morning wide-legged and wind-whipped on the deck, keeping pace with the gulls and pretending to be old-timey sailors fresh with adventure, we were ready…
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Elsie’s Dream
A winning story. This year, the Queenstown Writers Festival team held a mini festival featuring author talks workshops, as well as, for the first time, a writing contest. The Anna-Marie Chin Writing Competition saw writers from Otago and Southland given a range of prompts and 48 hours to write an original response, either fiction or…
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Push, push, roll
Nat Halliday revisits the time he skateboarded (yes, skateboarded) from Cape Reinga to Bluff. It’s 2008, and I am 31 years old. I’m in the Auckland Airport with a huge bag, some cash savings and a plan to travel the 2000 kilometres to the southern tip of New Zealand by skateboard. I should probably have…
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Green Mind
A grassroots history of sowing and mowing in Aotearoa. I left Wānaka in my little white Toyota campervan, bound for the North Island. The trip was equal parts long and tedious, novel and exciting. There were windy sections and straight sections, narrow mountain passes and expansive valley floors. As I drove and drove across our…
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A gig in a hut
On stage and off the grid in the Pisa Range. A single bulb hangs from the roof, casting direct light on the musician below, his eyes closed, his face contorted. The crowd, if you can call it that, sits on wooden benches in near darkness just a few metres away. They are completely silent. At…
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That’s the spirit
Liz Breslin goes ghostbusting in two of the South Island’s haunted hotels. We are not Kesha in popular reality TV series Conjuring Kesha, who says, in the trailer, “a lot of things have happened that are weird, but I’m like, give us more.” We are not the beloved Ghostbusters men or the flopped Ghostbusters women.…