Boxing day Saturday Dec. 26

We drove up the coast on a very overcast and unpromising day, and after some walking on windswept beaches with rough, rolling surf we found a small cafe that had been recommended to us for corn fritters. I now see that I have got these pictures in the wrong order. So I have to move to the end of our meal and work back. When we paid the bill, we asked where the beach was, and the lady who ran the place gave us directions. She then volunteered that there were no public toilets by the beach and maybe we should use the ones in the cafe before we left. Sensible suggestion, although I think she was rather proud of her loo. It was wildly decorated. The beautiful mirror, encircled with shells, is shown above, and the walls were papered with posters as shown below. All very striking.

You will note the name Lembas Cafe in many of the posters. But what was also interesting about the cafe was the way it was decorated. There were a whole series of attractive paintings or art graphics, and I reproduce three of them below.

And one wall was covered with a complicated arrangement of driftwood. On all the beaches we have visited there are considerable amounts of driftwood, from huge logs to small bits and pieces. This wall was decorated with smaller pieces.

And now you can see below the meal we each had-corn fritters with a good salad. That greenish glob is an avocado. There was a large selection of beers, and we had the Tuatara Pale Ale. Beers are excellent here. The corn fritters were O.K.--just an omelette with sweet corn in...Oh, and there was some chutney. Not exactly gourmet. And presumably because it was Boxing Day, and perhaps a bit of an effort to open and get staff, a handwritten notice said that there was a 15 percent surcharge on the bills.

Well, I started off by saying how windswept coast was, and how the hills were wreathed in cloud and mist. Rollers crashing on the beach, cold wind, spray flying everywhere--rather like mid-winter on parts of the North Cornish coast. All the trees were shaped by the prevailing northerly wind.

Looking inland from the beach--

And looking along the beach--

As we drove back to Wellington the sun came out, and for an hour or so it turned quite pleasant: but now black clouds sit on the tops of all the hills surrounding the harbour, and the wind is getting up again.

Posted by David on December 26