Here in Auckland its summer, summer, summer. My backs been burned twice already, despite sunblock with SPF 45 and higher. But its alright, soon itll already be cold at night and well have to spin the electric meter at night. Although, who knows. They say that you cant get away from global warming nowadays and the climate will inevitably change. Last year, for example, the summer here was the longest and driest in the past eighteen years. And this year, not long ago, a previously unseen temperature of +32° was registered. Thats just some casual sand in the wheels of those who think that its heaven here.

We bought a refrigerator from this farmer in the marvelous town Drury. The apparatus spent eight months in a garage, and ants infested it. They froze pretty quickly. Also, on the farm, theres a huge sandbox with nonchalantly scattered childrens toys. I didnt see any children, but I did see over five cats who use the structure not for building sand castles.

There is a large metal drum on Mount Eden that points and indicates the distance to famous cities of the world.

In Shakespeare Regional Park, while chasing after the frisbee, I bloodied up the bottom of my foot with a seashell. Instead of sand, the beach there has mollusk seashell ridges, various scallops.

Almost every time that I go to the shop on the corner for milk, this cardboard guy who offers ice cream with a maniacs smile scares me.

Ill talk about the boxers soon.

On one very slow intersection, the local rascality earns a little side money by washing windows. It should be noted that theyre polite and fun people. I apologized in advance to the hero of the photograph below since nobody carries cash around, seeing as credit cards are accepted everywhere. But this did not stop him from wiping the windshield just in case, asking about my camera and posing a little bit. I did not get a chance to ask for his e-mail, the light turned green.

 

When traveling I always taste the local food, especially local alcoholic beverages. My stomach is far from being satisfied with that habit. When I traveled to China, my stomach was upset for fifty days out of a hundred and twenty spent there. Once I even was in the hospital because of food poisoning, as I was said. But I did not stop tasting new food. People get just one bite at the cherry of human life. In addition, it is really delicious to have steaming piping hot rolls with peanut sauce and fresh home-made Vietnamese beer for breakfast, you know. Or in Katmandu, I remember, there was tonba with momo which is a type of dumpling with the filling made of chopped beef and served with chili sauce.
I have never understood people sitting in a Belgian pub and ordering some green-bottle beer with one and the same artificial poster taste. On Rarotonga which is one of the Cook islands, we used to order a local lager “Cook” or, as some of the menus said, “Captain Cook”. Fresh, tasty and cheap. Sure, one day we decided to see with our own eyes how it was being made and went to a tiny brewery located only one block from the center of Avarua.
The post is continued with a dozen of photos with metal mash-tuns and beer kegs and comments. 

Against the background of plastic bottles with glued faces of the famous sailor, there are various sorts of malt and barley in glass jars. The brewery makes two types of light beer and one type of dark beer. The owner generously fills beer mugs for visitors, so it is pleasant to drop in.

One of the owners of local bars, where tourists daily and nightly wear out the seats of their trousers and “rub” terminals with their Charge Cards, came to get fresh beer. 

Part of the brewery territory was intended for a beer bar. By the time I was there, the brewery had been working for less than a year. The anniversary celebrations with the island music, ukulele and ololo-singing were to start soon. Women were going to decorate themselves with flowers. 

As you see, It is a “village” bar, and everything is very simple. I like it this way.
Alexander, a Russian tourist, is checking the quality of a souvenir T-shirt with the image of Captain Cook. 

 
Kegs with the product. If am not mistaken they cost a hundred dollars a keg. People on the Cook islands use the same kind of dollars as in New Zealand.

After the owner of the brewery let us have all the variety of the product, he suggested making a little tour. In the picture, you can see a shop where bottles and printed matter were held. As far as I understood, the labels were attached manually. The equipment for the process automation was rather expensive and the owner could not afford it at the time.

That is a production department of the brewery “Captain Cook”. As you can easily guess, these are the tuns where beer is made. 

The owner explains the mode of operation, notably the way how that thingamajig crushes corn.

It is necessary to maintain certain temperature and pressure inside the mash tuns. The full cycle of making beer takes 12 days.

Russian tourists were not embarrassed to ask questions like, “What is this button for?”

I did not get what that rubber glove hanging on one of the controllers was for?

Glass containers for the lager “Cook” is collected in the whole territory of the island. It is not advantageous to deliver them from the mainland. The glasswares price is tenfold higher than the price of the drink. 

In the end of the tour we were given beer labels and I noticed that Captain Cook in the label had a red nose. I asked if he had it red because of the print or if it had been red in reality? The owner laughed at the joke, poured more beer to us and invited to come again. Of course, we came again, at least once. Light lager with smoked tuna from a fresh catch was just perfect!

Here in China, factories, plants and hundreds of millions of people work with a vengeance for our satisfaction. Sitting in comfortable chairs, in comfortable clothes, at comfortable desks with a modern notebook, the West rarely bugs the East about the worsening quality of the planets condition. Having successfully achieved progressive communism after many decades of sacrifices and a struggle with an invisible enemy, China is currently busy with its own development and isnt too interested in the issues of the environment.

For some reason I have a feeling that there will come a time when the problem will solve itself: gigantic atmosphere-cleaning plants will be built and will restore the balance to the planets unstabilized ecosystem. Before you know it, all over the world these structures will stand next to every factory. At a reasonable price, of course. Why not? Its a good idea, a profitable one. And the compassionate white community with high moral values and the habit of worrying about reasons that are, so to speak, “just there,” will be happy, and investors will have a place to put their money.

But for now, the developed part of China looks like one giant factory. Each square meter is utilized to maximum efficiency for the production of something useful. On the way to Shanghai you can see how some sort of rootlets is grown between the train tracks. Possibly the same ones that are later served in eateries. The area that feeds the twenty-million Shanghai, which is nowadays called no differently than “New York on steroids,” is three times as large as Shanghai itself.

The southern, Cantonese districts to which the hyper-economy of Hong Kong and the adjacent Shenzhen and Guangzhou is accessible work 24 hours a day. The landscapes resemble scenes from Japanese cyberpunk shows: a forest of pipes that extends to the horizon, the sky is sliced up with wires, the surface of the ground with roads. According to various sources, up to seventy percent of all the worlds clothes is produced in this place. The locals say that there is a real clothes fever in the labor villages: because of the selling of real and not-so-much Calvins and Kleins, there is as much money as mud there, people are indulged in entertainment, and the law, while workers, manufacturers and the mafia rest, humbly stands out of the way. The most pronounced hedonists in Macao are the Cantonese.

The photographs you have just seen were taken on the way from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, and from Macao to Nanking on the way to the Vietnam border. I will talk about Shenzhen, the mirror city of Siangan, and about Macao, which has surpassed Las Vegas in gatherings at playhouses a long time ago.

Bonus: Satellite photos of the central part of China.

In their measures, a four-million settlement is only slightly bigger than a city-type village. In the images, it is clearly visible how cities produce smoke. In addition to this, you shouldnt forget that this is where everything that we use, from toothbrushes to iPhones, is made here.

When we were in Kathmandu and took the master class by Maksimishin, we discussed the “problem of a great shot”. How did it come that some photographers were lucky to take great shots, and some photographers were to wait for years until they could really make the one.

I am not here to retell the whole discussion because the argument was heated and the examples included about five names. But in short, the main idea is as follows. You dont need to wait for the situation when you, such a cool photographer, are at some place out in the street and suddenly, bang, an elephant in drawers jumps out in front of you, just at the right time for you to take a cool shot, and here is that great photo, on the National Geographics cover. It will hardly happen. A great shot is a result of great work.

One can wait for the muse to come and suffer from waiting so long. In reality, the process is much more prosaic and work-intensive: you just need to make up your mind to do it and start doing it yourself. Almost any creative process comprises 99% of the chore, 0.99% of creativity and 0.01% of luck. When we talk about photography, we are to decide the above problem like this. Choose the place, the texture, the light, the situation, the format. Then work on the shot until you really get it. You need to work for a long time and, if it is possible, hard and no matter what. If you fail, then change the place, the texture, etc. That is the way how you, perhaps, will take a great photo, or a couple of great photos, which can be shown to people. The spectator will be surprised, “How did he/she manage to seize such a great moment? What luck!” Doesnt it seems to you that it sounds like we are in fishing, honestly!

In Nepal, when I noticed a rather interesting back part with a film billboard on a corrugated fence, I chose the position at a busy corner during the rush hours and was standing there for 40 minutes. I tried different angles, exposures and apertures – I made about a hundred of shots, and one of them, as the minimum, I consider a “lucky” one. Do you think it is quite normal? I do.

The post is continued with some MB of those photos. You can see the dynamics of the shot development and the attempts to catch something worthwhile.

The shots in green frames are now in the folder named “OK”. The red framed shot is in the final series. All photos are clickable.

In total, I have taken 89 photos, then I have chosen 12 out of those 89, and finally I have chosen only one out of 12.

Here in Kawakawa, judging by the vastness of multi-colored foofaraw and trees that grow on roofs, people are quietly going mad. The small (the population is slightly over 1000) roadside town north of North Island is decorated with every color of the rainbow. A long time ago there was a coal mine nearby, but since then the resource has run out, and now people make a living mainly from farming and feeding travelers. There are quite a few authentic New Zealand cafes with pretty good coffee and croissants in the town. Many people stop by to eat, since the settlement is located approximately halfway to Auckland.

Kawakawa is also called “Train Town” since trains occasionally pass by on the road that passes through it. Nowadays tourists are given rides on the eighty-kilometer section of the old railroad. Family/childrens entertainment.

Of course, the most popular site of Kawakawa is the public restroom built by the Austrian architect and painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who is famous for his unique style. His canvas buildings are called “ecological,” “organic,” “biomorphic,” “natural.”

Friedensreich left his footprints all over the planet. Other than New Zealand, where the artist spent the last 25 years of his life, his architectural projects can be found in Germany, Austria, Japan, the USA, Switzerland and Israel (photos on Google Images). Ive heard that many people deliberately fly to New Zealand to look at his final project, which he finished one year before his death: a public restroom in Kawakawa.

This is what the entrance to the restroom looks like. A tree grows through a hole in the roof. (The photos of the restroom arent mine, I got them here.)

Everything inside is made from ceramic tiles which are laid together using solvent, there are no right angles. Its as if the floor is moving.

Light gets into the building through a stained-glass window made of empty glass bottles.

More photos of artistic restrooms can be found on Google Images.

Across from the restrooms there is a museum, the entire wall there is covered with near-Maori drawings. The symbols probably mean something.

The bus station for “Clark” school buses in the outer part of the city.

A red sign on a pub where people love the New Zealand beer “Lion Red.” Here people can and like to drink.

You can see the train which was mentioned in the beginning of the post passing through the city in the background.

A farmers four-wheel off-road truck that is parked in front of a bar with arcade games.

Second-hand goods are sold in the empty first-floor rooms of the provincial theater of the town Kawakawa. Here and there you can encounter a familiar from Napier Art deco style.

In a Chinese restaurant, a little girl waited for her parent to make fish and chips, the favorite dish in New Zealand.

Because of the amount of pedestrians by the Friedensreich Hundertwasser public restrooms, the traffic significantly slows down.

The ceramic shark which many recognize from the illustrations to the recent post about adulthood. The small sculpture park made in the same inimitable “biomorphic” style in the downtown was closed for the holidays. On regular days, I suspect, children would really like it there.

Kawakawa pleased me with its originality, which was unexpectedly encountered among regular New Zealand farming landscapes.