Pointed hills and postboxes

My cousin Felicity is writing a series of posts all starting with letters of the alphabet. I'm not planning to go through the alphabet but a drive yesterday gave me the idea for this post and I liked the alliteration ......

This time round we are not doing any real sightseeing, but spending most of our time close to home in Tauranga, getting to see as much of Nic, Ray and of course, Emily as possible. So the sights we are seing are closer to home - when we go for a walk, when we drive out to where Pete is fishing and when we drive around be ause Em has fallen asleep in the car and needs to be given as much chance to sleep as possible.

Yesterday we drove home from Bethlehem where we had lunch by a very long and circuitous route - via a country road called Poripori Rd.  It took us deep into the countryside behind and above Tauranga where the suburbs give way to lifestyle sections ( what we would call smallholdings) and these lifestyle sections give way to farms.  We saw sheep - lots of sheep - and grazing land and orchards.  Post boxes are clustered at the end of roads, bright and plastic, ready to receive their mail from the rural mail vans. Post in the town is delivered by bicycle but out in the rural areas a post van fetches and delivers mail. Beehives, each in a different, faded color are piled on top of each other like blocks of flats, and everywhere, amongst the trees, you see the exotic looking tree ferns.

But to get to the pointy hills - this time I have been struck by the sharpness of the hills and valleys - flying from Auckland I noticed how steep and sharp the topography is. Hills have sharp edges, valleys and ridges slope suddenly down from sudden outcrops and everything looks defined. I think about the rolling hills of the Midlands and around Ixopo and I realize how much older South Africa is geologically - the hills have had time to smooth and become more rounded in a way the countryside here hasn't - this is a much newer country.

To use that awful trendy word - the New Zealand countryside is edgier than the part of South Africa where I live.

So - pointy hills and postboxes - and I look forward to more drives to see some more of them.