Owaka

Owaka is a marker. A stop for my youth dream. Done.

**

I remember an Indo edition of National Geographic Traveler I read during my undergrad years. Pages about New Zealand: full of visual seductions.

And other middle class travel magazines in the magazine section of Gramedia; one of the favorite spots back then. So many lurings and seducings there.

Sumba and Pasola. This and that. New Zealand? Empty road, green hills, and sea view from atop. It’s always like that, even before I had my first passport.

**

Winter 2022. Don asked me to join him to Palmerston, visiting his old pal. My first trip out of city in New Zealand. Suddenly, the pages of travel magazines I read 10-11 years ago came to life. The New Zealand I had always been imagining. Road, hills, seas: nothing else matters.

In our way back, Don even did a little detour to show me around. In particular I remember a lookout at/toward Karitane. No photo. Just stuck inside my head forever.

When I came back to Dunedin with Christal and Lelani, the first weekend getaway we did was to Karitane. I brought them to the same spot Don brought me a year before. With a little additional stop at a little café in that little sleepy coastal village.

**

Owaka. It was meant to be a ‘training’ for our summer trip. Just to ‘check the wave’, check the car, get knowing what we need.

Almost a coincidence.

It supposed to be Invercargill. But, an afternoon coffee at Bagelo, followed by short convo with Mba Evi, changed the plan. “Nothing in Invercargill,” she said.

Then I remember a particular tutorial session I tutored. We were talking about Catlins. My students love Catlins. One of them referred it as ‘definitely my favorite spot in New Zealand’.

So off we went to The Catlins.

Owaka, a hub. A stop. Perhaps the first foreign town I suddenly fell in love since Bari, summer 2018. There I asked myself, what else are you looking for?

**

We are still going north this summer. But we already fell in love with Owaka, and The Catlins. I could already imagine spending a week there. Just being there, going beaches, eating out at Lumberjack once or twice, playing at the playground near the school.

I stop searching because of Owaka.

(Or maybe not? Who knows?)

**

It was also in Owaka and Catlins that the lure of visuals, and consequently the naïve touristic necessity of taking pictures, became obvious.

It all came back to my mind: all those formative years of reading Kerouac, looking at travel magazines, and whatnots. All those formative little moments of getting cultured in a capitalist, consumerist culture I have been a part of: travel culture.

I never thought that photographs matter so much. And never thought that I would need to return to an old habit of loving to take photographs during travels. I thought, after the cultural mayhem Instagram caused to travel culture, I would stop that habit/love.

Owaka re-nurture that habit/love, reconnect me with the childlike (and perhaps naïve) pleasure of taking pictures, of pointing camera to a particular landscape/point/face/thing/etc.

In Owaka, things became scenic again.

[Upon return to Dunedin, I bought a camera.]

**

Scenic? What the hell is that? What is scenic (and not scenic)?

‘Scenic route’: everywhere, inside and outside the city. What is this thirst/desire for scenic? How can things become scenic (and not)? What makes things scenic (and not)?

The politics of scenic. Who decides? What matters?

Anyhow, the Dunedin-Owaka Southern Scenic Route was indeed an enjoyable route. Pleasure for eyes, and maybe soul (how cliché!). But, still, scenic? Is there any universal law of scenic? How do we become easily seduced by the scenic, the panoramic?

What makes a scene scenic and a panorama panoramic?

When do archaic sense of joy end and late capitalism begin? Blurred.

Nothing is scenic in the blur. Or maybe not.