Feet>flippers

It was the night before summer race day, and these two mongolian boys were getting their horses ready with a good bath in the Eggin Gol. Four-legged things taking up residence in water is weird. The kid in the foreground won first place.

Hovsgol Province, Northern Mongolia

it's a seal

When crawling around in waist-deep grass at twilight, you need to remember the giant weasels. Because you're not likely to see a Kekeno before you snuggle up next to it, and even less likely when you smell one. It's like finding a can of sardines in a steamy litterbox. They're funny without their feet though. This one was just ambling along, and wouldn't even stop for poor Peter the Norseman. We had to say his name a lot of times before he finally lunged out of the seal's flop zone. There were two on our other side, which put us in the middle of a small territory dispute with a lot of Pinniped coughing and grunting. Good thing Richard is bipedal.

New Zealand Fur Seal, Boulder Beach, Otago Peninsula

o Otago

Gold. It's here because of gold. Au, The only reason this place ever became a town of stone and gardens. Enormous churches, paved streets. It flowed out of the mountains and rolling dry plains, from the metamorphic dirt to the prospectors to the assayers to the buyers to the ships to the empire of londoners and back again, that's the reason it's possible to live so far out on the monastic pacific. And at dusk, when you emerge from a library that's closer to Tierra del Fuego, Easter Island or the Ross Ice Shelf than home, there's a glowing clock face that says so. Little candles burning in dungeons of knowledge behind leaded glass - this is the future of studying the past.

University of Otago clock on the Waters of Leith, Dunedin

Victory beach

It's named after a steamship ironically aground here (1861). The real win goes to this Yellow-eyed Penguin who was fishing out at sea all day. They waddle up the beach to bed down in the grass we're hiding in. This happens every day at sunset, but we were laying in wait tonight. There is something even humans love about the crepuscular.

Victory beach, Otago Peninsula, NZ

PS: Q: did I do anything to this photo? A: no, the light looked like this.

Photos from Bros: Richard Candler

Three days of cloudless skies were more than we would ever ask for. Rarely are the rain gods of the Southern Alps this merciful. Noting opportunity, we made for the hills. We took this shot poised on the edge of Fiordland while we waited for the sun to swing back around the other side Earth. This is what the night sky would look like if it took your eyes/brain 9 minutes to process light. Luckily, my Canon can do what my intervalometer asks.

- RC

Dart River valley, western Otago, Aotearoa

Lava

The whole Otago Peninsula is a scrambled sliced smothered and covered field of ancient sleepy volcanoes. Up and down, sea to sea to cove to swash, rolling and climbing steep hills. If land is still, it can be easy to forget - until igneous moments like this one catch you by surprise seconds from the beach.

Sea is on

Springtime in Antarctica now. Dunedin's gold-fueled botannical gardens are shedding pink petals all through the gutters. So it's not the cold that's life-threatening about a low-tide scramble through lava boulders and rotten pyroclasts. Adam leads us on a climby seaweed and mussel foraging trip to Murderer's Beach on the dusky South Pacific.

Luck

A day from when the only thing steering this bike was the next minute's worth of curiosity. Refining luck has something to do again with the automatic rearranging of randomness in reality to a story. Luck is lucky when it fits best into the plot. Like today, cruising my new 1974 Triumph TC 2000 up the street in Auckland, it didn't burst into flames from the pissing huge fuel leak out the rear carburetor. It means I'm still headed down to the South Island tomorrow, up the fish again, to the waters of Pounamu.

This is only one lucky frame out of a few hundred shot on the side of the road as part of a timelapse I'm still working on.

Out of bounds at Monument Valley, Arizona/Utah USA

A thousand years ago, Maui pulled up Aotearoa out of the sea like a fish. The other name for Auckland is 'land desired by many people.' So they covered it up with buildings so no one would want it.

CBD, Auckland, New Zealand

Primates in a Can

Aotearoa. They packed us all into an aluminum tube, gas pumped and pressured against thin air through which we hurled across the Pacific just slower than sound. Flying is crazy. Well, at least we didn't spend several months of our lives floating to get here. Pity, maybe. Certain: we are not on the same side of the world anymore.