Alden Boon

A 30-Million-Year-Old Recipe: Pancake Rocks, Punakaiki, Are a Feast for the Eyes

17/06/2017

Flour, sugar, baking powder, milk, unsalted butter, sugar and more ingredients go into the breakfast delights that are pancakes. In Punakaiki, New Zealand, making pancakes takes a bit of patience — 30 million years of patience, to be exact — and soft mud, clay as well as gnarly remnants of dead marine creatures and plants abounding with lime.

Punakaiki | Pancake Rocks
Punakaiki | Pancake Rocks
Punakaiki | Pancake Rocks
Punakaiki | Pancake Rocks

These ingredients of nature rested on the ocean floor, forming hard and soft layers of limestone and sandstone. Then the destructive tremors of earthquake brought the ocean floor to the surface, and there pelting rain and powerful gust rived the sandstone, engendering a knot of cliffs and ravines today known as Pancake Rocks.

The rolling sea feeds the stacked, outlying formations with many splashes. During high tide, the torrential waters burrow their way through blowholes and are eventually ejected to lick the vertical shafts. Less powerful are the expulsions compared with a geyser’s, but its rhythmic swishes are still soothing to the ears.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alden Boon
Alden Boon is a Quarter-finalist in PAGE International Screenwriting Awards. When he's not busy writing, he pretends he is Gandalf.