30 Oct: Slow day with gannets

Marian's still coughing and blowing and not feeling 100% so we took it easy today. We drove around Napier in the morning, up and down the narrow and curving streets on The Bluff, the nicer residential district on a hill above town, and looked down on Napier's little container port.

Then it was a choice between the national aquarium and a trip to a colony of gannets. Seen aquaria before, so...

This was to be a three-hour cross-country ride in a 4-wheel-drive bus so Marian opted to stay behind and relax in our van. As advertised the ride was an hour of bumping over a steep and narrow track...

...over a very hilly sheep ranch.

Funny story here. According to the guide, the first owner, back in 1890, was a scottish bank manager who bought it on the strength of a real-estate brochure, 5,000 acres of gently rolling fertile sheep land on Hawke's Bay. When he got here he found it was 5,000 acres, all right. That much was true.

Also worth a note: these very green hills, like our California hills, turn brown in late spring. This whole area is in a rain shadow of a mountain range.

Finally we reach Kidnap Point, so called by Captain Cook who had some sort of argy-bargy with the Maori here. There are three gannet colonies. The oldest, the Saddle colony, can be seen on this dramatic point.

It's been in the same place since 1890. On the top of the bluff is the Cliff colony, est. 1930. The bus parks right next to it.

The gannets who are home sit on their nest mounds, all facing into the wind, which was very strong and gusty today.

The male and female alternate guarding the nest and feeding. Even now, before they have laid their eggs, they have to guard it because if they didn't, their neighbors would filch the kelp they have collected as lining. So they sit and nap.

When fledged, a young gannet heads south to Wellington and then west over the Tasman sea to spend its first two years in Australia, nobody knows why. Then it comes back here to find a mate and set up housekeeping.

The one of the pair who's been out to sea fishing comes home.

It flies over the colony emitting a special "honey, I'm home" call.

Its mate sits up straight and calls back. The returnee puts down the flaps and lands.

Then they do a little necking and beak-stroking.

It is the male's job to bring back hunks of kelp to furnish the nest.

So that was that. Did the laundry for the last time in New Zealand: one week to go! Tomorrow we are off to Gisborne.

29 Oct: Transition to Napier

Today we just transited from Masterton to Napier.

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The day started slow with a frustrating search for internet access (all searches for internet are frustrating). The rather elderly campground in Masterton had none, but we had taken a walk down the main street after supper last night. The street was absolutely dead at 9pm except for several kids with noisy cars criss-crossing town revving their engines. However, we noted several cafes along the street and figured at least one would have wi-fi. Also the town library offered it but wouldn't open until 9.

So at 7:30 we started driving slowly down the high street with a laptop open and found a hotspot at the nicest looking cafe. Went in, ordered flat whites and very nice pastries. Counter girl gave us the password to the wi-fi system ("sugar") and we logged in. And it was awful, couldn't do anything. Slow as an acoustic modem on David's machine, while Marian's couldn't connect at all.

Finished our nice coffees, went out, filled the van tank with diesel, and it was time for the library to open. Went in there and were able to get done what we wanted to do, mostly, except that system would not allow FTP access so Marian couldn't upload her Stanford page. This often happens; the filters and other wacky modifications these hotspot vendors put in place frequently screw up FTP, which is only the oldest, simplest protocol in networking.

All right, enough of this, let's start driving. Yesterday's weather had been lovely, the first day in weeks when we had been able to walk around outside in shirtsleeves, no extra sweater or jacket. But overnight the dreaded Southerlies blew in, bringing chilly air and rain from Antarctica. So just out of town we notice that the local hills have powdered sugar on them.

The rest of the day was a 300km run across mostly flat country, as usual charmingly green.

The sky was dramatic with showers and hail alternating with fast-moving sun shafts. And it was cold: by evening down around 5ºC (40ºF). Arrived in Napier and settled into a campground. Marian has a mild respiratory virus so took a nap. Then we went for a walk.

Napier was levelled by a 7.9 earthquake in 1931, and they rebuilt the town center all at once. There was plenty of cheap labor around in 1931. They used the then-trendy Art Deco style and today they are very proud of their Art Deco buildings. We took a walk through the town center, which was quiet as a cemetery at 5pm on a cold weekday. The only signs of life were away from the center, at the supermarket and the take-away fish'n'chips shop.

Anyway, maybe just a jaundiced view but the famous Art Deco center wasn't very impressive to our eyes so we cancelled our tentative plan to go on a guided walk in it tomorrow. What will we do instead? No idea. It's an adventure.

28 Oct: Steep roads

The Kapiti island cruise didn't come off, sigh. If it had, we would have been ferried in a rather small (30-foot?) boat across to the island reserve, and had a guided walk looking for unusual birds, plus lunch. But the ferry doesn't run when the winds are wrong, and they've been wrong every time for us. We were scheduled to do it before reaching Wellington; then we rescheduled to the weekend we were in Wellington; and then re-rescheduled for our return from the South Island. And every time the winds have been wrong and it's been called off.

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So we started north and east, but did so by going south and east first. Marian said that on the map, the Akatarawa road was the shortest way from the coast at Paraparaumu toward our goal of Masterton. (Google maps thinks so, too, and boy are they both wrong!) Shortly after we started this road, it narrowed to no more than a 12-foot width and became extremely steep and twisty, with many blind corners. We met several oncoming cars on the way, but managed to avoid scraping anything, although it was close a couple of times. How close was it? Well, Marian took no road pictures through the windshield. She was too busy clutching her seat.

Back on the main highway #2 (with a center line and sometimes shoulders, what luxury!) we crossed the very steep Rimutaka pass.

Looking back at the ascent.

Descending.

From the bottom

The Rimutaka range was a major barrier in the early days, until it was crossed by a railroad. This line had a 1:15 gradient on the north, very steep for railroads, and used special track and locos. This technology is documented at the Fell Locomotive museum, where a very nicely-done video, based on 1940s-era films, shows how the system worked.

There was a fleet of special Fell locomotives on standby at the foot of the grade. An arriving train was broken up and one Fell loco spliced in for every 4-5 cars to climb the grade. The Fell loco had two sets of driving wheels, one normal set driving on the regular track, and another set that got a friction grip on a raised center rail. For a descent, the locos and several brake cars were added. Locos and brake cars both gripped the center rail with soft-iron shoes which became white-hot and were so worn they were replaced after every run.

A brakeman adjusted those wheels to clamp the center rail.

A whole village of railroad workers manned this hill for fifty years, maintaining the locos and brake cars and taking trains up and down the Rimutaka grade every day.

Further up the road we found Stonehenge Aotearoa. A project of a group of astronomy buffs, it is not a recreation of the British stone-age observatory, but a modern version adapted to New Zealand's skies. The alignments of the rising and setting sun at the solstice and equinoxes are marked by stones, as in the old British version.

But the shadow of the central obelisk, at local noon, traces out the analemma of the sun's progress through the year.

And other stellar and solar alignments are shown. One thing we learned there: the reason for building the circle of lintel stones. Single standing stones are enough to mark rising and setting points; why a whole elevated circle? The answer is that it supplies a known, level horizon against which the rise and set of stars can be marked. Without the circle, you as a naked-eye astronomer would be marking the time of a rising or setting star against an uneven local hillside with trees and sheep in the way.

For the final stop of the day we went to the Mount Bruce Wildlife Center, where endangered birds are bred for release. There wasn't actually much to see except a bunch of Kaka. We had spotted and identified wild Kakas at the Wellington Arboretum but here we got close to the noisy parrot-like critters.

Also we got a close look at a wild Tui who came and sat just above our heads. The Tui is a common bird, we see and hear them everywhere. AKA the Parson Bird for his neat little white bow-tie.

And so into camp. Tomorrow a long run to Napier.

27 Oct: Rough Passage

Today was the transition from South Island back to the North Island. It's normally a three-hour ride on the very large car ferry (see the 05 Oct entry for pictures of the ferry). Today at the check-in gate there was a sign, "Sea Conditions: Moderate." We didn't think to take a picture of it...

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As the ship cleared the land there was a p.a. announcement: "Due to conditions in Cook Strait, passengers are advised to use caution in moving about the ship..." In fact there were pretty large seas in the open strait and this very large ship began moving around quite a bit. A few times it rolled enough that stuff tried to slide off the table and had to be grabbed. The bow would bang down with a shudder and throw spray all the way to the top observation deck.

Here was the view forward,

and the view aft.

Usually we straighten pictures so water horizons are flat, but this time all tilting is natural.

The trip took an extra half-hour but docked routinely at 1:30 and we were off to Paraparaumu (pronounced just like it's spelled, para para umu ... and not "papa ooh mau mau papa ooh mau mau," as some of the fifties throwbacks around here want to say it...). Bought groceries; then couldn't find a suitable campground, so checked into a motel for the night. Tomorrow, weather permitting, finally Kapiti island. However, late info says it may be cancelled, which will be the fourth time for us.

26 Oct: Greenstone and Blue Water

Today is Labor Day in NZ and the newspaper had a dire forecast for people going home over mountain passes tonight: a storm developing with snow down to 500m. However the day began brilliant and warm here in Havelock.

Havelock bills itself "Gateway to the Pelorus Sound." As you can see in the map below, the Pelorus sound is a long complicated waterway. The surrounding land is largely unpopulated and unroad-ed, but there are numerous resorts reached by water and by several hiking tracks. All through NZ there are long hiking tracks through unpopulated but spectacular scenery. Trekking is a popular holiday activity which we only wish we were young enough to participate in.

Havelock is also home to a gallery displaying the works of (mostly) a single carver of greenstone, the NZ jade. Greenstone carving was and is a Maori craft; the designs are mostly traditional abstract shapes. When we passed through here (6 Oct) we both admired his work, but didn't buy because there were said to be several galleries of greenstone work further down the West Coast. There were, but they showed us nothing at any price that had the delicacy and imagination we had seen in Havelock by Clem Mellish.

So Marian adjusted the schedule to bring us back through Havelock and here we were at 10am outside the gallery waiting for it to open. Which it didn't. We had to be in Picton at 1pm and time was a bit tight. David asked at the grocery across the street; the lady said, oh, they're my neighbors, I'll call them (gotta love a small town) but there was no answer. Grocery store lady assured us they usually opened by 10:30, so we waited. The lady, Mrs. Mellish in fact, finally showed just before 11. After a good deal of careful shopping, Marian selected a small (about 1.5-inch) pendant:

Then we had to git for Picton.

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We spent two-plus hours on this 36km, very slow, twisty and scenic road a few weeks ago (see 10/6) but today with only a couple of quick stops for pictures we did it in 90 minutes. You can't pass up a view like this.

And reached Picton in plenty of time. Picton is on the Queen Charlotte Sound, which does not connect to the Pelorus Sound except by way of the open Pacific.

Note the seaplane in the air.

So the appointment here was for a boat tour to Motuara island, another bird sanctuary. (It's at the mouth of Queen Charlotte Sound, the tiny one just under the "o" of "Endeavor Inlet" in the Google map.) The tour team was knowledgeable and typically NZ in being sharp, cheerful and outgoing.

The first thing we stopped to see was gannets feeding. We'd had a glimpse of the Australasian Gannet at the top of Farewell spit, but here we got closer. They are one cool bird.

The gannets were feeding because a pod of dusky dolphins was driving fish to the surface.

We got a look at some King Shag ('shag' = 'cormorant'). They are rare, about 500 pair in the world, and breed only on some little islands at the mouth of the Queen Charlotte Sound.

On Motuara island we got a good close look at a common bird that has been eluding us the whole trip, the New Zealand Robin.

"You like my bands? They study me, you know."

As well as bell birds and saddlebacks which stayed back in the bush and didn't want to be photographed. There are nesting boxes for the Little Blue Penguin (aka Fairy Penguin). They apparently don't mind having the top of the box opened several times a day, as they keep returning to the same boxes year after year.

Excuse me, do you mind? We're sleepin' in here.

And so into camp. Tomorrow we ferry off the South Island, with some regret. It's been spectacular in many ways.

25 Oct: Just a nice day

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We had supposed that when we left Aoraki and the central alps we were pretty well done with "Wow!" scenery. But as we left Kaikoura this morning we couldn't help but notice that the northern end of the alps comes right down to the coast.

...always better with sheep...

"Kaikoura" means "eatin' crayfish" and the area is known for big crayfish, sold from roadside stands. We had to stop and buy one.

There was a gulp when we learned that the small one we chose cost nz$36.

Cutting l'hommard tres cher.

We meant to eat it cold right there. We set the plate on a picnic table and stepped away and a red-legged gull came down and stole half the shelled hommard. Fortunately the chunk of meat was too heavy for him to fly with, so he flopped to the grass and David drove him off. The grass-stained meat with seagull spit on it was eaten anyway, with mayo and a sip of Waipara Valley Riesling.

Like in Finding Nemo they are saying "Mine? Mine? Mine?"

Just down the road we watched some fur seals establishing territory for the oncoming breeding season.

Along this coast the Pacific has a color we cannot recall seeing anywhere else, even in Hawaii.

In Blenheim, David visited the Omaka Aviation Heritage Center. This is a collection of (mostly) WWI combat planes and memorabilia of the pilots and designers of that time. The collection is the hobby of Peter Jackson and the restored planes are exhibited in dioramas created by Weta Workshop. It was very dark and hard to get good pictures but here are couple of the 16 exhibits.

An Etrich Taube, early observer plane before planes got guns. The observer is firing with a rifle.

Nieuport 27 crashed in a tree; German soldiers arrest pilot. (Spectators are real.)

We were deep in the Marlboro wine country now. Thousands of acres of vineyards just coming into leaf.

As usual the afternoon sun makes the greens pop out. So here's your daily dose of green.

...sheep, they make a landscape better...