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:
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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.
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