Wrapping it up: Birding

Bird-watching is a highlight of all our trips — especially this one, where we expected to see many birds we had never seen before, as well as those we saw in our prior trip to New Zealand and Australia.

We took with us The Hand Guide to the Birds of New Zealand and information about various wildlife tours. New Zealand has many nature reserves (like U.S. National Wildlife Refuges) set aside to protect endangered birds, animals and plants. Guided tours are available for each one, and are sometimes the only way to visit one. We toured as many nature reserves as our schedule and the weather allowed.

In some ways, birding in New Zealand is ridiculously easy, because there are relatively few species. For example, there is just one kind of sparrow (House sparrow), one swallow (Welcome swallow), one warbler (Grey warbler), one large accipiter (Australian harrier). There are three kinds of gulls — the little one with the black bill and legs (Black-billed gull), the little one with the bright red bill and legs (Red-billed gull) and the big one (Black-backed gull) — no problem deciding which one you're looking at.

The seabirds are a different story. There are 11 kinds of albatrosses, 13 shearwaters and 36 petrels! We wouldn't have seen any of those, much less known which one, without the guided tours.

The rare birds are very rare. Again, we wouldn't have seen and identified any of those without the guided tours of nature reserves. An exception: We found and identified our 499th life bird (New Zealand dotterel) all by ourselves — an especially satisfying experience.

The trip met our bird-watching expectations. In a bit more than seven weeks, we saw 77 different species of birds, 39 of them for the first time. Here are photos of about half of them.

Wrapping it up: Money and Prices

New Zealand money is fun. The bills are made of a polymer material, are of different colors, have pretty pictures, and each bill has transparent sections. (A Wikipedia article gives details of these anti-counterfeiting measures.)

The only bills are the $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100. There are no singles; instead they use $1 and $2 coins. These are fat and solid-feeling.

The only other coins are the 10¢, 20¢, and 50¢ pieces. No pennies or nickels. How do they make change? They don't! All unit prices are in multiples of 10¢. When items like groceries and fuel are priced by weight or volume, the calculated price is rounded off to the nearest 10¢. This seemed very sensible and we'd like to see it done here, as well. Get rid of the nickels and pennies.

Credit Card PINs

One difference that came up every day, sometimes several times a day, was the way credit cards are used in NZ. Every business that takes them has a little 10-key numeric pad on the counter, connected to their credit card validator (the "swipe here" thing). NZ natives never sign for a credit card purchase. After swiping their card and hitting OK to agree to the price, they key in a PIN. It's much faster than signing a receipt.

We couldn't do that; our US credit cards don't have PINs associated. So we'd hit the Enter key instead and the clerk would give us a receipt to sign. And almost always, they would check the signature against the card.

Prices

Marian very correctly says you cannot make a reasonable price comparison when you don't take into account salaries, tax structures, etc. etc.

We did not keep records of what we paid for things and we did not agonize over (or indeed, pay any attention to) any prices under $20. We bought a couple of larger items—Marian's jade pendant, David's merino sweater—and in each case, gave the price enough thought to realize, "that's a good deal."

Just the same, there was a general impression that common things cost more than at home.

Fuel did, for certain. Similar to European prices, diesel cost $1/litre, plus or minus a penny. (Gasoline was closer to $1.50/litre but fortunately our van used diesel.) That's us$3.80/gallon (us$5.60 for gas).

Today (16 Nov) David went online to woolworth.co.nz (Woolworth runs a chain of supermarkets in NZ) and got the prices of some randomly selected grocery items that are similar to their US counterparts. Then he got prices for the comparable items from safeway.com.

All prices were then scaled to dollars per liter or dollars per kilogram, as appropriate, and nz$ converted to us$ at the rate of nz$1 == us$0.75. Here are the results (details on request if anyone cares).

Product	NZ price	US price
Chicken	us$12	$11.95
Bread	us$4.20	$6.89
Ketchup	us$7.03	$3.69
Coke	us$2.19	$1.69
Milk	us$1.15	0.79

So there you are. Coke, milk and Ketchup cost quite a bit more, bread is quite a bit less, and chicken is a wash. So there's no clear evidence that Kiwis pay more or less, on the average, than we do.

Wrapping it up: Equipment for blogging

We took all our photos with our Nikon D50 equipped with the Nikon 18-200mm zoom. We had along a pocket Canon A670 for backup but we never used it.

Oh thou good & faithful servant...

This Nikon is a horse. We've been hauling it around with us since 2006. It should fly free, it's been on so many planes. It's gone thousand of miles riding on the floor between the seats in our RV; it has crossed Russia on the TSE. Its battery is good for three days of shooting. It comes on instantly and focuses even faster. If you see a picture you can pick it up, slide the power switch to "on", aim, and shoot all in one continuous motion, grab-swing-click. Try that with your average pocket camera. By the time it has finished booting up and stretching out its lens, your picture is long-gone. We've been using the Nikon so long, the rubber strip on the zoom ring has stretched out of shape and wants to slip off.

The Macbook Pro 13-inch, on the other hand, was bought new just before this trip. Unlike David's prior Macbook, the screen of the Pro has good enough color it can be used for accurate photo editing. Its sale-clinching feature was that it has a slot in the side for an SD card. No need to carry an external USB reader to input the camera chips.

"Mr. Fusion" reading pics from an SD card.

Every night we uploaded the day's pictures from the camera card into the Macbook, where Adobe Bridge stored them in a new folder named for the day, e.g. 20091031. A typical day produced 100 or so pictures, with a low of 20 and a high of 250.

We would sit together over the Macbook and cull the pictures, choosing on average one in five to keep permanently. The selected ones got moved into a separate folder for the week and David would go through them and add keywords for cataloging.

Then David would select from the day's "keepers" the ones to show in the blog. These he would work over lightly in Photoshop, typically spending no more than two minutes on a picture. Mods were kept to a minimum. Almost every blog picture needed to be straightened and most were cropped a bit. The Photoshop "Shadow/Highlight" tool was sometimes applied to bring out shadow details in a dark scene. And pictures taken on gloomy days got their contrast and brightness boosted a bit.

The "road pictures" that Marian took through the van windshield had to be color-corrected. Here is part of an uncorrected road picture.

The windshield makes things too green and gray.

Fortunately, New Zealand lines every road with white plastic markers that have little reflective stripes in them. Those stripes are perfect gray-scale references! All we had to do was get a Curves adjustment, and click the mid-gray eyedropper on one of those reflector stripes, to get an instant correction of the color.

Windshield color corrected - whites are now white and grays, gray.

The windshield also drained contrast and life from the scene so a little Photoshop Brightness-Contrast adjustment was in order to make a road picture look like what we saw.

Photoshop chases the clouds away.

But again, that was for pictures shot through the windshield. Pictures taken in the open, under full sun, never needed anything done to them. The amazing greens and brilliant flowers, foliage, and ocean waves came out of the Nikon, bless its pixels, looking just like how we saw them.

After being buffed-up in photoshop, David scaled each blog picture down to either 1024 pixels (most) or 1280 pixels (the super-good ones) and uploaded the scaled version to our Smugmug album. Once there, links to each pic could be put in the blog text.

When David finished drafting the blog entry he turned it over to Marian for proofreading and rewriting. Then it got posted and we could go to bed!

Batteries and Charging

We had two laptops, the Nikon's battery charger, and a charger for the cell-phone. Fortunately all of them were perfectly happy to take 220-volt 50hz power. We had two adapters to connect US-type plugs to NZ's sockets. The van offered two outlet sockets that of course were only live when the van was plugged in at a powered campground. Both outlets would be occupied all evening charging laptops, camera, or phone.

Wrapping it up: New Zealand

People ask us, "So how was it?"

The answer is, it was great. We saw just a wealth of beautiful countryside, added a bunch of new birds to our life-lists, took a lot of good pictures, and in general had a great time.

So what is New Zealand like? Silly question; it's a whole country. It has twice the land area of the state of California. Driving the whole thing north to south as we did, is like driving from San Francisco to Vancouver, BC: that distance and variety of climates.

But what it is like in general is, gorgeous. New Zealand has more "wow" scenery per kilometer than any other place we've explored (Well, the stretch of the Rockies from Montana up into the big parks in Canada comes close.) In spring, even the gentle rolling parts are just dazzling from all the intense green, and there is always a steep, snow-capped mountain on the horizon in some direction.

Well-Kept Land

New Zealand is very well kept. The farms are orderly with tidy fences and outbuildings. Cities and towns are clean and graffiti-free. Public facilities of all kinds are almost as perfectly maintained as in Japan. (We contrast this with another island "country," Hawaii, where you often see tumble-down shacks, rusted-out cars, and decaying buildings. None of that anywhere in NZ.)

Especially impressive are the access trails to outdoor sites. We walked public trails almost every day and never saw a trail in bad condition, rough, or washed-out. (Well, we did find a trail with lots of mud-puddles, but that was after 24 hours of heavy rain, and if we'd been wearing proper hiking shoes it wouldn't have been a problem.) Wherever a trail is steep, they've built stairs. Wherever the trail crosses a marsh, there's a boardwalk. Wherever there's a view, there's a platform with a railing. And every stair, platform or boardwalk that might be slippery is covered with wire mesh for a non-slip surface.

The Highways

The highways are as nicely kept-up and signed as the trails. Now remember, in this whole country there is at most 50 miles of limited-access freeway. All the other highways are two-lane, often curving and narrow. Comparable US highways that come to mind: California route 1 from Half Moon Bay south through Big Sur; CA highway 50 from Placerville over Echo Summit to South Lake Tahoe; Washington route 20 up the Skagit valley and over Washington Pass to Lake Chelan. That's kinda-sorta what the New Zealand driving experience is like.

Would we recommend a trip like ours to others? Maybe. If you aren't very athletic and you like to travel on your own, driving around New Zealand in a van is great. However, there was a slight frustration in that we couldn't really get close to and engage with all that beautiful scenery. That's owing to our age and general condition.

If you are younger than us and able to walk 20km (10-15mi) a day, then certainly the absolute best way to get "well stuck in" (as they say) to this country would be to walk some of the great hiking tracks. There are world-famous multi-day walks that are supported by backpacker sites and wilderness resorts. And those walks get deep into the really spectacular scenery that we could only see the tops and edges of.

If you are really young and fearless, every New Zealand town and city has youth hostels and cheap backpacker hotels. With its low crime rate and the average New Zealander's generally open and accepting outlook, this could well be the safest country in the world to just walk and hitch-hike with minimal cash.

Wrapping it up: The VW LT Camper

We spent almost eight weeks in the Britz "Elite" van. Without going into a lot of detail, we can just say,

If you are renting a camper van in New Zealand avoid this one or any other based on the Volkswagen LT chassis.

The VW LT chassis on which this vehicle is based has a hard, choppy ride and a loud, harsh-sounding diesel engine.

At 6.6 meters in length, it is too long for any standard parking space. You cannot park it in an angle-parking space on street or a nose-in space in a lot because it will jut out into the travel lane. You cannot parallel-park it in a single space, you need two. And its wide turning radius and its length mean you have to take corners like a city bus. (David is proud to say that in nearly 8,000 km travel he only drove over a curb while turning a couple of times.)

Other van companies may do a better job of interior layout but the Britz/Maui/Backpacker version of the van is very badly designed. Storage areas are small and inaccessible and the bed is hard to set up and take down. From the many small annoyances we encountered, it is clear that the person who designed this interior never camped in it.

In selecting your New Zealand camper, go for a smaller chassis, omitting the interior toilet/shower unless you really feel a need for one. Look for a van based on a Ford, Toyota, or Hiace chassis.

Wrapping it up: Van Rentals

Renting a camper van seems to be the most common way of touring New Zealand. In two months on the road around both islands of New Zealand, we saw hundreds of camper vans. In the more remote parts of the South Island, camper vans make up half the road traffic! We looked at vans in campgrounds and on the road.

Typical Vans

The typical camper van is very like a rental RV in the US. It will have a sink, an electric refrigerator, an LP gas cooktop, and a seating area that makes up into a double bed at night. There is a hot-water heater that also works off the LP-gas bottle. There will be a microwave and a heater that both work off external power, so usable only when set up in a powered campsite. All but the smallest vans have a shower/toilet unit the size of a telephone booth.

The van has a certain amount of storage space scattered around the interior, some less accessible than others. We can speak only of one van layout and its storage was abysmally badly designed. Other vans might have better arrangements. But expect to struggle with finding where to put everything you bring. Bring a few big zip-loc bags to help organize shelves.

A word about the toilet. It's a Porta-Potti, where wastes are stored in a relatively small plastic tank. Unlike the typical US RV, to dump wastes you open a door in the side of the van, slide out the Porta-Potti container, and carry it to the dump station to empty and rinse it. Gray water from the sink and shower collects in a tank under the van and is dumped using a hose provided in the van.

Rental companies

The largest rental outfit is a conglomerate that does business under the separate names of

• Britz,
• Backpacker,
• Maui,
• and ExploreMore.

We booked with Britz and found their service adequate. It left a bit of a sour taste that, although we told them before arrival and during arrival that we were a long-term rental and would appreciate a good van, they still gave us one with 142,000 kilometers on the odometer. (A newer van of the same design would have been little improvement, see our discussion of the Britz "Elite" model.)

Other van companies whose vehicles we saw often on the road were:

• Kea
• Cheapa Campa
• and Jucy

The Kea vans in particular looked new and nice. Jucy aims at a youth demographic by covering their vans with splashy graphics.

Rental Contracts

Be aware that all of the van rental companies have long and very restrictive contracts. You need to read the contract (usually available online if you click around the website enough).

New Zealand auto liability law requires rental companies to take a huge deposit (nz$5,000, yes, five thousand) which is actually charged, over and above the rental fee, to your credit card at delivery. You will pay interest on it of course, unless you pay the credit card off before interest comes due. Be sure your credit limit will allow it, and it's not a bad idea to call your credit card service number and warn them of the large charge to be placed from a foreign country.

If there is any damage whatever to the van when you return it, the van company will insist on treating it as an insurance claim. They hold that $5,000 deposit and will not return it until their insurance company has evaluated the damage and decided how much of it they will cover. That decision, of course, is made in your absence, as you have returned to your home country. Anything not covered by the insurance is deducted from the deposit and the remainder is returned.

All the companies offer "improved" insurance coverage at various levels. This means that they charge you so much per day in a non-refundable fee, and in turn reduce that big deposit. For our long-term rental, the daily fee would have added up to nearly the $5,000 anyway, so we opted to carry the deposit. It's a no-win situation.

Besides the insurance "gotcha" the van company contract will usually require you to pay for windshield damage and repair of tires. We had two flats, costing us nz$70 to fix. The moral here is: refuse to accept a van that doesn't have good, deep tread on its tires (tyres). If the tires look at all worn, insist on a different van. The company will reimburse for mechanical breakdown charges.

All rental companies claim to offer AA road service. The New Zealand Automobile Association is a good organization, but their on-road breakdown assistance is not free to campers. When we wanted a tyre changed on a Sunday morning in the suburbs of Dunedin, we called the 0800 number on the Britz keytag. It rang through to the AA dispatcher, but she would not send out aid until she had successfully charged nz$95 to our credit card. We have no idea what the charge would have been if we'd been in some remote location. These charges are not reimbursed by the van company.

The final "bite" comes only when you turn in the van at the end of your stay. Then the van company calculates a "diesel recovery tax" based on the distance you travelled, and adds it to your bill. Don't look so startled, it is right there in that 10,000-word contract you signed. Hey, it's just another couple of hundred nz$ at the end of your stay...

Do we sound a bit sour? Well, yes: the final dealings with the van company did leave a rather sour taste at the end our otherwise excellent vacation. You can have a very good holiday in a rental camper, but you need to be aware of the many charges and restrictive clauses in the rental contract.

Wrapping it up: Holiday Parks

Near every town and almost every major tourist attraction in New Zealand you will find a "holiday park," what in the US we call "RV parks." Often there are two or three. (One noteworthy exception: the nearest holiday park to Mt. Cook is 60km away.) We stayed in many of these parks and they were all similar and almost all good. The nearest comparison to a holiday park would be a KOA, but the typical KOA is not as nice or as clean as the typical holiday park.

Holiday parks always have powered and un-powered sites. Powered sites offer an electrical connection and, usually, a water tap. Every powered site in the country uses the identical heavy-duty grounded 220V socket, and every rental van comes with an extension cord to fit that socket. You back into the site, get out your cord from the van's utility box, and plug in. Immediately your in-van microwave and heater work and your auxiliary battery begins to charge.

Unpowered sites are typically used by tent campers. These are almost always grass sites. Powered sites are sometimes grass, sometimes gravel, rarely asphalt. For powered sites we paid from nz$24 to nz$37 per night. Unpowered sites are less.

In the middle of every holiday park is an "ablution block" (they really call it that), a building with toilet and shower rooms for men and for women. With only one exception that we saw, these were always perfectly maintained and kept almost surgically clean. No leaky taps, no empty soap or paper dispensers, no overflowing waste cans or blocked toilets. Even in a cheap and rather forbidding camp in the farthest west coast, the ablution block was spotlessly maintained. They are usually heated, and often have piped music. At one quite old camp there was visible rust on pipes, but the facility was still clean.

Near, or sometimes combined with, the ablution block building is a kitchen with multiple sinks and stoves and refrigerators. Many campers cook here rather than in their vans. The kitchens also are kept spotless.

Many camps have an elaborate children's play area, often with a trampoline and other equipment. There is often a TV lounge. Some campgrounds offer a separate barbecue facility for campers to use. Some parks have an "internet kiosk," either stand-alone or as part of the TV lounge, where you can rent time on a PC to check email.

Every park has a trailer dump station. Many of these are better-designed and maintained than in a U.S. campground. In the nicer parks the dump station is in a little kiosk and there is a basin with soap dispenser right next to it so you can wash your hands.

The NZ equivalent of the KOA chain is the Top Ten Holiday Parks. Early on we were very pleased with a Top Ten park and bought their $30 membership card, getting a 10% discount at all Top Ten parks. The same card is supposed to be good for 10% off the inter-island ferry toll, and that would be a substantial saving, but you must book your ferry ride by telephone to claim it. (Not knowing this, we booked online and didn't get the discount.) We recommend the Top Ten chain; all their parks that we tried were immaculate. The Kiwi chain is another chain of affiliated parks. Our experiences with them were mixed: the Kiwi park in Christchurch was the best-managed and nicest park of our trip, while another was small and noisy and shabby (but still clean).

Using Wi-Fi

Many parks have wireless internet. In all cases internet access cost from nz$4 to nz$8 per hour. We used wi-fi wherever it was available. (Where it wasn't, we went into town looking for an internet cafe.) There are several different internet providers and each has its own style of annoying and intrusive sign-up page. The least convenient force you to purchase a 1-hour or 3-hour chit from the park office, and enter an 8-character userid and 8-character password to log-on. Of course you want to log on and off quickly so as to use your time efficiently, and this method is awkward and irritating. Other providers allow you to purchase time online using a credit card, so at least you can buy more time after the office has closed. But how secure is their purchase page?

The absolute best wi-fi provider is ZenBU.net, who do not charge by the minute but by the megabyte of data transferred. This works out cheaper, but mainly it is so much more pleasant not to have to rush to get things done in a limited time. Unfortunately we found ZenBU only in motels, not in parks.

06 Nov: The Last Flat White

The morning sky was, of course, clear blue with puffy white clouds. We spent a couple of hours going through every cranny and crevice of the van, dividing things into Ours, Theirs, Throw Away, and St. Vincent DePaul's.

The latter being the useful items we'd bought on the way: the plastic baskets we bought the first day which were crucial to making the few storage shelves in the van actually useful; the coffee mugs and cereal bowls we bought at a $1 store because the ones Britz provided were so small; the two wine glasses we bought at a charity shop when we decided to carry wine for sippin'.

The Ours pile was intimidatingly large. David, responsible for packing it into our suitcases, contemplated it with some dismay.

Marian gave the van a last brush-out.

Then we still had hours to kill, so we went back to the Auckland Arboretum. After walking around smelling the roses (literally)...

...we went to their cafe and had our last Flat Whites. Then it was time to take the van back to the rental agency. We'll post about New Zealand van rentals later; it's not all a pretty story. But when all the paperwork was tidied up, the van took us to the airport, Air New Zealand gave us two aisles with an empty middle between to share, and there's nothing more to do but wait for departure (and blog).

05 Nov: Washed out of the country

"This weather," Marian said, "is a disgrace."

Our last full day opened under low dark cloud. The only planned activities were to look at shorebirds from two places around the Firth of Thames, a major shore-bird hangout.

We had a dry hour at the first stop, seeing nothing much but godwits. Godwits have a great story to tell—they migrate annually between here and the Yukon River delta in Alaska, check that on your globe for a trip—but we had seen them before on this trip.

Then as we started around the foot of the Firth the rain began and it continued to rain, steadily and sometimes heavily, the rest of the day. No vistas, no color. At the second stop, the Miranda Shorebird Center, we tried to walk out to their shore hide. This involved a long trek across open pastures. Our shoes got soaked, our pants were sticking to our legs, and somehow we lost the trail and ended up back on the highway. Our only view of the birds were of happy godwits feeding in the far distance. As we pulled away, Marian stuck the camera out the van window and took our only picture of the day.

Declaring that a bust we headed for the Manukau Top Ten Holiday Park, a place we had stayed once before (21 Sept, "Back to Auckland"), driving through increasingly busy (but equally wet) Auckland suburbs

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Determined not to let our last day dribble out completely, we booked a table at an upscale restaurant in downtown Auckland. After showers and tidying up, we took a taxi downtown for a nice meal overlooking the harbor. (The two taxi rides did a nice job of using up most of our remaining NZ currency.) It was Guy Falks night and we could see fireworks displays going off across the water. In fact when we got back to the van around 9:30, there were fireworks going off in the backyards of the houses ajoining the holiday park. These are definitely not "safe and sane" fireworks, either, but big fountains and candles that shoot 50 feet in the air and explode loudly.

We figured, OK, New Zealand doesn't want to make us feel bad about leaving, so it gives us a miserable last day, but at least... fireworks for a send-off.

What's Next?

If time permits we may post a progress note from the Auckland airport Friday afternoon after we check in. Then, next week, we'll post a few follow-up notes, general impressions of camper-vanning around New Zealand. Eventually we will reorganize and expand the number of pictures in the Smugmug gallery. So keep the RSS link in your browser. This blog is not quite dead yet.

04 Nov: Full-Value Day

Lots of stuff happening in a short distance.

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Driving Creek Railway

Several attractions are the work of inspired/obsessed individuals, like the Eastwood Gardens we enjoyed a couple of days ago. Today we started at the Driving Creek Railway & Potteries, which is the work of one guy, Barry Brickell, who has twin obsessions with creating art pottery and doing civil engineering. In order to get clay and wood down from the steep slopes of his property he started, 27 years ago, to build a narrow-gauge railway. Now the elaborate system draws tourists to ride it, paying for the 79-year-old Brickells other obsessions. He was around this morning, said hello to us.

Marian: "I want to sit right up front."

And we're off.

Through tunnels that are works of art.

In order to get up the steep slopes the train uses "reversing points" where it runs up to a stop, the driver throws a switch, and the train moves off the opposite direction, climbing higher on a parallel track. One of these reversing points is out in the air.

The railway has a certificate of operation from the NZ Transport Agency.

There's a two-level bridge where, after reversing, you go back over the same bridge the other way.

At the top is the "Eyefull Tower," also designed by Brickell.

From it there is a fabulous view. Some days.

Not, alas, today...

Bird #500

Next to the train yard is Brickell's third obsession, restoring native vegetation and wildlife. He's planted hundreds of Kauri trees over the years, and now there's a predator-proof hectare of nature reserve. We asked about it and got a personal tour by a lady who's been working on it for years.

And, there in the preserve, was a bird we hadn't seen, our 500th, the New Zealand Brown Teal. Said to be the second rarest of New Zealand's ducks.

At the feeding station were some birds we've seen before, but not this close.

The Silver-eye

The Tui

Unknown Plant

Now it was 1pm and we set off down the scenic coast toward Thames. Right away we started noticing stands of a bright yellow roadside plant, which we don't know what it is...

Pohutakawa Coast

The Pohutakawa Coast road proved to be very scenic, kinda-sorta reminiscent of the 17-mile drive in Monterey.

It would be fabulous when the Christmas Trees were in bloom, but almost none were.

Rapaura Falls

We had tea at the Rapaura Falls Park, a private water-garden, that is, a garden that featured lots of water, as ponds, trickles and falls. Here are a few nice things from there.

Short-time Syndrome

In camp, cooked our last dinner in the van (fresh New Zealand lamb chops and asparagus from a farm stand); tomorrow night we'll eat out. Marian started throwing out stuff we won't use again. Feel like short-timers now.

3 Nov: Bird #499

A few days ago, Marian was updating the joint Bird Life List she keeps for us and noticed that we were at #499. "One more new bird and we'll have 500," she said. This later turned out not to be so; her spreadsheet had 500 rows, but the first row is column headings, so we were at #498 actually. So today we went looking for #499.

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As we set out we noticed at the entrance to the RV park, we noticed a variant Pohutakawa with a yellow blossom.

Later on that run we noticed a perfect bottle-brush bush.

Truth is, these grow 200 feet from our home. But it was perfect. We also noticed that the Manuka was in bloom.

This is the stuff from which the bees are making the wonderful honey. Also we've been seeing a lot of a tree, probably a European import, whose new foliage is bright yellow-green. Don't know what it is but it sure stands out even on a cloudy day.

And twice today we noticed thickets of some probably native tree that is coming in lipstick-pink.

So we made a side-trip to Opoutere (no idea how to pronounce it) where there is a sand spit where breeds the endangered (1400 pairs exist) New Zealand Dotterel.

The green fence is to keep people and dogs away from the birds while they nest. We walked around and saw a lot of a very common shore bird, the Variable Oystercatcher. These guys are funny because they sometimes stride along together, yakking to each other, like businessmen in an intense discussion.

But no dotterel. Or we thought not, but it turns out they are just very well camouflaged for sand dune life. Pop! There he was.

Notice he's wearing four (4) leg bands? No wonder he's endangered, so many people prying into his love-life. So that was bird #499. We have hopes that bird #500, if it turns up in the remaining days of this trip, will be a Rifleman. It's a tiny, tiny bird with a stumpy tail that never stops moving, walking spirals around tree branches. We think we saw one once, but it moved too fast to be certain.

There are several things we could have looked at along the way to Coromandel, like the Hot Water Beach, where there are thermal vents near the low-tide line and you dig a pit in the sand and it fills with hot water, but instead we turned onto what turned out to be a narrow, rough, twisting and steep gravel road, highway 309.

Faster, Bwana, the rhino is catching us...

Tilted because Marian was bracing herself.

The point of this digression was to visit a grove of Kauri trees. (Remember them? see 20 Sept.) A little island of big trees that somehow escaped the lumberjacks.

You say they don't look big?

They really are big.

Really big.

They support a whole ecology on their branches.

In Coromandel we bought groceries for our last NZ meals. Tomorrow down the Pohutakawa Coast.

2 Nov: Pohutakawa and other blooms

It's official! We were in New Zealand for its coldest October in 25 years. Lucky us. Today was warm enough for shirtsleeves, when the sun was on us. In fact, for one spell we actually ran the A/C while driving. Later it clouded up and we went back to light sweaters.

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Whakatane

We started the day poking around Whakatane (fah ka tah nay), a cute little port on a river mouth.

The town centers on a big rock where a Mauri pioneer made landfall from Hawaii 1,000 years ago.

Here is the rock from above...

...a view you get from the bluff over the town.

Pohutakawa

The trees covering the rock, and in the foreground in the overview above, are Pohutakawa (poe hoo ta ka wa, Metrosideros excelsa). The Pohutakawa, also called the New Zealand Christmas tree, can grow to several hundred years of age and very large, as we saw several years ago in Auckland.

In Whakatane, there are lots of young and middle-aged ones, and here for the first time we saw them starting to come into bloom.

They are currently covered with silvery-white new leaves and buds.

They are just beginning to bloom.

They will be in full bloom by Christmas.

As an aside, Palo Alto is remodelling one of its parks (Greer Park) and the tree design includes planting a couple of Pohutakawas. Of course in Palo Alto they will flower in July and nobody will understand why they are called the Christmas tree.

In a couple of days we'll be driving the "Pohutakawa Coast" road and will probably have more pictures of them then.

More Views

Leaving Whakatane we drove to the top of a bluff for views.

Moutohora, or Whale Island

Last night's campground was at the far end of that peninsula.

There is also a panorama if you like.

Cabbage Tree

Also just coming into bloom is the Cabbage Tree (Cordyline australis), a common roadside sight.

Although it looks like a Joshua Tree, it is no relation. Although it looks useless, according to Wikipedia its fruit is edible and its fibers make rope and clothing, and the missionaries (who were probably desperate) made beer from it.

Strawberries

And also just coming in, strawberries. We bought some from a farm stand and they were delicious!