New Zealand - 1977-1979

Auckland is situated on a very narrow piece of land, between Manukau Harbour in the West and Waitemata Harbour to the East - at the narrowest point there is only a couple of kilometres from side to side. This tends to split trips into quite sharp divisions - north of the city or south of the city.

What follows are brief notes on the places that stand out in my memories of what was a very enjoyable time living in New Zealand.

Around Auckland

Immediately north of the city, close enough for a day trip, these provided our favourite Sunday afternoon walking places. The forest is still lovely, with lots of paths for day walks, and beyond the ranges was a vast black sand beach.

We had a little dingy, and used to often go fishing on Waitemata Harbour, but Rangitoto is too far out for small craft, being just outside the harbour in the Hauraki Gulf, and is serviced by a ferry. The newest of Auckland's many volcanoes, it rises stark and black out of the ocean, and is a great place to see how re-vegetation takes place on volcanoes. You can climb to the top and walk around on parts of the slopes - really worth a visit.

North of Auckland

Very soon after I arrived and joined Geoff in Auckland, we took a trip up to the Bay of Islands, staying at Russel. At this stage, I didn't have a clue how to pronounce the names of the towns along the way, and provided endless amusement to the locals, with my foreign, Australian way of pronouncing Maori words.

We spent much of the time fishing, having taken our dingy with us, but to do it justice you need to have a big boat for the Bay of Islands - we could only putter around the edge, and even then I was rather shocked at the size of the waves every time we left the lee of the immediate off-shore islands.

The Barrier Islands - Little Barrier and Great Barrier, lie more off the north of the Coromandel Peninsula than off the east coast of the North Island. Little Barrier was a restricted access island, home to rare and endangered species, and only people with permits could land. Geoff was doing his post-doc in the Zoology Department at the University, and was able to arrange for us to join in a giant weta-collecting trip to the island.

Weta? What's a giant weta? Its a huge cricket-like animal, up to 30 centimetres long, that makes noises like a cricket, and can raise it's rear legs over it's head and bring them down in front of it's body with a crash, when disturbed. We had permission to collect just one of these rare animals, remove it back to Auckland, record it's song, then return it to the island.

We drove up to Leigh, north of Auckland, and waited at the research station there for the weather to calm down. There are no jetties on Little Barrier, and it would be a wet landing over a boulder beach, so the boat would only go if a landing was thought to be possible. After two nights waiting at Leigh the wind had dropped a bit, and the skipper decided to give it a go, making no promises. The water was still rough, but once at the island we anchored offshore and lowered a dingy, which was used to ferry us close enough inshore to get out and scramble through waist-high surf over slippery boulders to the "beach". All this while holding our belongings, including delicate recording equipment, up out of the water.

Little Barrier houses a permanent ranger. At the time we visited the ranger and his wife lived on the island and their children spent the school holidays with them, boarding on the mainland during term. The ranger was a really nice guy, with lots of stories to tell about the island. He was actively working on eradicating the last of the feral cats on the island; feral pigs and goats had already been eliminated. We stayed in a set of research barracks near the ranger's house, and were made very welcome by the family. During the day we could wander into the garden, home to an incredible range of birds, attracted by feeding stations set up around the lawns.

For a small island, Little Barrier has an amazingly steep and high central mountain, home to the very rare stitch bird, at that time found nowhere else in the world (it has since been reintroduced to some other islands). The ranger took us out on a day walk to the summit of the mountain, and we managed to see a couple of stitch birds along the way, as well as some fantastic forest and an absolutely amazing range of fungi.

Our collecting expeditions were at night, and eventually, just as we were running out of time, we managed to find a small (10 inch - 25 centimetre) weta to take back with us. Departure from the island was on a much calmer day than our arrival, and we enjoyed a pleasant return cruise. On the way back we sighted a whale, and stopped to watch for a bit, then motored back to Leigh.

If you ever get the opportunity to visit one of the more remote islands off New Zealand, I can thoroughly recommend it if Little Barrier is anything to guide by.

South or East of Auckland

The Coromandel Peninsula was a real favourite place for us - we preferred to go for a week, but would drive over for a long weekend if that was all the time we had. The western shore is very protected, providing good calm waters for our little dingy, and we would stay in one of the caravan parks north of Coromandel itself, up where the bitumen road turned to unsealed. The fishing was great, and we spent many relaxed days swimming, fishing and boating.

The eastern coast is quite different, much wilder and more dramatic, and the forested areas on the peninsula are quite attractive places to walk.

You can't really go to New Zealand and not visit the thermal areas - Rotorua, Whakarewarewa, Waimangu, and other nearby sites. Ignoring all the hype (and the strong sulphur smell!), this is a great place, with lots to see, including Maori villages where the locals just tap into the ground to heat their greenhouses in the back yard, thermal electricy stations (more interesting that it sounds) and endless variations on boiling water and mud.

Waitomo

Another must see. Waitomo is the site of the world famous glow-worm caves. We had a good trip there, but the caves are sometimes flooded, and sight-seeing trips are impossible when that happens. Incidentally, there are cave wetas, white and blind and much smaller than giant wetas, down in the caves.

Geoff also went on a more serious full-day caving expedition led by speleologists through another cave not open to the general public, and found it much more interesting that the standard tourist trip. It involved two groups entering the cave system from two different entrances. This was required since half way through one group had to negotiate a vertical five metre drop into a ten centimetre deep underground stream. This was accomplished using a ladder carried for this purpose, which was left in place for the other group, allowing them to climb up and then pull the ladder up after themselves.

The other interesting feature in the cave which had to be negotiated was the "organ grinder", a narrow horizontal slit in the rock between two caverns. It was only centimetres high, and had a small nodule of rock at the top. To get through you laid on your back, and pushed yourself through using your legs. The nodule of rock lined up with the centre of your chest and genitals, hence the name "organ grinder" (most speliologists are male it seems, although there were female members of our expedition). In fact, the very limited space availble meant that only reasonably slightly-built people had any hope of getting through the organ grinder, so the more substantial members of the party were taken by one of the speliologists on a more round-about route to get to the next cavern.

The north island has three central mountains - Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu. Of these, Tongariro is the most approachable, especially to non-climbers. We climbed the mountain twice, once from the north and again from the south-west.

Our first climb was up the northern slope to the Ketetahi hot springs, a bit short of the summit. We slept overnight in the car at the foot of the trail, and made an early start in the morning, with sky blue and laced with fluffy clouds. It isn't a tough climb, but it takes quite a while, going first through forest, then up onto the more sparse alpine scrubland. There were no other people in sight - it felt as though we had the mountain to ourselves.

By the time we staggered up to the springs the clouds had started to build up, still light and fluffy, but very low, turning into mist when they touched down on the mountainside. It had snowed overnight up here, and we sat on snow-covered boulders, with the soles of our boots in near-boiling water, enjoying the warmth of the steam. Around us were dozens of little birds, all living on the wealth of insects that lived in the warm thermal microclimate.

There were other people on the trail now, glimpsed as vague ghosts through the mist. Looking out to the south, source of the major weather in this area, we could see a build-up of darker clouds threatening, and headed down the mountain as fast as we could, knowing that it wasn't a good place to be caught in a storm. We heard on the evening news that a walker had been lost on Mount Ruapehu that day, caught in the white-out that came with the afternoon storm, a reminder that the mountains aren't quite as benevolent as they look.

Our second climb of Tongariro was with friends, on a bright spring day. We approached from the west, across the semi-desert scrubland then the long trek through the south crater, brilliant with white crisp snow.On the far side of the crater the wall provides access to the incredibly narrow and steep saddle that links Tongariro to Mount Ngauruhoe. Ngauruhoe was gently steaming, and in the far distance we could see a party of climbers setting off up the steep slope. We were headed in the opposite direction, literally crawling along the knife-edged saddle until it broadened out into a path.

Tongariro has several craters, and at this time of year they all required ice axes to cut steps up the ice. We weren't carrying ice axes, but followed in the fairly recent footsteps of a party who had conveniently chopped steps up to the red crater. The hot steam in the crater keeps it bare of snow, providing a rich red contrast to the surrounding white.

The return journey was back over the same path, but the hot sun had softened the snow in the south crater, giving us a very long and wearying slog back, sinking into the snow at every step. Looking back at Ngauruhoe we could see the climbing party descending the mountain, ice axes dug into the snow as brakes, while they slid down on their bums at an incredible pace.

Taranaki is the rounded bit of the North Island, to the west of the central mountains. Undoubtably the major attraction is the elegant extinct volcano Mount Taranaki (a.k.a. Mount Egmont). This is another climable mountain, but we unfortuanately only had time for a rather long day walk around the base. We were hoping to get as far as the so-called "vegetable sheep" - great mounds of mosses in the high alpine meadows - but the walking tended to take longer than we expected. The forests on the lower slopes are magical - real fairyland stuff with snow covered rocks - and we lingered, enjoying where we were, rather than pushing on in the hope of seeing something even better. The only drawback for me were the wire bridges over the creeks. I'm not very athletic, and Geoff had to cross then come back before I was convinced that a single strand of wire was okay as a bridge!

South Island

There were lots of hightlights, but some of the best were: taking a ski plane up to and landing on the Franz Joseph Glacier (just the two of us and the pilot); flying around the summit of Mount Cook; driving through Haast Pass, with icicles dripping from the cliffs along the steep mountain road; Queenstown; the flight through the mountains to Milford Sound and the Sound itself; jetboating on the Shotover, amid rapids through ice-covered rocks; more jetboating - it was just great!

Summary