Sunday afternoon I took Miss Maddie down to the Cat House Hotel and she walked right into her usual Junior Suite and settled in. Such a relief to have a confident cat that doesn’t freak when we go on vacation!
We were worried about getting to LAX for our 10PM flight as last summer we had somehow scheduled our departure day for the second busiest travel day of the year! Thanks to a CalTrans’ web site we could see that traffic was a total gridlock from Santa Barbara through Carpinteria, so we took back roads, slow and scenic but without the stress of stop-and-go. We got on the 101 as traffic loosened up and got to LAX and Air New Zealand by six - no worries!
We got Nate ‘n’ Al’s hotdogs and a G&T for me and relaxed until the 9:15 boarding. We had splurged and purchased Premium Economy tickets which feature sleeping pods! We figured we needed a good night’s sleep so we could land 13 hours later and take off driving north 150 miles to our first B&B, birding along the way.
We climbed aboard our section on the jet only to find regular seats!! Good leg room but narrow seats nine abreast rather than the advertised six! It turns out that Peter Jackson of the Hobbit fame had countermanded our jet so it could be painted with a hobbit theme (to carry a dragon back to NZ…??) and we were put on an older version of the plane. Didn’t make sense but there it was…. and we had paid well over double the price of regular economy for only slightly better seats @%%$ We wouldn’t have considered doing it if we had known about the callous double cross to come! We did get a very good pinot noir and dinner, but how good can an airline dinner be? Needless to say RRZ wasn’t happy. Our attendant gave Bob her business card with an email address to send his grievances to. He’s looking forward to this battle!
We landed in Auckland on Tuesday morning to overcast skies, went through immigration and customs without any problems and got a jitney to take us to Apex Car Rental. We took off in a Toyota Corolla at 9:15 AM and headed north through Auckland and the northern suburbs and finally got out of town on Rt. 1, the main north-south highway.
After a couple of hours we turned off Rt. 1, which is a mostly two-lane, fairly high-speed, winding highway with no center strip which requires a lot of attention! We drove to Tawharanui Regional Park which consists of a large peninsula at the base of which a vermin-proof fence has been installed. 800 years of Maoris and 200 of Brits have decimated many of the native birds. The Maori ate the large moa birds and the English introduced weasels, cats, foxes, etc, so the birds which had evolved with few predators were helpless with this onslaught.
Finally in the last 40 years a large effort has been made to protect and encourage the recovery of the remaining species . The last bird to go extinct was in 1973! It started drizzling as we entered the park, but we saw quite a few lovely, and some new, birds, including the Red-Billed Gull that has bright red feet as well, a Buff-Banded Rail, and the musical Tui, a large dark bird with a tuft of white feathers at its throat like a cravat! Although it started to rain quite a bit, the local New Zealanders kept on surfing, hiking, running! I guess when you live in a wet climate you just have to ignore all the moisture. Meanwhile I was trying to juggle my binoculars, umbrella, and bird guide!
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| Red-billed Gull |
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| Wal & Dog herding sheep |
We continued up the coast and finally in the late afternoon neared the Bay of Islands where our B&B, Birders’ Rest, is located. After a very convoluted trip around many traffic circles we drove through the town of Kerikeri and reached our accommodation about 4:15, and were greeted by Carol Davies, who with her husband, Detlef, runs a small B&B for birders. Our room overlooks a lush garden where we hope to be able to watch birds without getting too wet tomorrow. Carol said she was grateful for the rain as they have been having a drought!! Not by Santa Barbara standards!!
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| Birding in the wind and rain 1 |
We drove back into town in the pouring rain and had a pleasant meal at an Italian restaurant filled with rather raucous Kiwis and managed to get back before nightfall to collapse and recover.
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