Great Barrier Day 2 - beautiful beaches and stinky long drops

back to catching up...

14-June-08
Great Barrier Island, day 2

Today we spent lazily exploring the island. In the morning we appreciated the nice campground that we had all to ourselves. It was sheltered from the ocean by some sand dunes, and situated between pasture land and a large estuary river.



We saw some of the native parrots fly over the night before, but this morning we had to settle for brown teals :)



These are a very rare duck that has a last stronghold on the Great Barrier Island and they're everywhere. At one end of the campground there was a large walking bridge over the estuary with several houses on the other side and a few residents walking back and forth. So we crossed the bridge and explored a little bit – this was where we first saw the brown teals.



We also saw this amazing modern house/cabin. The weather was sunny and pleasant and we were quickly smitten with the island.





A little while later we packed up and drove north to explore more of the island and check out one of the main villages, Claris. This major hub of activity turned out to be mostly closed – no surprise since we were here in the dead season – but a few shops were open. We made the obligatory visit to the Pigeon Post gift shop, but since I'm banned from buying any knick-knacks all I got was a topo hiking map. sigh. It's called the Pigeon Post shop because the Great Barrier Island used to use carrier pigeons to fly telegrams to and from the mainland!
We also eyeballed the Claris Texas cafe next door. Yes, that's right, just like Paris Texas. We didn't stop for anything today, but it looked good and was full of people.

Then we continued north through more beautiful countryside and up and over a couple headlands with fantastic views until we reached the Whangapoua Campground where we planned to spend the night. The road into the campground was just a couple muddy ruts through a pasture and even though we were afraid of getting stuck again we braved it and parked the van on the highest grassy knoll we could find! Since it was too late for a serious hike, we just spent a couple hours exploring the estuary around the campground – full of mangroves and nervous oystercatchers. It was low tide and we walked way out on the tidal flats and watched a nice sunset.





Then it was dinner, a movie and straight to bed. Oh, I also have to mention that even though this was a lovely campground it had the scariest long drop (pit toilet) that we've seen so far. If the bushes had been any bigger we wouldn't have used it!