Unbefouled by Peafowl

13Jul08
Robin Hood Bay to Cowshed Bay

The morning is chilly, but still clear. While our backs are turned during the usual breakfast clean-up, the pea-hen hops into our van. After a few seconds of tense-but-restrained hand-waving, hoping not to stimulate a load-lightening flight response, we chase her back out. Luckily, inspection confirms we acquired nothing worse than a couple of muddy footprints on the floor during her visit. Our van is not quite yet ready to be turned into a poultry house!

North winding along the coast, we drive through skies so blue they almost hurt, stopping periodically to look down and across the sparkling turquoise sea. Each cove, inlet, and bay is its own little world. A few of them have houses; many are unpeopled. The area we are driving through is part of the Marlborough Sound region, and here the land and the sea so intertwine that the coastline seems a perfect example of a real-world fractal as described by Mandelbrot in "The Beauty of Fractals". The land itself is hilly and often steep, rising right out of the water except for tiny half-hidden beaches that can only be reached by boat.



It would all seem idyllic and unspoiled were it not for the fact that aside from a few homes, every slope is either managed pine forest or devastated clear-cut. If you squint your eyes a bit, it's still mostly just green hills against beautiful, almost still waters, but close-up the sterility of the pine plantations is pretty obvious. Aside from the trees, little else grows except a few shrubs and ferns on the roadsides. The number of birds and other wildlife is markedly lower than we've seen elsewhere. I remember looking at pictures on flickr of this area and noting the green, green hills against the sparkling water, but completely failing to remark the fact that the green was plantation and not native.



Even so, it's a most spectacular day. We drive through the sunshine and daydream. Towards noon, we drive into one of the few tiny seaside cluster of homes, and stop for lunch on a gravelly spot down beside the water. We pull our van's table out and sit facing the sea. A few local boats bob slowly and the occasional car drifts by.



Eventually we make it through to Picton. We hurry on west out of town and up the peninsula sandwiched between Kenepuru Sound on the North and Queen Charlotte on the South. Out here it's a mix of rural homes - modest farmhouses with enormous boats parked in the front yards - and holiday bachs perched on the edge of the water. Everywhere along the water's edge continues to be gorgeous, and we agree that the area is at least as striking as the bay of islands if not more so. Marlborough seems to have suffered less of the posh development that seems to be turning the bay of islands into a pretty-but-dull rich-person's playground.

Near dark we pull into a DOC campground on Cowshed Bay and park near the water. So buffered here is the sea from the ocean's surging that the waves barely lap the shore. Tonight's avian camp docent is a weka, who motors over to the van, begs shyly, then runs away.

Midway through dinner, a spanish couple show up. They are very friendly and turn out to be on a weekend jaunt up from Christchurch. It's apparently their first couple of days out in a van, and we do our best to help when their gas stove turns out to be fiddly. The guy drives their van with a great deal of energy, and after observing him spinning his tires repeatedly while repositioning the van within their site, we suggest they move to higher, more gravelly ground near us. After so many nights of going to sleep on dry ground and waking up in a bog, we don't want to see them get stuck. Moreover, as they turn out to be leaving at 6am the next morning, we don't really want to have to wake up at 5:30 and help dig them out!

It's another very quiet night. Though we are perhaps only 20 feet from the edge of the water, the sound of the waves against the land is so slight that I have to strain to hear it as I drift off to sleep.