Today was a fun adventure. Annemarie made breakfast bagels for both of us, I stopped at a coffee shop called Peoples Coffee and got their seasonal coffee, which was chocolate hazelnut and mandarin. It was pretty good, though I have to say the Supreme Coffee has been my favorite so far. We took the ferry from Wellington to Matiu/Somes Island, a scientific and historic reserve in the Wellington harbor. I was very excited to be able to go there as when I was living in Wellington in the early 90s it was an animal quarantine station, and the only people allowed on the island were the Department of Conservation (DOC) workers. It’s been open to the public for about 10 years and is another amazing wildlife sanctuary that is easily accessible from Wellington. This is the third one that I’ve been to in the last week!
It’s a small island – the track that goes around the island only takes about an hour. There is an old lighthouse, as well as a monument to the people who died on the island, including children of some of the caretakers, and immigrants who came through when the island was used as an immigration station (it was also used during World War II as a detention facility.) We hiked up to the top where there are five gun placements leftover from World War II, luckily, they never needed to use them. Up at the top were the sheep that live on the island just hanging out under a tree. Because Annemarie works in preschools she knows most of the Maori names of animals, so she was pointing them out to me. We saw quite a few skinks, and many different birds, including seagulls that were nesting all over the place, on cliff faces, in bushes and on top of old buildings that were no longer in use. You can camp or even stay in a couple of houses on the island, I think that would be fantastic as there is lots of night life that you’d only see here when it’s dark, like the little blue penguin and weta, though I’m not sure that would be a highlight for me. Weta look like huge cockroaches, and live in decayed wood. Once when I was digging up a dead tree in the front yard a huge weta crawled over my hand, it totally freaked me out and I couldn’t do anymore digging that day. We did see a small one in a weta ‘motel’, that’s as close as I want to get.
After we had checked everything out, we hopped on a smaller ferry that took us over to Days Bay. We laughed at how much more casual things are in New Zealand, when we got on the smaller ferry, the ferry driver hopped off to help pull the gang plank/stairway down, and she was wearing casual clothes and flip-flops (or jandals as they call them in NZ.) I can’t imagine a US company allowing anyone to work in that role without closed toe shoes, and at least a company T-shirt with an embroidered insignia.
Days Bay and Eastbourne are small suburbs that have lovely beaches, cafés, and art galleries – and I found a free little library! We looked around for a bit, in one of the shops the young woman at the counter announced that she had to use the toilet and would be back in 5 minutes, leaving everyone in the shop, apparently trusting that no one would steal anything! Amazing. After we ate a late lunch Annemarie cooled her feet in the water and we hopped back on the ferry to head back to Wellington. It was very windy on the trip back, we both took our glasses off for fear they would get blown off our faces! The final stop before getting on our respective buses to head home was to use the public bathrooms near the ferry dock, the architecture was very interesting-not sure what they were supposed to be, a pair of worms or maybe binoculars??
It’s amazing how long it stays light here. I woke up at 4:45 this morning and it was just starting to get light outside, right now it is 915 pm and it’s dusk, but definitely not totally dark yet. I wonder what it’s going to be like on summer solstice, which is coming up in about 2 1/2 weeks. I don’t remember when I lived here before how long it stayed light, I definitely was not waking up at 4:45 in the morning then!