Woke up at 9:15am, made it to the 10am ferry with 30 seconds to spare. Tweeted our progress and added pictures with my phone. When we arrived in Matiatia we wandered around a bit until we found a path, and then followed that around the coastline. The views and the wildlife were amazing. There's a huge variety of birds here; we saw an abundance of what looked like overgrown moorhens (Pukeko) in the fields. There were many small birds, and a fascinating one which had a multitude of different calls, with a repeating one which was three hoots, a low rasp and a high tweet, which Lindsey found quite comical. We took a video of it on the camera. It was a black bird with a green sheen on its wings and a pure white tuft protruding from its chin. Its amazing range of vocalisations made us wonder whether it was related to the lyre bird. (Tui again!) One other bird we failed to video was small, and fat like a robin but with a long tail, which had white edges when spread. Its flight was spectacular, It seemed to flutter about like a butterfly. If we see it again we'll try to take a video. (Fantail, got a video much later at Rainbow Reach.)
We walked round to Oneroa and decided to catch the bus to Rocky Bay and walk along the coast to a nearby vineyard for lunch. We sat ourselves down and waited for the bus. The No. 1 bus arrived first, which didn't go in our direction. The No. 2 bus was just behind but turned off down another road! The driver of the first bus stopped and asked us where we were headed and when we told him he informed us we were at the wrong bus stop and that he'd drive us along in front of the other bus so we could catch it. Apparently this sort of thing must happen a lot, as all the drivers have radios to communicate with each other. I've not seen that before!
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| Matiatia Bay, Waiheke Island. |
We arrived safely at Rocky Bay and wandered along the coastal route to Te Whau vineyard. We couldn't find a menu online so we had no idea of the prices. It turns out it was ridiculously expensive: $40 for a main course. So we ended up having a sticky toffee pudding and some cheese for lunch with two glasses of wine. One was particularly nice, which was a 2009 Gibbston Valley, Pinot Gris, we'll look out for that again.
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| Tom's lunch. |
Finally we took the bus back to Onerau and wandered over the hills in the twilight to the ferry port, with 3 mins to spare before the ferry left.
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| On the ferry back to Auckland. |
In the evening we met Antonia DeVere and her boyfriend who we've forgotten the name of (we are socially inept). However, we had a very nice time chatting about all sorts of things. They seemed quite interested in Physics, much more than other people we generally meet, which is great and gave us a bit to talk about. We also discussed Heston Blumenthal's recipes for homemade pizza, corn muffins and chilli.
Antonia is a manager for a jewellery company, and her boyfriend is studying furniture design and architecture. We got plenty of advice for places to visit around the north island, so we'll certainly be stopping off on the way.
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