I was very lucky to be able to spend about three months in New Zealand / Aotearoa at the end of 2018 – it was very much a holiday of a lifetime.
I had been to New Zealand before in 2008 on a walking holiday and fell in love with the place and I knew that I had to go back and spend more time there. This time my holiday was split into two parts, the first few weeks was an organised garden holiday and we were lucky to visit some amazing gardens and their owners, the remaining couple of months of the holiday I spent travelling around independently.
A popular saying in New Zealand is “take only photos and leave only footprints”. As I sort through my photos from the holiday (in excess of 11,000!) I will be adding various images and information here. Currently there are slide shows of gardens, wildlife and transport. I’m working on slide shows covering plants, landscapes, buildings, street art, unusual signs and toilets. Toilets might seem to be an odd choice for a slide show but as the book I purchased on the subject, “Kiwi-as Toilets”, says in its introduction ‘no other country does toilets like New Zealand does’.
The following slide show contains images of various gardens that I was lucky enough to visit.
Wildlife
The following slide show contains images of albatross. Seeing an albatross was number one on my bucket list and I saw five different varieties on my tiki tour. I spent an amazing four days on the Otago Peninsula and visited the colony of Northern royal albatross at Taiaro Head, the only such colony on an inhabited mainland. I highly recommend Monarch Wildlife cruises and tours, all their people are extremely knowledgeable, friendly and helpful. Apart from the two images of albatross on land, these images are from my albatross encounter trip off the coast of Kaikoura. I will never forget this experience as we were surrounded by various seabirds of all sizes. Towards the end of the encounter we had a hot chocolate drink whilst the birds were sitting on the water all around the boat – I just couldn’t believe that I could be this close to an albatross. Now that I am back home, I like to keep in touch with the albatross at Taiaro Head by watching them on Royal Cam on the Department of Conservation website (doc.govt.nz) where they have highlights of their 24 hour live steam of one of the nests.
I was lucky to see three species of penguins during my tour. One of the Monarch tours included spending an evening watching blue penguins coming into land and heading back to their nests – we saw around a hundred of them coming home. I had two trips to see yellow-eyed penguins, one on the Otago Peninsula and one near the Moeraki boulders. I encountered the fiordland crested penguins on both the Doubtful Sound and the Milford Sound.
Here are just a few of the various birds that I saw over the course of my tiki tour. Four birding tours that I would recommend are to a) Ulva Island off Stewart Island, b) Orokonui near Dunedin, c) Zealandia in Wellington, and d) Tiritiri Matangi Island off the coast of Auckland. All four places are wildlife sanctuaries where mammalian predators have been eradicated and a number of threatened and endangered bird and reptile species have been successfully introduced. Orokonui and Zealandia are fully fenced urban ecosanctuaries on the mainland covering 360 and 225 hectares respectively. The night tour at Zealandia is a magical experience seeing and hearing the birds coming home to roost, hearing kiwi and morepork calls (the morepork is aptly named) and yes I did see one of the little spotted kiwis.
The following slide show contains images of some of the other wildlife that I saw during my tiki tour.
