Beyond the Caves toAuckland - the end of NZ (for now?!)

From Waitomo we had a week or so to get to Auckland for our flight to Sydney and went on a round the houses route from windy, surf bum heaven Raglan across to Hamilton to spend a very welcome and enjoyable night spent with Matt, Meika, Danika + Taylor, eating a fraction of one of their home killed cows and drinking way more beer than I should have. Thanks must go to Dan dan for giving up her bed for 2 weary travellers!

From there it was up to the Coromandel peninsula where sadly we missed the best time for digging our own jacuzzi on 'Hot Water beach' but we were lucky enough to see the rare and endemic but definitely not shy NZ dotterel happily pecking at the sand for little tit-bits. Another highlight of the peninsula was seeing Cathedral cove, a cavernous limestone cave of which some had clearly recently dropped from the roof so we proceeded gingerly thru the cave. Not sure if it's come thru on the blog but Claire will tell you (probably with a sigh) that I am one for getting quite excited by rock formations and this was another occasion where I got quite excited. The view from the beach was similar to that of the 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean road in Oz (see Oz entries when we get round to writing them!) but not quite as numerous but impressive from the beach, the rocks are formed in the same way, limestone cliffs being degraded by wind and wave erosion leaving the various bits of isolated rock, doesn't sound quite as nice as it looks but there you are! Another impressive natural feature on the peninsula was some quite enormous Kauri (a form of pine) trees, try as we might we couldn't take a picture of these monsters that would give you a sense of scale, so in dry terms they were about 40 metres high and can grow to 60m. The views when we crossed the top of the peninsula were impressive out to various small islands with forest in the foreground and that was on a fairly miserable day.

From the peninsula we stopped for our last night in Steely just by a town called Miranda where we popped into the Shorebird Centre there and took a walk up to see lots of, well you can probably guess what we saw, yep eagles, no, not really shorebirds. There is a rare form of shore line that exists here, they are called chenier, these occur when the shore is formed by shells and infilled mud, as such it's recognised as a wetland of international significance and safe to say shorebirds love them! We got there as the centre closed so, much to Claire's relief, I didn't have time to do thorough research on the shorebirds before walking to the hide. Therefore the details of exactly what we saw are sketchy - Bar tailed godwits (who migrate from the Arctic to NZ!!!!) were definitely there but can't be sure of anything else (see pics if you want to help me with the rest!!).

After nearly 6000 kms of up hill and down dale we said goodbye to Steely in Auckland and skimmed the surface of what seemed to be a pleasant enough city, we took in a lovely walk out to Mt Eden, chatting to a local who gave us his take on the lack of pure bred Maori and a variety of other subjects that we were fairly bemused by, taking in what looked like another fine museum in Auckland museum but only having an hour to take it in having completely lost track of time while lying on the grass outside, drinking miniscule amounts of more ludicrously expensive but very pleasant locally produced beer and catching up with Noel Schroder (a friend from Compaq days) for a lovely bit of tapas.

For our final full day we took a ferry to an island I was very excited about visiting, called Tiritiri Matangi. It is one of a number of islands located throughout NZ which have been baited to be rid of predators so that rare native/endemic birds can continue their existence**. Whether this version of conservation is right or wrong is a current debate (survival of the fittest etc) but for me places like this are special and this one rang out with a lot of new bird calls which was refreshing, not that the beautiful bellbird song heard pretty much everywhere we'd been gets tiresome, it's just that it's nice to hear something new for a change. We saw blue ducks, stitchbirds, kokako and takahe among others, all of which you could spend a lifetime looking for and not seeing in the 'proper' wild but here they are dotted all over the place. We also saw a little blue penguin who was sheltering under one of the steps on the rainforest walk from an absolute downpour which set in just after lunch and and continued when we dripped back onto the ferry a couple of hours later. Though this weather is not conducive to twitching we saw enough in the morning to keep me more than happy, the morning was topped off by Bruce the Takahe posing for a number of great pics for me. It was a great way to round off our NZ trip and sent us off with a fine feeling for our next leg to Sydney with allit's beaches and iconic images.

**for anyone who saw Last Chance To See - another BBC Stephen Fry vehicle - one of them starred the very rare Kakapo an extremely funny NZ parrot, (especially when it's making lurrve to a photographers head), it was filmed on an island that the public aren't allowed onto.