Christmas and Boxing Day on Stewart Island

Ruben discovered kind of late that the Gore Medical Centre was closed for Christmas and Boxing Day and he didn't have any call responsibilities. We checked online and discovered that the ferry service to Stewart Island (the third largest of NZ' islands) was running, so we made reservations, and off we went (after R's Christmas morning omelet breakfast courtesy of Henny and Penny). I learned in The Southland Times (our local newspaper) that the origin of Boxing Day is that the day after Christmas England's wealthy citizens would box up their leftovers to distribute to the poor. The point of making it a statutory holiday is to foster an ongoing spirit of charity after Christmas, but it seems like it's become NZ's Black Friday instead. All the shops were having big blowout sales. Anyhoo. Back to Stewart Island...

Our departure point from the South Island

Halfmoon Bay, the main port for the one settlement (~400 people) on Stewart Island

View from our hotel room toward Halfmoon Bay

We were picked up on the warf by the manager of our hotel, a very kind but fast-talking Kiwi called Robin. We arrived at 10:30 and he was closing the hotel office at 11. So he was interested in getting us checked in--and fast. He started to apologize that nothing on the island was open, but we stopped him and said we had brought our running shoes and planned to entertain ourselves that way. He pointed out that if we planned to eat between now and Wednesday morning we had better go to the grocery store right away because it would only be open between 10:00 and noon. We checked out our kitchenette facilities and made the grocery store our first stop. We discovered that remote island living is even more expensive than main island living, but we laid in the necessities. R took a nap and I took a walk.

It was warm enough to swim, but as this shed depicts, there are great white sharks
in the Pacific around Stewart Island.

These islands, especially the uninhabited predator-free ones, are home to wild kiwis.
They are nocturnal, and since it doesn't get dark until after my bedtime, this is the closest I came to seeing one.

We finally got our act together and took off with our map to explore the "track" system on the island. Most were "improved" with a crushed gravel surface, but some were pretty rugged, even muddy in places. We ran for about 2 hours, with many breaks to study the map and enjoy the views (and, at one point a snack of "Wiggles" a fruit leather product I found at the grocery store in Gore.)

Don't worry, I'm not considering becoming shark bait. I'm just cooling off a
bit on a beach with beautiful soft sand and extremely clear water.

We don't look too happy here. Must have been before the Wiggles break.

We ran past this telephone hung on a tree trunk as we were running down a road connecting two tracks. The wires weren't connected and there was no dial tone (I checked), but the Yellow Pages was a current edition!

 On Boxing Day we took a boat tour. It was fun to see from the water where we had run the previous day and to see parts of the island we didn't didn't get anywhere near during our little outing. The national park on the island features a 3-day Rakiura Track Great Walk, an 11-day Northwest Circuit Track, and a 5-8 day Southern Circuit Track, with huts along the way for overnight tramping. We shared the ferry with backpackers with some pretty serious looking packs. From the aroma coming off some of them, Stewart Island was not the first stop on the adventure.

During the boat tour, we stopped at a predator-free island. The postmaster used to live on this island when there were active sawmills on the surrounding islands and the mail boat came every 5-6 weeks. Now, although the postmaster's cottage is still there, it is next to a summer home for a family that has been on the island for four generations. Because it is free of predators, it is a great place for birding. Personally, I never saw the appeal of birdwatching, but this was really fun. Listening to the bird calls was very relaxing and it was exciting to spot one of the birds we were looking for, like kakas (parrots), yellow parakeets, this, wekas, and Stewart Island robins.

Can you see the robin in this leaf litter? He's about the same color.

From the boat we saw albatross. These are seriously big birds.

Our guide guesstimated that his albatross flying over our boat had a wingspan of 2.5 meters (~8 feet).

The boat tour dropped us off with 5 minutes to spare before our ferry back to the South Island. Apparently we weren't the only ones who had worked up an appetite during the afternoon because a little girl a few rows ahead of us was eyeing Ruben's Wiggles snack pretty intensely. I should have taken a picture, but I had developed a chill during the boat tour and was huddling around my cuppa.

There was slightly more traffic on our way back to Gore than we had encountered early Christmas morning, but Vitzi (our name for our little Toyota) was a trooper and with pedal to the metal even passed a couple of other cars. This coming weekend we're venturing west rather than south to the Fiorlands National Park. Keep your eyes peeled for posts...