It is pretty, very pretty, as one follows the east coast of New Zealand southward, rolling farmlands are sparsely inhabited with a mountainous inland studded with turquoise lakes. I am about as far south now as I am willing to go. I am starting to bump into travellers headed for the Antarctic with big jackets. Summer has come and gone here, summer being the month of December only, it is the coldest I have experienced yet on my travels with rain 270 days of the year. The crossing was in gale force winds and if I thought I was fine I started to double check as passengers around me were sick. One person woofed her cookies right beside the skipper in front of everyone, a performance that brought the boat to a complete standstill while we all watched. The captain apologized for the winds but said it typified the 40’s latitude we were in and said at least we weren’t in the howling 50’s or the screaming 60’s. There are men here wearing shorts and gaiters, trekking gear, the back country uniform. The people that live here are descendants of European whalers who married Maori women and the town is culturally integrated. That was after the Maori were shamelessly hunted down and killed. In these parts the Maori were waiting and ready and managed to eat those that had killing on their mind. They spared an American who married the chief’s daughter and this gentleman ended up being the next chief. The wildness of the wind perhaps creates a tough breed of islander bent on reversal of fortune, it is clearly marked Oban on the map and in the signage but apparently nobody that lives here calls the town this. They call it Halfmoon Bay but it was actually historically named Horseshoe Bay. A London cartographer mixed the names up when the map was issued. In politeness that name has stuck but it all seems a bit haphazard and blique for me, surprising, as I am a tried and true island girl myself. If you are going to put me in a gray sheet of howling wind and rain you have to give me a woodstove. “I just love it,” my waitress said, “At least you can still see down the bay. Sometimes it is a wall of black.” She has been here since November and is from Wales. My hotel is like something out of an Agatha Christie novel.
Today I felt a bit better on a boat ride to Ulva Island which is a national preserve for special reason. Enroute we saw enormous albatross and tiny blue penguins. Here we were introduced to plant life that had some unique primeval plants, missing links in a unique and ancient rain forest. There is a plant called Tmesipteris or Chain Fern that is the forebear to vascular plants and our coniferous forests. Here there are no stoats, or possum, so plants and birds are able to survive that normally would not be able to. We were shown an orchid that possum usually destroy, also there were birds that were thought to be extinct and which have found to live on Ulva Island. One was a little bird that looked like a Brown Creeper called a Pipipi. It didn’t at all behave like a bird. If one moved ones foot across the dirt it hopped to the area looking for bugs even if it was inches from your foot. It had no fear. The kiwi also looks for grubs and has evolved so that it has no wings and is susceptible to the same predators but is easily able to survive here. The kiwi is a strange bird that has multiple mammal characteristics. It is believed to have evolved from the moa that lived not so long ago and has now been hunted to extinction.
The plants, and some of the birds still have defenses against the moa (a giant ostrich) even although they have been gone a century or so. This land is part of Zealandia that separated from Gondwarra. Genetic testing has shown that the kiwi and some of the parrots are relatives of Australia while other parrots are relatives of South America. Much of the life here is unique to these islands, Tasmania, and New Caledonia all of which separated from Gondwarra long ago.This island is laced with golden sandy beaches which the travel brochures certainly play up but one just has to wait be patient for that sunshine.