November 10—Today is the day for Penguins

Rocks off shore, late in the day

This was one of the busiest days, with three distinct adventures: kayaking, which is described immediately below; our visit to a beach where we could observe penguins; and an amazing climb up the steepest of slopes (almost a cliff) that ended the day.

We started off with an immense breakfast, and went off for our kayaking trip, on which we would go to the mouth of the Moeraki River. I had never been in a kayak, and was really not all that eager to break my virginal record. But what the hey, might as well go along with the crowd. We drove a bit, far enough to be downstream of the rapids that were near the Lodge, with the kayaks in a separate vehicle, and were soon ready to put in. Naturally, I did not have my fancy camera with me, but we had bought a special little Olympus waterproof camera, which Mark had in a pocket.

The Lodge staff unloaded the kayaks, mostly one-man jobs naturally, but there was one built for two people. Folks got into their kayaks, which were of various sizes to accommodate the short and the tall among us. Mark got into his, and told the Lodge manager that although he had never been in a kayak before, he was experienced with canoes. (I, by contrast, in my several canoe adventures, have never felt competent in the things.) Anyhow, when Mark got settled into his kayak, I noticed that his knees were very high: Partly, I think, because of the difficulty of squeezing his thighs into that little hole you sit in.

So, with a push into the shallow water from one of the staff, he took maybe three strokes and immediately turned turtle. Luckily the water was only a couple of feet deep, so there was no danger of his drowning, but he did get pretty completely soaked. The camera, as you can tell from his pictures of this day, was completely unaffected. It took a while for him to strip off his outer jacket and take advantage of the kindness of the Lodge's manager, who loaned him a sweater. He was nervous at the idea of getting back into his single-man kayak, so Nicky took pity on him, and had him share the two-man one with her. He had no more mishaps from then on.

Needless to say, I was a bit cautious in the kayak; but the principle was easy enough to understand, and my center of gravity was relatively low, so I probably didn’t run any risk of capsizing. The seat, however, was extremely poorly designed, so that the natural posture for sitting in it was to lean back at an uncomfortable angle. The guide, a very knowledgeable fellow named Cory, kept telling me to sit up straight. It was clear that this was the best posture, with the greatest mechanical advantage for doing the paddling, but since the seat gave no support whatever to the lower back, it was extremely difficult to maintain the right posture. The real reason, I suppose, is that I’m just Too Old for this kind of thing.

We got to the mouth of the river and put in to the shore, and I was happy indeed to get to stand up straight and walk about. And then I realized that I’d have to paddle myself back. My heart sank. I did manage the return trip to where we had originally put in, but my back complained all the way. And to my surprise, there were no later repercussions—my back gave me no trouble on this morning’s account.

It was now time for lunch, and we went back to the Lodge for the meal. While we ate, Nicky told us a little about the penguins we were hoping to see later this day. They nest in the woods close to the beach, which means that they are subject to predation by the introduced mammals, especially rats and stoats. These are Fiordland Crested Penguins, and they’re definitely endangered. Cory would be our guide again, and we would have to follow his instructions closely.

I did take hundreds of pictures of penguins, and I’ve decided that instead of trying to make a selection and place those few alongside the description of what we did this afternoon, I’d just make up a slide-show on a special page, where you can go through as many of the pictures as you wish, at whatever speed you wish. To go to this page, you can click on the picture to the right.

After lunch, we got warmly dressed—we would be on the beach, after all—and Cory drove us a few kilometers down the road to the entrance to the penguin preserve. There was a sternly worded sign warning visitors not to bring dogs or cats; not to disturb the penguins in any way; not to make loud noises. We moved into the woods as silently as we could, with both Cory and Nicky holding their fingers to their pursed lips warning us not to speak. In our gradual trip through the woods, I saw no penguins, but Nicky said later that we had walked right past a nesting bird. This would have been a male, who apparently fasts while incubating the egg.

As we approached the beach, I saw a penguin hopping from the woods, across the beach to the water, at least a hundred yards from us. I felt bad that I couldn’t get a snap of it, but Mark’s head was in the way. For all I knew, this would be the only penguin I’d see! Once at the edge of the woods, before stepping onto the beach, Cory and Nicky told us to walk slowly and keep in a bunch, so as to minimally frighten the birds. We stood together at the woods’ edge for a time before moving down towards the water and along the strand, finally settling at a cave or shelter in the cliff, to wait for penguins. We had seen some just a little beyond this point, and knew that some were near.

And so we waited and watched for quite some time. I took well over two hundred pictures of penguins, almost all of which are in the slide show, and many of them are of rather good quality, since the shutter-speed was usually 1/500 sec., and my lens was of fairly high quality. All the slides on that page are radical croppings of the pictures that I took, though, since the maximum focal length of the lens is only 85mm.

We spent a long time sitting, watching, photographing; and finally, when there weren’t too many birds in view for us to spook by our movements, we moved off southwestward, along the beach but away from our first entrance to open terrain. The picture to the left shows the nice outcrops of rock, much reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest, that decorated the landscape. (Big image, small.)

Trudging along the beach, we saw a huge New Zealand Fur Seal on a rock, watching us nervously. As we approached, he homped himself across the beach and into the water. Walking past where he had been, we saw a smaller-looking one in a cave, perhaps sleeping. Mark says there was a third seal at this time, but I don’t recollect seeing that one. The upper picture to the right is not of very high contrast, and you can probably see the seal better in the large image than in the small one.

In the lower picture to the right, there he is galloping, if an eared seal can be said to do that, towards the water. Again, you’ll get a better idea of him from the big picture than the small.

I haven’t said till now that it wasn’t just Country Walkers folks who were on this penguin-watching adventure. In particular, there was a Belgian couple, probably in their sixties, who came along with us. In the picture to the left (big image, small), you can see all of us that walked beyond the penguin-observation cave that we spent so much time in. From the left, Tom, then Jim, Pat, Cory, then the Belgian couple—I never did find out their name—with another tourist who was staying at the Lodge, beyond them, then Nicky, then Mark.

No pictures from here on: I put away my camera, when I saw the rough terrain we were going to have to negotiate to get back to the highway.

We had to scramble over a number of big piles of huge rocks. They extended out so far into the water that there was no possibility of walking around them at sea level. We would climb up from one immense monolith to another, and then have to make the even more difficult descent back to the beach. And this was the easy part of the trip back home!

We came to a place on the beach with the steep and densely wooded terrain coming right down to us, and Cory and Nicky explained to us that we would be climbing up. Up that? Mark and I estimated afterwards that the hill was at a slope of 60° to the horizontal. Think of it the other way: just thirty degrees off vertical. Well, we set to it, and we soon came to a place where a rope was installed to help us pull ourselves up. Mark thinks that about a third of the climb was provided with these ropes, anchored in most cases to pretty sturdy angle-irons, but sometimes to trees. It was extremely strenuous. But by going hand over hand, putting one foot in front (or, more often, above) the other, we did finally get to the top.

To quote from my journal: A tough climb, but mostly not at all frightening, and it did have an end. A short walk from the summit to the road, and a few hundred meters along the road led us to where Cory had left the van. Then it was back to the room for a quick shower, and a nice supper at the Lodge.