After leaving Muller Park I went down to Ohawe Beach to the little motorcamp there. I love meeting the people that run these little out of the way motorcamps. The lovely Maori lady who runs the Te Rangatapu Reserve motorcamp is a wonderful woman. She met me as I drove in and invited me to have a cuppa with her and then gave me a huge slice of a lovely cake to take away. She had baked it for a local man and only gave him half. So I had a lovely afternoon tea.
It is a lovely little place, nestled under a large cliff….
The weather was extremely changeable and for the rest of the day it rained, sunshined, winded and riand and winded and sunshined.
But I found my wet weather gear and headed off for a walk along the beach, again a windswept west coast beach….
Saturday I decided that the weather was good enough to attempt another look at Lake Rotokare. So i set off early and headed back towards Eltham and headed out towards the lake.
It was so great to see the mountain!
This time I managed to get some pics of the gates heading into Lake Rotokare
The pest proof gates almost caught me while I was taking pics and had to back up quickly as they started closing on me. But after successfully negotiating them the view was amazing…
So i decided to offload the kayak and go for a paddle around the lake while the weather was good. Problem was that the water was very very very cold.
but a lovely paddle was had around the lake.
On the way round I saw an amazing sight, on a little dock there was still ice/frost covering the structure. That explained why everything was very chilly.
After getting back to the bus and repacking the kayak, I headed off to walk around the lake.
The birdlife on the walk was wonderful with having tomtits flying close to me as they fed on the orange fruit from what I was told later was a NZ native passion fruit vine.
So the evening was beautiful with the reflections on the lake….
There was yet another contrail in the sky.
So after a lovely night listening to the kiwi and the birds all night, I joined up with the group of volunteers that meet every Sunday at 9am at the lake to keep the place looking good and are constantly upgrading and improving the place.
There was a group of 7 of us and the tasks for the day were to put in a retaining wall on the start of the ridge track for a seat and to dig out and put in the boxing for a new picnic table.
While we were putting the boxing together for the picnic table, we heard a bird singing to us with a lovely cheep-tee-tee-tee’. The guys who were with me immediately recognised it and it was tools down and we quietly moved to the edge of the bush to see if we could find the saddleback that was talking to us. We did find it and we had a few moments with it sitting not too far from us. The comment was made that I had to read its leg bands so we could identify which bird it was, but it was too far away.
The birds in this reserve are amazing with kiwi, saddleback, stitchbird and fern birds being released in this amazing pest free sanctuary.
Didn’t have the camera with me during the day but went back afterwards to get shots of the work that we had done.
It was a lovely day with some great people and a huge amount of work was done.
I was invited back next week for more of the same……
Again a lovely night was had with the window open to listen to the bird life.
This morning (Monday) the weather was again rainy and cold and I am heading back towards Stratford for the night.
Safe travels everyone.
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