Rotting fish and cat’s pee

Rotting fish and cat’s pee

So, we had a change of plan and decided to stay on at our current campsite for a bit longer and do a couple of day trips.  We’ve had mixed feedback about campsites further north and there aren’t a lot of places we still want to see.

Our first day trip was to Muriwai, which is noted for its black sand beaches and its colony of 1,200 pairs of nesting gannets.  We got to the village and then followed the sign pointing to the gannet colony, only to find ourselves heading back inland.  For reasons best known to the tourist board, when you come to the turning into the reserve, there’s no signpost.  If it hadn’t been for the tour buses we would have missed it completely.

The sand is indeed black, and if you enlarge the photo you’ll see it is also a favourite for surfers.

At first glance, the gannets look like seagulls, some on ledges below the car park and others on two very steep islands.

However, once you get up close, they are very clearly not gulls.  The grey, speckled ones are the young birds.

We also learned that gannet colonies stink of rotting fish, so after a couple of minutes we left the tour bus crowd posing for photos and headed back to the village for a coffee.

This is also a good area for wineries, so our next stop was Coopers Creek Winery.  They don’t have too many vines here, but use grapes from all the other grape-growing areas in NZ to make their own product.  The guy was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic and Diane ended up tasting eight different wines before we went out for a walk in their grounds.

We did end up buying the bottle above. It wasn’t one we’d tried, we just liked the name.  The story is that wine writer Oz Clarke once used the phrase to describe NZ wine.  Coopers Creek created this one in response.  You can’t get it in the USA – they had to rename it Cat’s Phee!