We finished off our trip to Lake Taupo with a 2 night visit to Hawkes Bay, about 2 hours to the east and on the South Pacific side of the North Island. Hawkes Bay has primarily 3 little towns---Napier, Hastings and Havelock North. It is an area famous for its wineries (79 total), great weather (though not while we were there), and gorgeous countryside. Napier was leveled by a 7.9 earthquake in 1931, killing 236 people and gifting the town with 40 more square kilometers of choice real estate thrust up from the ocean floor. The quake also relocated a river a distance of 30 kilometers or so away. The town rebuilt in the popular style of the day, Art Deco, and it is very charming. Last picture is overlooking Napier from Bluff Hill nearby and the sea and sidewalk picture is from downtown Napier.
We took a wine country tour and got to see the countryside. The oldest winery in the area and the most famous is the Mission Estate, which was started and run by an order of Marist priests for many years. They still own the Mission but now live in Auckland and have a commercial company run the winery. Large building is the Mission. Nine of the brothers were praying in a stone chapel adjacent at the time of the quake and were killed when it collapsed on them.
Cape Kidnappers (so named from the time of Captain Cook when the Maoris kidnapped a Tahitian boy working on the ship) is at one end of the bay and is spectacular. Steep cliffs rise up out of the sea. Gannets---a beautiful bird with a 2 ft wing span---have been nesting for thousands of years on top of the cliffs of Cape Kidnappers. They come in late July and start migrating in late March. While there, both parents take turns sitting on the egg on the ground. Whoever doesn't have egg sitting duty gets to fly out to sea to fish. They will fly out a couple hundred kilometers if necessary to fish and will dive deep into the ocean after their dinner. When the egg hatches, the parents take turns providing food for the chick. When the chicks are about 13 weeks old, they fly nonstop to Australia, a distance of 1200 miles. They will stay there several years, then return home to NZ, never to return to Australia. Gannets will live into their 20's and 30's, but 75% of the chicks never make it to full adulthood. Gannets usually nest on remote islands and I believe this is the only known nesting on mainland that is accessible by humans. They seem to not mind at all being on display for the tourists. There are an estimated 20,000 gannets, divided into 3 colonies, living at Cape Kidnappers.
To get to the gannets isn't all that easy. You can walk (10 miles round trip and only get to see one colony), ride a bicycle, or take a tour on an open trailer pulled by a tractor along the beach. All of those options are timed around the tides because there is nowhere to go with those steep cliffs when the tide comes in. The other option was an overland safari through a private farm, which we booked. We rode for about an hour or so just to get there through breathtaking scenery. You can see in the pictures the winding dirt road through the green hills with all the cows and sheep. Sometimes there would be some pretty big dropoffs on either side when we were climbing.
And to the golfers reading this, the farm owner (it's quite the huge farm) developed part of the property 5 years ago into an expensive lodge and a golf course that our guide said was rated #27 in the world. You can google it. The scenery with the golf course is very comparable to our trip to the top of the cliffs to see the gannets. Went right by the golf course on our way.
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