First stop this morning was Te Mata, a hill which looks like a man lying down. Look at the photo and you can see his head on the right of the picture and his feet to the left. Moari legend is that he was in love with a girl whose father made him do various tasks to prove his love. The last task was to eat through a hill - he failed, died and became one with the hill. It's now a park and a lookout point (though our guide book suggested we try and scale his obvious erection instead of the standard lookout).
We stood and watched a small plane crop spraying for quite a while, then walked up to the main lookout.
The view over the Hawkes Bay area was very impressive, and the steepness of the cliffs at the side of the lookout was alarming, especially when we spotted the two hang glider launch ramps. I worried about falling off and Mick just commented on how a good a slope soaring site it was.
After Te Mata we drove through Hastings and down to Cape Kidnappers. There we joined the Gannet Beach Adventures tour along the beach to a gannet colony. The company use tractors to pull trailers on which sit about 20 to 24 people. On this occasion one tractor was pulling two trailers filled with children from a local school. We set off along the very narrow beach, firstly on hard sand, then later on more rocky sections.
The cliffs were wonderful examples of layered rocks, uplifted by tectonic plate movements. Frequently you could see dislocations in the layers caused by later earthquakes. There were layers from volcanic ashes, shells, sediment, decayed vegetation and other rocks.
We passed two small colonies of gannets en route, then after about 11 kms of driving we stopped on the beach and were shown where the path led up to the main colony on top of the hill. A 20 minute stiff walk up hill brought more wonderful views, and another three gannet colonies.
The edge of the main colony was only about 2 m away, and we had about half an hour up there observing the birds, a mixture of parents and chicks. These chicks were almost full grown, and were standing right on the edge of the cliff exercising their wings.
Several of the parents flew directly over our heads as they came into land to feed their youngsters. Frequently a landing would be followed by a reuniting with their partner, and both birds would rub necks and display to each other.
The chicks, of course, only wanted to be fed, and would pester their parents until they got some food.
All too soon it was time to walk back down to the beach ready for our trailer ride back.
Despite the tide being further out we still had a few quite deep bits of water to get through along the way. We also suspected the drivers rather liked getting us wet on the way home! The school kids thought it was great fun; several of them came back wet almost up to their arm pits.
Back at the car we set off to visit Joy and Graeme Thomas in Napier. We had met them briefly at the National weekend, and they had generously invited us to stay at their house in Napier. We got there not long after Graeme had got home from work, and were greeted with cold beer, wine and a wonderful meal.
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