Goat Island

As we are embarking on The Mammoth Road Trip of Fun^TM next weekend I thought it was a sensible idea to have an expense-free weekend doing mainly sitting down things.

Instead, I went snorkeling. Sensible behaviour is for grown-ups.

Myself, the other DrA, and DrC, set off in our rental car (a much much smaller car than the previous one) for Goat Island Marine Reserve.

Goat Island Reserve, or Cape Rodney-Okakari Point Reserve (much less catchy), is New Zealand's first marine reserve, created over 30 years ago. The name Goat Island has a quite interesting origin. Back in't day when there were loads of seafaring type folk, people were quite scared of running aground on some desolate piece of coast with nothing to eat for miles. They introduced livestock everywhere they went, so they would have food. However, there wasn't much point introducing them on the mainland, where they would just disperse, so they introduced them on islands easily accessible from the mainland. If the island had a source of fresh running water they introduced cows and sheep, but if there was no fresh water they introduced goats. This is because goats are so frugal with their water metabolism that they can survive on a diet of just foliage without any water. In fact, there are about five Goat Islands in New Zealand.

Pigs were not used, as they have an inconvenient habit of swimming to the mainland.

Goat Island became a marine reserve because of its clear water and open exposed coast. According to Wikipedia, a marine reserve is just a patch of sea that is protected from fishing or development. I was envisaging underwater fences.

Anyway, we arrived at Goat Island, and rented our snorkeling gear - wetsuit, flippers, mask and snorkel. Here are the two DrA's looking like a very attractive duo:

I was quite offended by the snorkel gear-woman judging me to be a size 16.

We then set off to snorkel. Technically my camera is waterproof to ten metres (which means ten metres below the surface. When I was a kid I thought it meant you could only swim a distance of ten metres before it would be damaged. I was very confused by what would happen if you just stayed still), but I didn't really fancy trying it out when I can't afford to buy a new one.

At first, I kept forgetting to breathe, and just popping my head above the surface and taking big gasping breaths. Then I remembered the purpose of the snorkel, and managed to force myself to breathe through it. I was still breathing like a smoker of 40 years having a panic attack though.

We saw lots of fish. It was great! There was one enormous Snapper that kinda appeared from underneath me and made me scream, but the rest were pretty cool. There were some nice glowing blue ones, and some pretty ugly frilly ones. Nearer to the coast we got caught up in a shoal, and they were so close we could have easily touched them. We kept our arms firmly by our sides, though, as they were pretty scary. They were definitely watching us, and everytime we thought the shoal had gone away, we'd turn round and they'd all be behind us, staring at us. It was an amazing experience.

Here is a picture of the reserve:

You can just see a rock in the middle of the sea, in the far left. This is called Shag Rock, pronounced 'Shay-g'.

After getting changed and trying to tame our hair, we decided to go for lunch. Fish and chips. Yep. It was yummy.

Nearby is Tawharanui Regional Park, so we decided to go there as we'd heard it was very pretty. We went to a part of it called Anchor Bay, and were rewarded by the clouds moving away and the sun coming out for the first time that day. Anchor Bay was very nice, but the best bit was when I rounded a corner and ended up on a massive beach all by myself. It was incredible. The low sun did pretty amazing things with the light:

I also saw these very odd structures made of sand on top of a rock:

After that we decided to go home. However, there was a slight problem:

The sheep did eventually disperse, and we went home to go to a Chinese restaurant. You may have noticed we are trying to eat every Far East cuisine during our time in NZ. So far we have tried:

• Japanese - £7.50
• Korean - £6
• Malaysian - £12.50
• Chinese - £5.90

Next time: Vietnamese.

After tea we went for a late night drive, as the other DrA had put too much petrol in the rental car. We went to Mount Eden and Mission Bay, but I won't tell you about them as I'm going to go in the day at some point.

EDIT: I forgot to mention The Toll Road Incident.

On the way to Goat Island there is a toll road. The car rental man told us you had to go into a BP garage to pay the $2, but that it was well signposted.

It wasn't.

We ended up on the toll road, driving past loads of signs saying 'NON PAYMENT IS AN OFFENCE' in big letters, but no idea how we were meant to pay. Finally we saw a sign with a phone number. Apparently our car had already been flagged up as not having paid, but they let us pay over the phone. Phew!

Silly JAFA's (Just Another...Friendly...Aucklander - their nickname given to them by the rest of New Zealand)