Flea Bay

I have the best fire going in the stove fireplace of this cabin at Flea Bay. It has warmed up the room nicely. I think I’ll sleep in this room tonight as the others are all cold. Partly due to the fact that I closed the doors to keep the heat in the living room here. It started off quite cold. Flea Bay is about a 40 min 4 wheel-drive drive from the little town of Akaroa 2 hours outside of Christchurch. They offer sea-kayaking and penguin tours here. I’m doing the whole package deal which means staying overnight at the cottage accommodation.
Usually when the Banks Peninsula Trail is open hikers stay overnight here but as that is not the case at the moment and there are no other sea-kayakers/penguin watchers taking the package deal, I have the whole place to myself. It’s a retreat. I’m fairly completely secluded except for the penguins that have come up onto shore and I can hear braying, squawking, calling. There must be some that have a burrow near the cottage.

In the meantime, it’s Sunday morning. I heard the penguins leaving again at maybe 4 in the morning, heading back out to sea. They’re very cool. Yesterday we went kayaking around the bay. It was too rough to go further out to sea but it was beautiful in the bay too. We saw seals and penguins scattered around on the rocks along the shore. Apparently there were dolphins not that far out but we didn’t get to see them. And the landscape just in itself is picturesque. In the evening, a dad and his 6 ¾ year old little girl joined us for the evening penguin tour. We started the tour in the garden where there are a couple of penguin boxes whose inhabitants were already home so we got a close up look at them. We hiked further up along the steep rocky shore to some quiet remote areas where we could watch the penguins coming in at dusk. The bay was filled with them, swimming like ducks in the water, hundreds of them, all calling to each other. They’re quite noisy. We could see a few of them already ashore. I watched one group coming in. You could see them swimming just under the surface of the water, torpedoing along. And then there they were at shore gliding onto the rocks, waddling and hopping up to safety. It’s amazing the steep and rocky inclines they get up on with their two little feet and their round bodies. We saw two big groups come in and three yellow-eyed penguins as well. Apparently it’s quite rare to see them here and we were quite lucky. They’re bigger than the blue penguin and are more solitary. They came in on their own. We were high up on the cliff watching all of this with binoculars. It’s a good thing that Shireen was with us and could spot all the action.

Shireen and Francis, the owners and farmers of this huge piece of land on this peninsula, are helping to save the white-flippered blue penguin which is on the endangered list. The two main things they do for them is to help them find shelter by building them little burrow boxes and trapping their predators. Penguins are territorial and will fight over living space, which causes problems in the community. So the more living options they have the less fighting there is and the more breeding can go on. Animals which are not native to New Zealand like ferile cats, ferrets…and another…prey on the penguins. Shireen and Francis have set traps all around the bay to keep the number of these predators down. Their area has since been named a marine reserve and they work together with the Department of Conservation. They have around 1500 sheep and 500 cattle as well on their farm, though the land is so vast that I haven’t been able to see near that many animals.
I went on a hike yesterday afternoon up along the creek to a beautiful waterfall, climbing over fences to avoid the bulls in their area.

I got up a little later this morning, got the fire going again, have finished my blog writing, ready to post when I get back to Internetland. Maybe I’ll have some breakfast and then go for another walk. It looks like a beautiful day. It’ll probably be warmer outside soon than inside. Shireen will drive me back in to Akoroa to get the afternoon bus back to Christchurch. And then I’d like to make my way further south down to see the fiords