To Stewart Island

 

We drove to Bluff in the morning to catch the ferry over to Stewart Island.   It's a passenger ferry only so we left our van in the ferry parking lot and carried our suitcases onto the boat.

Leaving Bluff

We thought we'd hang out on the back deck and look for birds and dolphins but the sea was really rough, we got soaked in a minute and retreated inside. 

It was a good thing we'd taken Gravol before we left.  

It was an hour across to Oban the only town on the Island, then we walked a few blocks to our room at the Stewart Island Backpackers

Our block of rooms at the Backpackers

A lot of customers were doing the 3-day Rakiura Track. The plastic buckets under the benches are for your muddy boots.

Our room was pretty basic:  2 beds, a tiny bedside table, and a charger for our devices (very important as we didn't have a AC converter.  Toilets were down the hall. There was also a very busy kitchen and a large lounge.

What you get for $110 NZ, we repurposed a boot container as a bedside table. 

Next we headed for lunch at the Old Butchershop Café.  Leo had eggs Benedict and I had a salmon bagel.

This Paradise shelduck was just hanging out at the harbour.

After lunch we hiked out to Acker's Point.  On the trail we saw the usual forest birds - tui, gerigone, bellbirds.

At the point there's a Sooty shearwater colony.

All the holes are shearwater nests.

And from the point we could see a flock of shearwaters and white-fronted terns (lifer) feeding on a school of fish.  We also saw an Australasian gannet fly by.  Not a lifer as we have seen these in Australia.

There was a fishing boat off the point with a pile of white-capped albatross (lifer) hanging around.

White-fronted Albatross and silver gulls

Hah, we thought, we endured 4 hour of a pelagic trip off Chile to see albatross and here they are just off the shore.

On the way back we came to Harrold Bay where we found the oldest European dwelling on Stewart Island.

Lewis Acker lived here with his Maori wife and nine children.  And this is the lovely view from their house:

Then we walked back to town.

Road back to town

We'd been told that Kiwi often come out onto the rugby fields after dark 

Oban harbour

So at dusk we headed up there but had no luck.  We did see a kaka (parrot) fly overhead.

Decorative abalone shells at the harbour

We were hoping to see red-crowned parakeets, found only on Stewart Island, but no luck there either.  

But the welcome swallow was happy to welcome us to Oban harbour