Holiday at Shakespear Regional Park

Last Thursday Martin and I headed off for a camping holiday at Shakespear Park.  It was remarkably easy to get there - biked to Avondale train station, train to town, ferry to Gulf Harbour and about 40 min bike to the campsite.  And, whilst I still have a number of concussion symptoms, this was something I can now comfortably achieve :-)

Us Avondale train station with our stuff:

Perfect weather for a ferry ride:

the land from the centre of the image left is Whangaparāoa Peninsula; you can then see (I think) Great Barrier in the distance, then the tip of Tiritiri Matangi at the right.

arrived at Gulf Harbour

I'd only really registered a day or two earlier how much of a bird sanctuary Shakespear Park is these days.  I mainly associate it with French camps when I was at university, as that's what I was last there for.  But it's the closest land to Tiritiri Matangi, plus it has a predator proof fence.  I was very excited to see these signs as we arrived:

We saw many variants of this sign - they were definitely keen that no "dogs, pets or animals" enter beyond the predator-proof fence, even inside cars.

The main crossing through the predator-proof fence - we also went through a pedestrian access point later on

looking towards Rangitoto from the last high ground before we went down to the actual campsite

more evidence of Kiwi in the neighbourhood

The most difficult thing about getting there was the ferry: the last ferry of the morning left down town at 8am!!!  So we packed the night before and were up at 6:30 to catch the 7:07 train into town.  But all that meant we arrived at the campsite before 10am, meaning we pretty much had four full days of holiday :-)

our setup

The campsite was at Te Haruhi Beach - we ate breakfast there most days as well as having many wanders along it.

Martin especially enjoyed watching the many kite-surfers and folk on foil boards

Back at the campsite, I was rather taken with this worm bin.  It has four compartments - three are padlocked then there's a sign on the fourth saying to use that one.  Very practical.  There were also a kazillion fig trees in the scrub behind it - you can see one on the right.

Mānuka and kānuka were flowering abundantly, and the flower buds (I presume - they looked very similar to the seed cases) were a glorious red.

French camp!  I believe this is the original homestead from when the park was a working farm.  It's now owned by the YMCA and was where we had French camp when I was at university.  It was the perfect venue for what was essentially a weekend house party :-)

The campsite had some touches of luxury, including a lovely toilet block (you can see it under the trees - men's and women's to either side and three showerheads in between) and, to the left, a shelter with sinks and a good kitchen bench for doing your dishes.

the toilets not only flushed - the whole area was beautifully tiled :-)

Another luxury was the wee solar-powered lantern we brought with us - thanks Keith and family :-)

Arriving so early in the day, we ended up going on a wee excursion the first afternoon to Waterfall Gully - 15 min by bike over the hill and down again.

Check out this puriri!  There were many similarly massive specimens.

Also heaps of epiphytes

and a fungus that looked like a brain :-)

However, I don't have any photos of the main highlight of waterfall gully - the hihi.  Someone in a Facebook group I'm in mentioned there was a hihi feeder not far from the waterfall.  A bit before we got there, I noticed a hihi maybe 2m away from Martin, just sitting there.  I've never seen one before, so that was pretty special :-)  There were also heaps of tūī and kererū - plus simply being in the bush was a real treat.

We went back again on the Sunday afternoon to see what we could see a little earlier in the day, but mostly saw large numbers of walkers enjoying a sunny afternoon.  We did, however, see maybe 10 hihi.  I hadn't realised they were so sexually dimorphic and couldn't initially work out what I was seeing.  As well as 'regular' hihi (i.e. males), there were birds of the same size with similar colouring to korimako but quite the wrong body-shape and with white streaks on the edges of their faces.  It turns out they were the females :-)

The other significant excursion we did was a circuit of the Tiritiri track on the Saturday.

The land's all pretty steep around here.

There's an army facility next to the park - these signs basically say to not proceed along the track when the red flag is up, as that means a live-ammunition exercise is progress!

All the birds over the weekend were such a treat.

straight after we arrived we saw these two swans shepherding six cygnets along the beach

a tūī in the karo tree right by our campsite - so close that we could see the fibres that made up its feathers.  We saw heaps of birds in this tree, including a korimako/bellbird which I was surprised to be able to ID from its silhouette!

There were always at least 2-3 dotterels on the beach.  It was fun to watch them running along in little darting bursts as we sat eating our breakfast each morning :-)

Most had this orangey breeding plumage on their fronts

Also, although we didn't get up to look for them, I was certain I heard kiwi!  The first night I heard something that I thought might have been one but I wasn't sure.  Martin had data on his phone, so we listened to a bunch of calls.  And then, on the Saturday night I heard what must have been 2-3 of them interacting, making both harsh and whistling calls.  I wondered about getting up to see if I could see them (Martin had left his red bike light by the door of the tent for this purpose), but it was 3am and I was pretty sure they'd be in the thick scrub on the other side of the fence behind us and it didn't seem worth it.  Maybe another time!

We also heard ruru most nights as well as lots of riroriro/grey warblers :-)

The campsite was frequented by a great many pūkeko, and we tried to keep our food in boxes and bags whenever we weren't around in order to protect it from them.

Our defences mostly worked, but one day we came back to all our food tossed on the ground.  It confirmed our suspicions as to where a packet of flavoured TVP and dried mushrooms had disappeared to a day or so earlier :-(  This time they got away with two apples but not much else!

The loss of the TVP/mushrooms was the biggest loss, as that would have been our protein for one dinner.  However, both the local beaches had cockles - we'd been intending to have them for one dinner, but it wasn't too much hassle to get them for two :-)

At Okoromai Bay: by far the better of the two beaches when it came to cockles, but it did involve a 15 min bike ride over the hill.  We got our bag limit of 100 really quickly there, though.

I went to Shakespear Park once as a child, and was struck then by the prevalence of turret shells.  There are still heaps there and, whilst picking cockles, I got to watch them trundling along leaving a line in the sand behind them.

We also encountered many little clusters of slowly-wriggling whelks - we think they were eating cockles.

Our haul :-)

 All in all we ate pretty well over the weekend.

lunch day 1 included cake, otai from my friend Helen's business and mussels left over from a thing at Martin's work the day before.

 

I've been thinking a bit about the carbon footprint of our camping food, which tends to be much more animal-product-heavy than what we eat at home.  This time we trialed a few new options I've been developing - including the hummus and lemon tofu jerky you see on this wrap.

The hummus was a real winner - no matter what else we end up taking on future trips, we'll definitely be taking that.  Basically, I mixed up a powder at home and divided it across four little ziplock bags (in this Covidian era we have so many little plastic bags - RAT tests have so many!).  Then, a bit before lunch, we mixed up one bag-worth with a little olive oil and water.  It was really good.  If you'd like to try it, my recipe is below.

10-12 dried garlic slices
2T tahini (can also use 30g toasted and ground sesame seeds)
2t dried basil
1 1/2 tsp cummin
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp citric acid (err towards less - is very strong)
pinch chilli powder (ours is really strong - for more normal chilli powder you probably want 1/4 tsp)
120g fine-ground besan (chickpea flour - buy it at any Indian grocers)

grind garlic to powder in a spice grinder.  Add remaining ingredients (but only as much besan as fits) and whizz again.  Scrape out, stir in remaining besan, leave to cool, divide across four small ziplock bags.

It's shelf-stable on a sunny windowsill for at least a week, but goes rancid pretty quickly if you add olive oil into the dry mix, hence why we add that just before use.

****

On Monday morning it was time to go home.  The last ferry of the morning was the return of the 8am one we'd caught to get there, and left at 9am.  We left just after 7:30am just to be on the safe side, and arrived around 8:20am to see a ferry sitting at the wharf.  It turned out that Monday was the first day of a new timetable and, if we hadn't got there in time to catch this new 8:30am ferry, we'd have been waiting till 10:30am.  Thank you Jesus for getting us there on time :-)

On arrival in town we stopped for a rest on the recliners at the end of the wharf - it'd been an early start!

Then we dropped our bags at Martin's work and headed up to Benny's bike shop for a new seat for me, then to the hospital to visit a friend and down to Fort St. for some lunch before another rest at Martin's work and the train home.

Back home, we found spring has sprung :-)

the daffodils are out

and the bluebells are about to get going

All in all a lovely break - and fairly frugal in both money and carbons :-)  We were responsible for the emission of about 67kg CO2e (of which 54 was for the ferry - ferries are not that environmentally friendly, unfortunately - driving a petrol car there has about the same carbon footprint as each person on the ferry) and came in exactly on budget at $250 (of which $140 was for the campground and $57 for public transport).