Camping at McCreadies Paddock

Over ANZAC weekend Martin and I had four nights at McCreadies Paddock campground, near Karekare in the Waitakere ranges.  With my health at the moment AND the trains not running that weekend AND some campgrounds being fully booked for part of the time we wanted, we ended up choosing a place we hadn't been to before and having a friend drop us there and back by car.

It turned out to be a really lovely spot.  It was two areas of flat ground surrounded by trees and a creek.  One of the flat areas had a small cooking shelter and some toilets at the edge, and there was a carpark with space for maybe 6-ish cars.

It seems the area gets moderate use as a picnic site, and is also used as a toilet stop by folk who've been surfing at Karekare.  It doesn't intersect any walking tracks, but there are some maybe 10 minutes walk or so away (including one that takes you to the "best swimming hole in west Auckland", according to a fellow camper).

We'd expected to have the place largely to ourselves, which we did the first two nights, although others were also there the Saturday and Sunday nights, including a young chap trying out camping under a tarp in preparation for future backpacking trips.

The creek was quite lovely :-) 

And handy for chilling our feijoa fizz, which I'd decided didn't taste as good warm.

It was also our water source.  We've camped previously at places where you have to boil water, but creek water was a new one to us.  It worked surprisingly easily.  We brought two 1.5L bottles with us, and Martin made sure one came with a green lid and the other with a red lid.  Each time we went to the stream we filled up the red bottle (and sometimes a saucepan as well), and boiled water went into the green bottle when cool.

The creek had a resident eel we saw most times we went down there.

When I was having a wash on the Saturday morning I noticed the branch by my leg seemed to be moving.  I dismissed it as imagination, only to get a firm bite on my leg!  The eel gave me a bit of a shake, I yelled and jumped back onto the beach, it let go and I carried on - definitely a bit shaken! - in another area of the creek too shallow and full of rocks for it to reach!

 

I got two decent marks from the two sets of teeth. 

I think this is the upper jaw - a very distinct shape

the lower jaw one is more grazed-looking

It seems to be healing fine, but at the time I didn't know what to expect.  Do eels carry nasty diseases?  No idea.  We cleaned it, dressed it with peroxide cream and decided to wait and see.  It was initially quite sore, but didn't swell up or anything so that seemed good.  The campsite has no cell reception within any reasonable walking distance, but it was right by a fairly well-trafficked road, so we could have gotten help fairly easily if anything had gone really wrong.

One day Martin went for a walk to the beach and through the bush a bit.  These are my favourites from his photos:

I continue to be really nauseous after even quite short walks.  The top of the rise here was as far from the campsite (the grass on the right) that I got.

 

I enjoyed all the greenery everywhere, including this lovely moss (?) that I've saw a lot of at Karamatura, also. 

And plenty of lacy kawakawa :-)

 

 

I also really enjoyed using my new camping-sized pillow case - made from an old 1000 thread count cotton sheet, and embroidered during our last camping expedition.

It was really good to be away - and, I think, extra-good to be out of cellphone coverage.  We read quite a lot.  Martin read aloud Skyward, a sci-fi novel from Brandon Sanderson that we both really enjoyed.  I was also dipping into Light in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, a collection of essays by Ukrainian Christians reflecting on their experience of the war.  So many of them commented on the pain they feel when Russian colleagues dismiss the reality of their experiences and, instead, parrot the lines of their government.  They feel they are, again and again, seeing evil being called good.  It made me think about the bombings of Gaza and Lebanon.  I feel those are evil, also, yet so much of my community sees them as good and as things well-aligned to God's will.  How do I share my perspective on this?

Lastly, a pair of signs that amused me in their difference of tone/directedness when it came to drinking untreated water :-) (you might need to click on them to make them big enough to read).

Then it was home and back to daily life - and noticing, once again, that our style of camp cooking involves immense numbers of plastic bags! 

I estimate the trip resulted in the emission of around 46kgCO2e, the majority of which was on the two return trips our friend drove to the campsite.  Our camping food is now basically of the same carbon-intensity of our regular food, so all that's left is transport, camping gas and the maintenance of the campsite itself.  This trip was about double the carbons of our time at Waitawa (when we traveled by bike and train), but comparable to our recent trip to Duder, where it was train, ferry and bike.