Lodging: Kowhai Guest Lodge
After completing the TA we decided to take a few days off of our bikes to visit Stewart Island, just south off the coast of South Island. Lodging there books up in advance, and we couldn’t plan dates far ahead due to the uncertain nature of bike travel, so we were excited to find a room in a guest house where you book a bedroom and share the kitchen and living areas with other guests. In the end we were the only ones staying, so we had the place to ourselves including a deck with views of the town harbor. Only a few hundred people live here, so it’s small and peaceful. We could have brought our bikes and used them to explore, but we wanted time off and left them at our hotel in Bluff.
Just after our ferry docked, there was an 7.4 richter earthquake ~100km away, and we all got tsunami warnings on our cell phones. No tsunami materialized. Our hosts, Peter and Iris, showed us around our guest house which was only ~0.3 miles from the ferry dock, shops, and restaurants and had a beautiful garden. Peter and Iris pretty much treated us like family friends rather than lodgers during our stay — very generous with their knowledge of plants, birds, wildlife, and local history.
The next day after arrival Peter took us on a private tour of nearby Ulva island, an island unique in that it has no predators. As a ranger in the late sixties, Peter was part of removing predators and restoring natural habitat on the island. New Zealand had no mammals except a couple bats. All mammals were introduced, and many wreaked havoc with bird populations. Native birds aren’t fearful of people since they evolved with no predators which makes them extra vulnerable to predation, but it’s great for bird watching.
Peter is a colorful character with an interesting background as sailor and also served as a Ranger of Ulva island for a year when he was younger. He was super knowledgeable about all of Stewart Island and its surrounding islands. We saw a sea lion resting on the beach meters away as well as a number of local birds including the saddleback, tui (which make strange sounds — whirring, clicking, and R2D2 sounds), kaka, parakeets, yellow heads, fantails, Stewart island pigeons, and others… The robin is particularly curious and approaches you to dine on the insects you stir up. We learned about the many ways that the population of invasive pests such as rats and possums are controlled and about many of the plants, native and otherwise. It was a great tour.
At our guest house, every evening a kaka flew in for apple slices. The kakas large parrots are similar in size to the keas we saw in Fox Glacier. Iris and Peter left apples to feed them (no cores or seeds). The bird would eat the fruit except the peel. It felt strange to feed the wild parrots here when there were explicit signs not to feed the others in Fox Glacier, but Peter and Iris assured us it was fine to do. The kaka visited us multiple times in our evenings there.
The next day Peter came by and invited us to their home for coffee and a visit. They were both so nice and welcoming, and their house was lovely with views of both the town harbor and their expansive garden. After our coffee we went on a hike up Fern Gully and around Ryan’s Track. It rained for a bit of the walk but later cleared.
In the evening we headed out for a kiwi sighting on a tour we had booked before heading to Stewart island. Kiwi are usually only active at night, so we headed out at dusk. We took a boat to surrounding islands seeing several albatrosses, fauveau shags, fur seals, sea lions. We spotted a rare yellow eyed penguin on Bench Island, then we split into two groups to silently creep through the rain forest in search of kiwis. The stars and Milky Way were bright above us with distant sounds of crashing waves. We spotted one kiwi in the forest, apparently dining on worms, pecking its long beak into the forest floor. Later we also saw a juvenile on the beach, easier to see its large oval body and dinosaur-ish feet.
After coffee on our last morning, we took the hour long, bumpy ferry ride across the swells back to Bluff. We walked to our last hotel where we had stashed our bikes, packed up, and rode the ~22 miles back to the town of Invercargill. It was a bit windy and open, all on cycle trails but partly near the noisy road. It felt good to be back on the bikes but at an easy pace. Tomorrow we will transfer to Queenstown with Catch-a-Bus-South for a little more exploration.
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