This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
by Rob Stone During May, Myself and three others (Simon Field, a club member, Simon Barratt, a former club member and Mike Rose, a member of another Wellington club) decided an overseas trip was in order, so we headed north in a rental car on Thursday 16. The first night was spent ina wet gravel pit just out of Rotorua, after a fruitless search for an "amazing campsite", complete with hot pools, that Simon knew of. “The turnoffs near some pine trees", he told us as we approached Kaingaroa Forest in the dark. We reached Auckland midday on Friday, shopped till we dropped, and assembled at the wharf at 5 pm, with baskets of food, fishing reds and a guitar, to catch the Jet Raider destination: Great Barrier Island. This ferry cruises at 31 knots and covers the 50-odd miles in an hour and 40 minutes. Needless to say, it was a quick journey, punctuated only by a dog vomiting by the bar which caused a rapid exit to the stern and fresh air. We arrived at Tryphena Harbour after dark and began to experience Great Barrier hospitality. A bus driver resembling Basil Fawlty charged us $4 each for ride of around one mile. The hostel however, was cheap and comfortable. Next morning in a warm breeze amidst stands of bamboo anda nikau, we sorted through our food supply (lots of bananas because they were cheap in Auckland) and arranged a bus ride to Claris on the other side of the Island. The bus dropped us at the start of the Peach Tree Hot
Springs track, which was an easy hours walk in to a camp amongst the nikaus, with the hot pool but no peach trees. It. was such a beautiful spot we spent the rest of the day lying in the pool, eating, photographing and meandering around. The only drawback to an otherwise perfect camp was sulphurous water, causing foul tasting brews and some whinging amongst the troops. Next morning, Sunday, we headed inland, destination: Mt Hirakimata (Hobson) 621 m. A stop was made at the first creek for fresh water and we reached the main ridge about illan. A colony of black petrels nest around Hirakimata. It is one of only two such sites in the world. Unfortunately the only Petrel we saw was a dead one, probably killed by a wild cat we were told later. However the views from the top were fantastic. On the way down the other side we lunched at one of the Kauri log dams built in the early 1900’s. The highlight of the afternoons walk to Port Fitzroy, after I had twisted my ankle, was finding an emergency telephone at the start of a roadwalk into the township. We decided to ring and see if DOC would pick me up, so we read the instructions, cranked the handle and waited. Finally a voice came through and told us this line was no longer connected and it wasn’t a recorded message! The camp at Port Fitzroy was empty and it was raining so we tied the fly to the side of a woodshed and lit a great fire. There wa a tall ship moored in the harbour, all lit up. It was all very picturesque. Next morning we strolled to the shop and entered into negotiatins with the local transport operator. He finally agreed to take us back to Tryphena as his wife needed to do some shopping there. This summed up the Islanders attitude to us - tourists are there main source of income, but they’re fairly begrudging of it. Anyway, we got back to the hostel finally and started to reduce the food pile with more serious eating to the the sound of Mike on guitar. The generator went off at 10 pm so it was literally lights out. With morning we packed up fishing gear, guitars, food baskets etc and walked down to the jetty to catch the ferry back to the mainland. From Auckland, Mike and I jumped onto the night train home. Simon F. headed to Coromandel and Simon B. back to work. All in all a relaxing, interesting, cheap holiday in great company.