Thursday in Tryphena, Great Barrier Island

Our host Jo tends to our breakfast needs and also tells us stories and shares photos of this island her family has been a part of for so many years. Her daughter's boyfriend is a fisher, and I'm showing you this first photo of the view from the lodge to illustrate where he caught the fish in the next photo, near shore.

NZ snapper 

(Can you imagine bringing it in? He released it.)

Another story today concerned a letter Jo recently obtained, written by the woman whose family first settled this property in the 1800s. She and her husband and children came via ship from England, drawn by the promise of acreage--something like 40 acres each for the husband and wife and a smaller amount for each child.

Their ship first stopped in Schooner Bay on Great Barrier Island before going on to Auckland. Here's a photo from our visit to Schooner Bay today. Jo said they likely stopped to obtain some pohutakawa wood because of its utility in creating curved portions of ships.

The father and son got off the ship and scouted around, walking to the stunning overlook in the photo at top. When they re-boarded and finally landed in Auckland (which had no roads at the time), the family applied for and got this very property.

History's not such a long time ago, and yet can you imagine any country today offering such a deal? With more countries closing their borders to newcomers, Jo's story seems like a fairy tale.

Here's a long shot of a lucky boatie just outside Schooner Bay.

House in the bush.

Thereafter we drove up a steep unpaved road to visit woodworker Peter Edmonds. His workshop is a couple of kilometers past the bay and looks out over it, all watery breezes and gorgeous views.

I found a pot stirrer, made of kanuka wood (relative of manuka, as in the honey). Its silkiness and shape called to me, as did the gently curved plate beneath it, but we're leaving this island on a small plane and are already over the weight limit.

Then to the Tryphena wharf, where we saw this cute working Rover.

Also the ferry from Auckland, which carries passengers, vehicles, and lots of food and other island necessities.

In years past we heard kiwis refer to "metal roads." I always wondered about the derivation, since it describes roads made with gravel/rock. This place is rife with metal roads and everyone needs a 4WD to get around, definitely anyone staying at Trillium, since the approach is a largely uphill boulder-strewn effort.

We met a couple of nice kids from Canada here on work visas. Their work concerns the invasion of NZ by Argentine ants. Here's more than you ever thought you needed to know about them (the ants, not the kids).

The lodge offers us the use of the barbie, so today since the ferry came in and replenished stocks we picked up rib eyes and a bunch of produce.

Art's never happy with a gas grill, but I can confirm this was delectable.

Dolphin Bay Track: Two Hours Return (aka A Three Hour Cruise)

Virtually every signpost at the head of a hiking track in NZ gives its name and the time it will take to complete the walk. A two-hour return means round trip, there and back. If you're us, you always take this with a large grain. We love walking, but we're not mountain goats.

Still, when we set out on this lovely path, breathing in a brand new biome, everything seemed possible.

It was a most thrilling hike, our first in NZ this year. Don't let the path below fool you like it did us, though. There were numerous vertical ups and downs, working all kinds of muscles laid to waste during the brutal Chicago winter, too frigid or icy to be walking outside. (Also, netflix.)

Whew. By the time we reached this point we felt the cooling breezes off the water, invigorating us for the rest of the hike to Dolphin Bay

NZ flora (puts hand over heart)

Epiphyte? Am guessing yes. (NZ has an epiphyte network!) Anyway, at some point on this alleged two-hour return hike I reminded Art that it's the journey, not the destination and we turned around, probably 2/3 of the way there. When we got back to the car I guessed we'd walked about 90 minutes. (There's a math problem in here somewhere.)

Heading back to our lodgings, we stopped in the tiny hamlet of Mulberry Grove, just around the bend from Tryphena. Solar panels are de rigeur. This is the cafe, grocery, and meeting place under one roof.

Outside, a reminder

And the local library.

Here's the grocery we'll stock up at Friday when we head to a new location a bit farther north. The proprietor told us the boat with fresh supplies comes in tomorrow around noon.

Flat white time

Art reported on his fitbit stats: we did 72 floors and five miles. No wonder we feel like limp rags. It's going to take more than three days for us to regain our pre-polar vortex muscles.

My last map of Great Barrier Island didn't show up in the email version, so I'm re-posting it here with a link to click if you can't view.

Tonight we went to the Barrier Social Club for supper, encouraged to do so by our host Joanne. She told us the club was started in the 70s when a group of people wanted to open a pub but it was prohibited, so they did this instead.

Classic pub scene with 70s music

(American woman, get away from me-e)

 This sign made me laugh. A play on pretentious beer?

For supper, red snapper with crispy potatoes and salad. Undoubtedly the meal you're served in heaven.

Trillium Lodge on Aotea/Great Barrier Island

We awaken here to the opposite of this, a quiet so large it fills our open-window room, lingering there in the sweet air.

Can quiet have a sound?

On Great Barrier Island--Motu Aotea (white cloud) in Maori--just 62 miles northeast of Auckland,  absolute silence comes naturally. The entire island is off-grid, every structure generating its own power via wind, water turbines, solar panels, or diesel generator. About 900 people live here.

With little development pressure and nearly 60% of its territory under the management of the New Zealand Department of Conservation as a nature reserve, GBI has retained essentially all of its natural nighttime darkness. Those conditions are protected by the Island’s separation from the mainland by the Hauraki Gulf and the absence of utility electricity to power outdoor lighting.

The nighttime sky is inky black here, the brilliant twinkling stars like nothing I've seen before. Homes, streets, and places like our lodge are lit sparingly, to draw minimally from the battery banks fed by solar panels. With virtually no night light at all, Great Barrier has surrendered the convenience of nighttime illumination to a designation as a Dark Sky Sanctuary, conferred by the International Dark Sky Association in 2017. Here are several others.

The Milky Way spans our Southern Hemisphere sky and the Magellanic Clouds, not visible in the Northern Hemisphere, are easily seen. The night sky is woven into Maori culture with Matariki, the rise of the Pleiades constellation, signalling the Maori New Year.

We're definitely going to try for a night sky tour, but honestly looking up at the sky on a clear night from any location is thrilling.

Trillium Lodge

We're staying at Trillium Lodge, run by the extraordinarily gracious Lynda and Joanne (and their husbands), sisters whose ancestors on the island go back to the 1800s. They purchased the lodge in 2014, but the story of how the lodge got started is worth a read. Most interesting to us was the fact that one of the the original owners was from Ontario (hence trillium, the flower). She wanted to recreate the log buildings she'd seen in British Columbia and, remarkably, the builders chosen to do this were Mennonites from Idaho (hi Camille!).

Eventually Caribou Creek Log Homes, from Idaho in U.S.A., highly successful family businesses that specialise in log construction using the “chinking” method were chosen to build the house.  Five men and their families (11 adults and 17 children) Mennonites from Idaho were brought to New Zealand to build the house, they were here for almost three months around 1997.

Local stone was used to build the surround and chimney for the huge log fire; rimu was used for the floors and cedar tongue and groove on the ceilings.  The only cutting tools used in the log construction were four chainsaws and a small discgrinder, a cosmetic tool to remove the more obvious tooth marks left by the saws.

 

 

 Breakfast is included in the tariff

Note the highly perfumed passionfruit at 12 o'clock, and also the ripe fig from their trees.

 

Trillium is located in Tryphena, at the southern end of Great Barrier Island. The scale of the services here is challenging to describe. The food stores are tiny, occasionally well stocked and then not. We're happy to enjoy a big breakfast and then forage the handful of restaurants later in the day for a second meal.

We're just getting to know this place, settling into its rhythms, which are distinctly laid back, local, and extremely friendly. On two occasions in any many days, people have just started talking to us. Last night after exploring the beach above, a man pulled over his car and asked if we were lost. Then ensued a lively conversation about his living here 40 years ago, leaving and raising a family, and returning to live out his years.

Excellent seafood chowder last night at the Irish Pub in Tryphena

We walked Medlands Beach today, restoring body and soul after our long journey (not my photo).

Big Old Jet Airliner

16 hours and some change from O'Hare nonstop to NZ, courtesy of Skycouch, Air NZ's exceptional coach option that transforms three seats into a place to put your feet up or sleep lying flat(ish).

The various configurations of Skycouch show a parent-child combo and also a couple spooning the night away in a single Skycouch, which the women behind me pulled off elegantly. If you think Art and I considered this...no.

Unadorned version...

The sexy lines of the Boeing 787-9 wing on descent into Auckland this early morning

First stop: sim cards, one from each NZ carrier, to give our phones near-countrywide cell access (so I can work in the wilds). These guys handle all the particulars, using a paperclip to pry out reluctant US sims. "A paperclip works on every phone!" the guy on the right was excited to share.

Airport Airstream food truck

We had a good walk from international arrivals to domestic departures, looking for Barrier Air, which would fly us, a couple hours after landing, to Great Barrier Island just off the coast of Auckland.

 

Only in NZ? When we walked up to the Barrier Air desk, this guy looked up and said "So, Heidi and Art, is it?" I was so jetlagged I thought I'd dreamed it. Turns out the proprietor of our lodgings here had just checked in and asked if we'd arrived yet.

Antithesis of the Boeing 787-9, but briskly nimble for the 30-minute flight

The approach to Great Barrier Island.

Love is messy, sort of like the pooled flat white under this cup that dripped all over my t-shirt when I lifted the cup to sip. As they say in Mexico, ni modo. We're here.

 And this feels like a good starting point

Greta Thunberg Speaks For Me

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