We were a bit delayed this morning chatting with our hosts. When we got on to the road, we headed up State Highway 1 to the nearby town of Otaki. We had been told that there were some good outlet stores here. We had a wander round but limited our browsing as we knew we had a fair drive to go on our gannet safari this afternoon. As things happened, the drive was a little longer as the road in one part was closed and we had to follow a diversion which added about 15 minutes to the drive. We arrived at the place we were meant to check in to find the office closed and a sign saying 'next tour 0930'! This was not exactly encouraging. We were about to go up to the house above the car park (which said private property) when we spotted a tour bus refuelling. We accosted the driver. He knew nothing about us but was able to contact the owners and, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, the lady in charge made an appearance. It seems that she had taken her eye off the time and she asked the chap we had spoken to to take us out. We were driven up on to the Cape Kidnappers estate, which is absolutely huge, and through to the coast. There are four colonies of gannets on that piece of coastline; one of them is on the cliff top and we were able to walk up to within a few yards of the nesting gannets. There were a number of chicks of differing ages on the nests and adults both preening their young and flying out to get food.
The number of birds and the noise was quite something to see and to hear. This is the largest publicly accessible gannet colony in New Zealand. We will be playing the golf course at Cape Kidnappers tomorrow morning and then it is on to Napier to meet up with Liz.
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