Tutukaka – the bees knees

We got home today from a week on the Tutukaka coast, which as far as I’m concerned must be one of the best places to spend a week in a New Zealand summer.  We stayed in a little bay with about half a dozen houses, which was typical of most bays on the Tutukaka coast.  We were a couple of bays from Tutukaka itself and the marina.

Our little two room bach was at one end of the bay, and it was about 5 metres from front door to beach.  The bay was shallow and calm, perfect for the girls to swim, with a small island offshore that we could row to, or walk to during low tide.

Two houses down was another family with a seven your old girl who became fast friends with Maddy and Lulu, and they played together for hours every day.  There were two hammocks and a tyre swing under some pohutukawa trees between the bach and the beach, and the girls invented a game of swinging into each other on the hammocks – not a great game really, as it ended in tears on several occasions!

We spent the days either exploring other bays on the coast, or just playing at our beach.  We took the little dingy at the bach out onto the bay a couple of times, walked to the island, went to a surf beach a couple of times, and ventured into Whangarei for a rather dismal movie – Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeaqual.  Yes, really.

(Looking back on it, that trip to the movies was a lesson in why, when you’re at a perfect beach, you should just stay there.  Just as we went to leave, we discovered we had a flat tyre.  Luckily the man we were renting the bach from, who lived upstairs, was able to pump it up.  But we were really late, and got to the theatre just as the movie was starting. So I jumped – actually hobbled, because I’d sprained my ankle, which is another story – from the car and left behind my phone and my glasses, realising as I watched Andrew and the car disappear into the distance, that I only had my prescription sunglasses.  We spent about five minutes trying to figure out how the hell to get into the cinema, which was accessable only through a parking building (Skycity Whangarei, sort that out!  Its awful), and with my half sight got the tickets, blundered into the totally dark theatre , which was PACKED, fumbled around til we found seats, then I had to plop my sunglasses on and watch the movie in almost complete darkness.  Turns out, thats the best way to see the Squeakquel, because it is truly the lamest children’s movie I have seen in, well, ever.  Plot so thin it was almost invisible, female chipmunks bumping and grinding like pole dancers, and 88 minutes of high pitched chipmunk voices.  Migraine inducing.  And the girls’ favourite movie in months.)

The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Poor Knight Islands, which are off the Tutukaka coast.  The area is a protected marine reserve so the fish are totally tame and will swim right up to you.  Andrew and I went snorkling, and I went right into a school of fish, which just continued to swim around me.  The water was actually pretty chilly, so the girls weren’t keen to spend much time in it.  They did have a little spin in a kayak though, which was quite short because it turns out that kayaking is absolutely brutal on one’s thighs, and neither Andrew nor I were quite up to the task.   At the end of the trip the tour boat circumnavigated the islands, entering the largest sea cave in the world and passing through several of the arches carved by water out of the islands.

As you will see from the video below, the coast lines of the islands are almost all sheer cliffs.  Apparently about 400 Maori used to live on the islands, and the islands were relatively easy to defend, as there are only a couple of landings.  According to our skipper, the islands took their name from Captain Cook’s breakfast – Poor Knights, the German version of French toast – either because he happened to be eating them when he sailed past, or because he thought there was a resemblance.    As our skipper said, Cook had named many places by the time he got there, so maybe he’d run out of inspiration.

We’ll post other videos, photos and posts about the Christmas break in the next few days.

Poor Knights

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