South Island, West Coast: Kohaihai to Monro Beach

From Little Wanganui, we headed north to the Department of Conservation (DOC) office in Karamea to get a map of Kahurangi, New Zealand’s second largest national park. We wanted to day-hike the lower end of the Heaphy Track along the Tasman Sea. The Heaphy is one of New Zealand’s Great Walks (4-5 days from Karamea to Golden Bay, north of Abel Tasman National Park). According to a sign at the trailhead, Charles Heaphy, a European explorer, was guided down the West Coast by Kehu, his Māori guide, in 1846. We stayed at Kohaihai, a DOC campground at the northern end of the Karamea- Kohaihai Road. It was small and undeveloped, but had toilets and potable water and cost $6 NZD per night. The campground was mostly empty and our spot had a view of the Tasman Sea out the back windows. The sandy beach behind us was steep, not very wide, and littered with weathered tree trunks.

Our caravan at Kohaihai campground

N Zed – The Beginning

Our plan was to spend five weeks circumnavigating the South Island of New Zealand in a campervan (known as a caravan in Australia and New Zealand). We’ve always gone camping, backpacking in our younger days and, more recently, out of the back of a four-wheel drive pickup on federal lands around the western U.S. New Zealand would be our first long trip in an RV as a test, not of our marriage, but of whether we’d like to own one ourselves. We arrived in Christchurch at midnight. Immigration was automated: scan your passport, answer a couple of questions, drop your incoming visitor card in a box welcome to New Zealand. Customs officers asked us questions about food and x-rayed our bags. A female officer asked if her beagle could sniff us and our luggage for fresh fruit; the dog tried to climb into Rande’s purse. She had an empty plastic bag that had carried apples and bananas, which we had eaten before we arrived. Outside the terminal, we caught the shuttle to the Sudima, a large, upscale hotel near the airport and fell into bed.

Mercedes caravan hooked up to electricity in a caravan park

Yeppoon to Airlie: the Highs and Lows

In Yeppoon, we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast owned by an Aussie (Lois) and a Kiwi (Richard). At breakfast we talked about living in Australia, politics (mostly Donald Trump) and travel. One of our maps showed a colony of flying foxes near Yeppoon. Richard said that they roost in trees along Figtree Creek and we went to look for them late in the afternoon. The tide was ebbing and boats along the tidal creek were resting on their keels in the mud. An old guy in faded shorts and worn tee shirt introduced himself as Dave; he was tall and slim, and as weathered as his clothes. He said he’s lived in a steel-hulled boat tied to a jetty for two decades, one of the 40 or so boats I could see. The Jetty Club was sponsoring a photo contest with a $500 first prize and he said I could take pictures from his jetty.

Boats in Figtree Creek at low tide

Dive Heron - Part 1

We left Bargara for Gladstone, three hours north, where we caught the ferry, a 34-m (112-ft) catamaran, for Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. We were going to spend a week at the Delaware North resort (link). Heron Island is in the Capricorn-Bunker Group of islands in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. They form the Capricornia Cay National Park, so named because the 15 islands straddle the Tropic of Capricorn where temperate and tropical waters meet. From a distance, Heron Island is a small (0.29 square kilometers, 0.11 square miles), undistinguished, sand cay (key) covered with vegetation, but it sits on the leeward edge of a thriving 27 square kilometers (10 square miles) coral reef platform.

Approaching Heron Island

Beyond Brisbane

From Brisbane we drove north to Rainbow Beach, which is named for the brightly-colored cliffs rising behind the narrow beach. This small, busy town on the Coral Sea caters to campers, fishermen, kayakers, surfers and beachgoers. Before 1969, it could only be reached by boat. After the road was built, the name was changed from Black Beach to Rainbow Beach (link).

Rainbow Beach

How We Goin’ Mate?

“Every picture tells a story don’t it” (Rod Stewart). The picture below tells a couple stories. The yellow warning sign with a kangaroo tells you that we’re in Australia (and that kangaroos are on the roads, especially at night). The truck in the picture is on the left side of the road and the story it tells is more complex, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Rural road in Queensland

Twenty-four hours after we left northern Colorado, we walked out of the international terminal in Brisbane’s airport in the state of Queensland. We dragged our bags to the taxi stand and a driver greeted us with “How we goin’ mate?” To which I could have replied “All good,” except that I said we’re going to Taigum. My first lesson in Australian. He wanted to know how we were doing, not where we were going. He had a mini-van and I rode in the front; I needed to get a feel for driving on the other side of the road.

Winter Texans (Part 1)

We rented a house on the Gulf Coast of Texas for a month and ended up staying for three months. We knew the birding would be good and the diving bad, but there were national seashores and wildlife refuges to visit, and coastal bays and estuaries to kayak. And while we had explored West Texas from El Paso to Big Bend National Park on the Rio Grande, we had not spent time in the Coastal Bend.

Rande and the Big Blue Crab, a local Rockport landmark on Little Bay

The Road North (Part 1)

…runs through New Mexico. In late August, I left Loreto in Baja California Sur and drove 1,100 miles to Taos where Rande had spent the summer. Our plan was to drive to Whidbey Island in northern Puget Sound to visit her family, but first I had to deal with an ear problem. On what turned out to be my last dive of the summer in the Sea of Cortés, I had what diver’s call reverse squeeze – a sharp pain in one ear as I returned to the surface. I couldn’t equalize (reduce) the air pressure in my ear with the pressure of the surrounding water. 

Rio Grande south of Taos, New Mexico

The next day, I went to the emergency clinic in Loreto and learned that I had an infection in one ear. The doctor, a young woman who spoke some English, gave me a prescription for antibiotic ear drops and told me to stay out of the water for two weeks. My summer of diving was over. Before leaving Mexico, I made an appointment online for an ear specialist in northern New Mexico. When I arrived at his office in Taos a week later, the infection was gone, but he sent me to a clinic in Los Alamos to test for a tear in the eardrum. They pressurized the outer ear and waited; a decline in pressure indicates a tear. I passed the test; I could go back in the water.

San Cosme

Parque Nacional Bahía de Loreto is the largest marine park (800 square miles) on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Park regulations prohibit spearfishing (except for subsistence by Mexicans), so I was looking places to launch my kayak outside the park. I plotted the park’s boundaries in Google Earth (they’re not shown on local maps) and looked for access roads. The first good access to the Sea of Cortés south of the park was San Cosme, 26 miles from Loreto. The 13-mile road from the Transpeninsular Highway to San Cosme reminded me of the road to Caleta Agua Armargosa in Gene Kira's King of the Moon: A Novel About Baja California:

…men fought their way from the main road in the west, over the high mountains, and down the very cliffs themselves, to the floor of the canyon. It was not a legitimate road they cut, but more of a plunging, twisting trail clinging to the sides of the cliffs. Is was so narrow in places one could not get out of a pickup, for on one side the door would be stopped by the face of the cliff, while on the other, it would open over noting but air.

Feral burros along the road to San Cosme

Damselfish: Danger (and Sex) on the Reef

I was up before sunrise to go diving in Parque Nacional de Bahía Loreto (link). Driving south from Nopolo on Baja’s Transpeninsular Highway, I stopped at the Mirador (viewpoint) above the village of El Juncalito to check sea conditions. The winds were light from the north and the Sea of Cortés was calm. I turned off the highway where it turns inland and begins to climb. The dirt road to Ensenada Blanca drops down into an arroyo that drains a large canyon stirring up a cloud of dust. I wondered what the arroyo was like during a flash flood. 

Sunrise over Isla del Carmen from the Mirador above El Juncalito

Boca de Tomatlán

It’s cool in the morning before the sun rises over the Río Horcones. The breeze from the east is fresh and the leaves of the palm trees wobble as it swirls. White-collared swifts gather and wheel in the sky above the village announcing their presence with loud chattering. Noisy blue-rumped parrotlets fly through the trees in small groups at high speed. Great-tailed grackles are whistling and social flycatchers call from the tops of snags. 

Pangas on the estuary