New Zealand - a cycling visit to Picton's Snout... and about!

-
Caroline sitting at the Snout after an intermediate mountain bike ride, Picton, NZ.

In Picton, NZ, Caroline and I rented mountain bikes and headed out for the local headlands, or "Snout."  The track is well-known as a day hike or ride, but you can't get there by car.  Round-trip, it took us about 4 hours, and that includes the slight detour as we slipped past the sign telling us that we were entering an alternate spur rated "advanced."  Pay attention, Robert!  An advanced mountain biker I am not!



Note to self... pay attention to those little signs that designate how difficult the trail is!

We had great bikes (Scott) that performed well.  When we arrived at the rental facility, the bikes were already set out, with our names on them.  Thank goodness for a bike with well adjusted gears and brakes!  I needed both on this trip!



For the most part, the trail was well-marked, although we did go the wrong direction on a stretch that was one-way, and the final route down the hills vexed us (you can "see" us going in circles in the map above).  Regardless, it was a beautiful day, and a great time.  We met a couple from the ship who were walking to the Snout, and another biking couple who were next headed to Moab for some mountain biking.





When we returned to Picton, we walked through a little craft fair (apparently, they always spring up when a cruise ship is in town), and found a table for the Sea Shepard Conservation Society.  Stephanie was staffing the table, and gave us an update on some of the plans for establishing a program to protect endangered dolphins in NZ.  We donated the last of our NZ cash, $5.


We passed many boxed rat traps along the track, and this one, which I believe is a toxicant bait station.  They were all right next to the path, and easy to monitor.  None of the traps was vandalized, as I would expect in the US with visible traps.

Entering Queen Charlotte Sound in the morning.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Voyager of The Seas: giving guests a reason never to cruise again

-
Image
  A "veggie burger" in the Windjammer buffet.  If I wanted mashed potatoes, I'd choose mashed potatoes. After spending a month on the Anthem of the Seas , I was looking forward to a trip on a different ship. And this trip was going to include the entire family, some of whom had never cruised before, so I was looking forward to them being impressed with a week on the Voyager of the Seas. Voyager is a smaller ship than Anthem , so I knew in advance there were some missing amenities. Still, they were all part of the Royal Caribbean corporate ecosystem, so the overlapping elements, like the quality of the food and service or the accuracy of the "Cruise Compass" (a digital or paper calendar detailing everything there is to see and do onboard, from dining times to the location of trivia contests to where all the many musicians are playing) should be similar. It wasn't. The week we returned home, we canceled our future transatlantic cruise on the  Voyager. We neve...
Read more

The one, the only... Chobe National Park, Botswana!

-
Image
We were on our way to the famous Chobe National Park, in northern Botswana.  This visit was somewhat troubling for me.  In May, Botswana's president had announced an  end  to a five year ban on elephant hunting.  Elephant hunting?  There were calls for a boycott against Botswana.  Botswana is a bright spot for African savannah elephants, with over 100,000 in the country.  The proposal was to permit around 400 elephants to be killed by trophy hunters, who presumably would pay $30-50 thousand dollars to kill each of these animals (at $40,000 each, that would come out to $16 million).  There's roughly an equal number of elephants being poached for their ivory each year in Botswana.   I'm going to editorialize on hunting elephants for a moment.  Just scroll down to the white rhino photo below to skip my ramblings. But the overall populations of both forest and savannah elephants in Africa are in steep decline (espe...
Read more

The Tale of the Maui Mystery Cat

-
Image
In 2003, a jaguar was suspected of terrorizing residents of the Olinda area, Maui. Photo of a jaguar attacking a cayman in the Pantanal, Brazil, by Frank Schoen. Copyright: https://www.123rf.com/profile_djambi1969 . Used with permission.      In 2003, I was sitting in a Starbucks across from the Honolulu Zoo in Waikiki, reading the Honolulu Advertiser , when I came across an article about the sighting of a large, cat-like creature on Maui. I don't have that initial article, but I did find an archived copy of an article from Hawaii News Now on the topic: Wildlife officials are planning to intensify efforts today to capture a large catlike animal spotted in the lower Olinda area of Upcountry Maui. A search team sent out yesterday found evidence the animal does exist. They discovered tree trunks with deep scratch marks and a number of doves that appeared to be killed by a catlike paw. Wildlife experts plan to bait an existing trap today and add four more traps. Officials s...
Read more