Punakaiki is a small village nestled below tall dark limestone cliffs. Where they could find a foothold on the steep terrain, trees and shrubs and ferns were growing, including palm trees. We stayed in cottages right on the beach, and listened to the surf over night. Several of us went for a walk in the morning, then the guides served pancakes in honor of our upcoming visit to the Pancake Rocks.
The main walk for the day again had to be cancelled due to the previous day's rain. Fortunately, the rain was in the process of ending during the course of the day. We got sprinkled a few times, and it rained pretty hard while we were in the van, but we avoided hiking in the rain today. We ended up taking several shorter hikes, seeing rocky cliffs and walking through podocarp forests.
After the hikes we headed south to a lagoon called Okarito, where we’ll stay for two nights. Along the way we stopped at The Bushman’s Store (or something like that) and watched a DVD of the efforts to cull the deer population in New Zealand. This country basically had no mammals at the time people arrived. For the most part, the introduced species have been a disaster because they have no natural predators and compete with the endemic species. Deer were one example. They multiplied wildly and were damaging the ecosystem. The movie made the case about the damage they were causing, and then told the story of the efforts to cull them, which later turned into efforts to capture them. Deer are now farmed, and we passed several fields with high fences holding herds of red deer. The movie called the culling and later capturing process “New Zealand’s last great adventure.” It started out with hunters going out on foot and muscling the deer carcasses back to where they could be sold (venison brought a good price), and over the decades evolved into the use of helicopters to shoot them and then airlift numerous carcasses and carry them back. Eventually, when it was decided that capturing them to farm them was the most economic approach, they first had men leaping out of helicopters onto the backs of the running deer to bring them down and hog tie them. Then they switched to using net guns to bring the deer down, followed by leaping out of helicopters to secure them for transport. It was a pretty wild film, all in all. Tackling deer has now become a group joke, with the variation of "tickling" deer added by the Kiwi accent.
Today's pictures are here.
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