Whitsundays

After our sojourn in Dunedin we caught a direct flight to Brisbane and then up to Hamilton Island where we boarded the boat for Hayman Island. Noreen decided to start as she meant to go on.

It’s an hour’s journey north – the Whitsunday islands on the left here, the mainland on the right.

We stayed at the fairly luxurious One and Only resort.

Did I mention it was luxurious? This was our modest digs.

Sulphur crested cockatoos abound in the area and were a constant cheeky presence. They can be very destructive if they get in your room and breakfast in the outdoors is an interesting time as the cockatoos come down and take the sugar sachets from the tables. They have learnt to open them neatly and ingest the contents. The other hazard was seagulls swooping down and taking food off your plate. Noreen lost a tasty pastry to a marauding bird.

Cockatoos roosting in a palm tree.

Other better behaved birds included this dusky moorhen. 

I loved the rainbow lorikeets. Unfortunately they dart about quickly high in the canopy so this is the best photo I got. I’m told it’s the haematodus subspecies.

The water lilies were colourful.

One morning we went on an expedition to go snorkelling at Blue Pearl Bay.

It was a lovely experience with the coral starting a few metres off the beach and a varied selection of fishes, clams and coral.

We saw many of these little lizards, some only a few centimetres long.

I walked up to the highest point on the island (about 500m but quite a grunt in the heat) and got this panorama looking toward Hook Island

plus an aerial view of the resort.

Dunedin

We have been away for a few days celebrating our 40^th wedding anniversary. We started off with a weekend in Dunedin where we caught up with Sam and Bex. On the Sunday we headed off to Allan’s Beach. It’s on the Otago Peninsular and a bit remote but access is by a very reasonable gravel road.

It’s a wild and secluded place, with steep cliffs (home to penguins)

and wide open beaches.

Here are Sam and Bex

and the elderly couple.

Here is a male sea lion or possibly seal pretending to be a rock

and further down the beach a female basking in the warmth (given they are found down to the sub-antarctic islands a Dunedin autumn would seem tropical).

There were several of my favourite oystercatchers.

After Dunedin we flew to a really tropical place - but that will have to wait for the next post.

Polhill Gully

At the far end of Aro Street, between Brooklyn and the sanctuary now known as Zealandia, lies the Polhill Gully. A few years ago it was opened up to walkers and bikers. We did explore the area soon after it was opened but I can’t find any reference in the blog. On Sunday we did a quick walk up the first part of the track. It climbs up fairly steeply from the valley with views over the city, 

harbour

and power cables!

The track is well formed, with seats for waiting and admiring the views.

Our weather has been quite extraordinary of late. Long spells of settled fine weather, higher than usual temperatures and very little rain. This was the record for the preceding month last Thursday.

It did rain a fair bit that day but we could do with a lot more over winter.