2022-11-23 — Sea Life, Bushwhacking, and More!

After getting up that morning and writing all those posts in the rain at Whangarei Falls, we begin heading north. North. Chase scheduled our scuba diving trip for the next day, so we had a day to drive north and play around a little bit before all the scuba adventures were supposed to start.

The owner of the dive shop was having some issues getting connected to the Padi site to get us our links to get started on the e-learning portion of our training, so instead of being held hostage waiting for the links to come through, we decided to go exploring, even though it would take us almost certainly out of connection range.

We decided to take the route that would take us to the south and of the Bay of Islands, near Rawhiti, but about 7 minutes before Rawhiti, we saw this beautiful cove looking down from a bend in the road.

Seeing how beautiful it was and how interesting it looked to explore, we parked our car on a little shoulder area, loaded up our day packs, and started heading straight down the steep hill. That was right before the cliffs to the shore. The first part was relatively simple, but we did get to a point where it was a little tricky, and we had to climb down one of the trees that was growing out of the side of the steep hill next to the beach.

We made it safe and sound without injury, and dropped down into a beautiful little cove with gorgeous turquoise water and large rocky outcroppings with deep water channels going every which way. The water was pretty much crystal clear even in places that look to be like 15 or 20 ft deep, you could see all the way to the bottom.

One of the first things I did was to get in the water, before we even got to the Rocky outcroppings with all the deep water channels. I started waiting out into the ocean, and then I jumped in. Because I was underwater, I didn’t hear the fact that Chase was yelling at me, so when I finally surfaced and popped up, Chase was yelling something. I realized that what he was saying was stingray. I looked back to where I had been swimming and saw a ray of some kind, either stingray or some other kind of ray. That was only probably 5 ft away from me swimming right beside and then away from me.

That was enough to get me out of the water pretty quickly. 🙃

I learned later that there’s not really much to worry about with stingrays, even though they can be deadly, they work pretty hard to stay away from you. But having the only thing that I really knew about stingrays being the fact that Steve Irwin died from a stingray encounter had me a little on edge to go back into the water knowing there was a stingray right there.

Anyway, Chase and I headed over toward The Rocky outcroppings with all those deep water channels and started exploring. They were crabs, more crabs, and even more crabs just about everywhere. Creatures of one sort or another. It was a magical little spot that we had found.

We even found a cave that went probably 60 or 80 ft back into the cliff and then teed off at a 90° angle back out to another small cove.

It was super cool.

As we were walking by a very small tide pool, and I’m talking maybe 10 inches wide and maybe 8 ft long or so with a small little pool on one end, that was maybe a few feet by a few feet, My eyes caught a glimpse of an octopus right there in that little tiny tide pool!

I think it was the first time for both Chase and I to see an octopus in a wild. We took lots of video and photos of it and we’re super excited for the experience.

We kept wandering along, exploring the tide pools and the deep water inlets. We saw at least two different species of fairly large fish swimming through the crystal clear deep water inlets. One of them was the striped fish that we had seen several days before that Chase had videotaped with his iPhone in a little tupperware. The other one was about the same size, but it had a sucker style mouth and it’s fins. At first look to me like they were actually those little fish that swim alongside bigger fish to eat the leftovers and to clean them of parasites, but after watching it for a while, we realized that it just had these really weird side fins that when extended had almost little stringers on them like some kinds of kites.

We ran into one more octopus as we were starting to head back, it was really cool because this octopus decided to change colors on us. Us. It was a reddish orange I think when I first saw it, and then it turned itself almost into a pale yellow. That was pretty cool as it blended in much better with its background.

From there, instead of walking back the way we came, we decided we were going to just climb up the hill/cliff thing that was right next to where we had finished our exploring.

E-learning…

That… was not our best idea.

It started out just fine. There are some sketchy spots as we climbed up a really steep hill that had a cliff at the bottom of it, but it wasn’t too bad at all. Just watched our footing and what? We were holding with our hands, and we did just fine. Ridgeline all the way up until it turned into trees. From there, obviously we were safe from falling and rolling down and over the cliffs, but we ran into another problem:

The road was missing.

😶

Neither one of us, as we were contemplating going up that Ridge, thought anything at all about the fact that the road might not be as close to the ocean where we were climbing up as it was where we had climbed down.

Oops. 🙃

So we started bushwhacking through the trees a little bit, going in the direction we expected would take us to the road, but…. the trees just kept going.

After we’ve been bushing for oh, maybe 10 minutes, we have the thought about turning around and going back the way we’d come, but it’s always harder going back down something like that then it is going up. We probably could have done it, but at that point in time, only 10 minutes or so into our bushwack, we were thinking. Were thinking I think that it was more likely we’d find our way to the road before too much longer, so there wasn’t a whole lot of point hiking back down.

Oh had we been right!

But we weren’t. 😬

We bushwhacked for probably another 30 minutes down, a slope, back up, another slope, etc. Finally we came to another small cove, and we hope that maybe we could go down that one. It was one we had passed earlier while we were hiking down the beach. We spent probably 15 minutes or so there looking for a safe route down before finally giving up, realizing that it wasn’t worth our safety to try and find a way down at that particular spot. We pretty much, after that, consigned ourselves to having to bushwhack all the way back to the road, wherever that was.

As I was pulling myself back up from having gone further down to scout out that little cove in hopes of dropping back down to the beach, I reached my hand toward a clump of tall thick grass, and as I was sliding my hand down to grab the base of it for something to hold on to, the grass sliced my finger open pretty badly. Badly. It was like a bag of paper cut, only caused by blade of grass. That was probably 3/4 of an inch wide. And a couple feet long. I’m sure it’s not glass grass, but it looks like grass if that makes sense. So I started bleeding all over my finger and onto my other finger and hand and what not but there wasn’t much to do other than keep trying to find a way out.

So we bushwacked and bushwhacked and bushwhacked some more. Scraping our legs, catching spider webs in the face nearly constantly, and getting smacked here and there with branches all over. The cab that had formed on my leg after scraping my shin really hard while caving in Abby caves got completely torn off with the repeated scraping of all the plants and bushes and whatever else that we were timing through. We got to the point where neither of us really cared about the pain anymore of all the scratches they were getting as we just wanted to find the road. We pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed through the foliage, hoping that at each new break in the trees or each new ridgeline we’d see the road, but no.

Finally, after who knows how long we heard a car and realized we were close. From there. It was probably another 10 or 15 minutes before we finally hit the road, but we did.

🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

Finally, at the road, we were able to inspect our cuts and scratches and other such injuries. I don’t know if you’ve ever been bushwhacking before, but when you’re bushwacking through shrubs that are both prickly and sharp and dead and whatnot, you get one heck of a lot of scrapes.

I had something else on my mind pretty strongly as well.

Poison ivy. 😶

Did New Zealand have poison? Ivy? We’ve been told not, but having had my fair share of poison ivy experiences, the worst of them coming after bushwhacking up a hill by the beach, I was very concerned.

If there’s a chance you’ve been exposed to poison ivy, then the first thing you need to do is go wash off. Urushiol oil is water soluble, so a good rinse in the ocean would clean off any oils that I had gotten on me. However, from first exposure, you only have 10 to 15 minutes to wash the oil off before it fully bonds to your skin and there’s nothing you can do about it. So wash in the ocean would only help any residual oils, or anything that had been contacted within the last 10 or 15 minutes.

Either way, that was my first priority. Finding the ocean, jumping in, and rinsing off.

Chase’s first priority, on the other hand, was food. 🙃

So we drove down the beach to the next available inlet that we could access easily, and I went down to the water and thoroughly rinsed myself off. Off. Was paranoid all the rest of that day and even into the next after that, worried that perhaps I might have gotten urushiol oil on my clothes or pack or something like that.

So does New Zealand have poison? Ivy? No. However, they have an invasive species that is related. That is a tree that just so happens to grow in that area. The tree grows up to something like 30 ft tall, and has branches with leaves on it that look to me like some of the stuff we’d been climbing through, but Chase didn’t recognize them. Crossing my fingers, I was hoping that there really weren’t any of those trees in the area we were bushwhacking through and that we were completely free of oils.

I would know within probably 6 hours if a very sensitive skin areas were oils it would be another two or three or four days before more would let me know if it had been in contact with the awful stuff.

Well at that little beach where I was washing off, there was a woman there sitting in the sand who caught my eye from a distance. When I got finished with my little bathing ritual, and started walking in her direction, she got up and started wandering around the beach taking photos. Seeing that she seemed to have little interest in running into me on the beach, I mostly gave up, heading back toward the car up the little Ridge that you drop over to get down to the beach.

But once at the car, I sort of demured a little bit, taking my time cleaning up and getting everything in the car organized a bit. Walked back up the little ridge and toward her car, and interestingly enough, she was the first one to say something to us.

Her name was Maya, and she’s from the Czech Republic, though half Vietnamese. She and Chase and I had quite an enjoyable conversation or probably a good 20 minutes or so before she needed to leave to try and get back to Whangarei in time to get a shower. Like others of the people we’ve met here in New Zealand that are traveling from other countries, she is working a little and then traveling a little and then working a little more and then traveling a little more, on a work tourist visa. I guess each person is allowed one work tourist visa to New Zealand in their lifetime, and this was her opportunity.

Anyway, she gave us her contact information, and we started to back out of where we were parked, but as Chase was back in the car up, the bumper caught on something and tore itself loose, taking the headlight with it. Way on to the ground, but just tore free from the rest of the car. It was kind of funny because Maya had just been talking about how she just barely done something similar. She hadn’t realized and she was on a steep embankment, and she’d backed her car over the edge of it and ended up stuck and needed to be pulled out. She told us that story only probably 5 or 10 minutes before Chase tore our bumper off. 🙃

Maya flagged us down a little bit to let us know that we actually done significant damage as we were backing out, so once we pulled on to the main road, we pulled over right away at the next pull out to assess what had happened. She pulled over with us to make sure we were okay, and I think she was a little surprised to find Chase and I both laughing at the fact that we tore our bumper off instead of being concerned about it.

She and I chatted for a couple minutes while Chase worked on trying to put the car back together, and then she took off to go try and get her shower before the aquatic center in Whangarei closed.

After a quick Jimmy rig fix to try and get everything back together, Chase and I drove from where we were near Rawhiki over to Paihia, the little town on the west end of the Bay of Islands where we were to do our scuba training. We looked on Google Maps, found a road that went out in the middle of nowhere, and figured that would be a good place to find a little doubt to sleep for the night. Gratefully, it was a pretty good place to go, though there were bugs to deal with.

And so ended our sea creatures, bushwack, introduction to Maya, and car devastation day. 🙃

Oh, wait, I did spend a little time doing my eLearning scuba stuff before crashing into bed. I was hoping that I would have the energy to do my whole online course that night, but it was not to be. I was just too tired.

Love and hugs. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen