Cape Kidnappers

Day 26- March 3rd

We got up and caught our tractor ride at 9:00. My dad, sister and I rode the tractor while my mom walked, as she was allergic to the exhaust from the tractors. The tractors have a trailer on the back with seats around the outside edge where everyone sits. We drove right down onto the beach, which is legally a road, and along the cliff side. We drove for about an hour, stopping every once in a while for geologic explanations from our guide, until we got to a trail.

See the strike-slip fault? It displaced the layers in the rock by about two meters.

The trail led up to a gannet colony on the top of the cape. We hiked up to the top and took pictures of all of the gannets, which were just behind a short fence. They seemed sort of cramped, but I guess they are just social birds and don’t mind living in close quarters.

My sister being a gannet while the gannet acts as a human

The colony was atop Cape Kidnapper’s, which was a little sand dune/island out in the water off the point. There had been two other islands off the point, but they have eroded in the past 50 years.

 

After that we drove into town and met up with my mom. She had walked right to the trailhead, but turned around without going up to the top so she could get back before high tide. After resting for a bit, my family went into town while I worked on my English Paper. While they were gone, two people moved into the unit next to us. Talking to them later that night, we found out that they were from Ketchikan. They had been in New Zealand since the 14th (the day before we got here) and were leaving about the same time as us. The only difference was that they started in Auckland and moved south while we had started in Christchurch and moved north.