Barry Town-The best night ever
Trip Start
Sep 06, 2004
1
46
70
Trip End
May 22, 2005
Barry town, New Zealand
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
We left Abel Tasman and headed south through the Butler gorge down to Barry Town, which is on the west coast.
Before we reached Barry town we stopped at Punakaiki, so that we could marvel at the extremely strange, but unusually beautiful pancake rocks.
As I walked around the well laid out path, it was like looking at a film set from a sci-fi movie.
The rocks are made up from layers and layers of flat rocks and they do look like a stack of pancakes. It looks very unreal. It always amazes me how strange and unreal nature can be.
It took about 30mins to walk the whole way around the rocks, then we started off to our accommodation for the night.-a pub.
Barry town was once the scene of the west coasts' last gold rush in 1879, but after the gold ran out so did most of the population. Now all that remains in this neck of the woods is a pub that also doubles as a hostel and a few die hard locals.
We booked in and found our way to our room and dumped our stuff.
Emely, Steph Gaetena and I decided to walk down to the beach to see the sun set.
It was a 30 min walk down a dirt road, but we all had a good chat on the way. When we reached the beach a quad bike stopped, it seemed that the whole family was on board. The driver said hello and asked if we had come to see the penguin-PENGUIN-what penguin, I nearly peed my pants.
He then told us that just down the beach was a king penguin, who had got lost on it's was to Antarctica and had come ashore to moult. He then went on about how rare it was, I had at this point already started walking, nearly running but my bloody ankle wouldn't have it.
The other three caught me up, they already knew about my penguin obsession.
I can't begin to describe my emotions walking along that beach, to be able to see my first ever real wild penguin. It was just a dream come true.
It seemed like we had been walking forever, when I saw it; the most beautiful penguin in the world-well to me it was. In reality he was a bit scruffy, but he was moulting.
He just stood there so majestic. I could feel a lump in my throat.
I just wanted to pick him up and take him away. The sun was setting and it was a beautiful evening with the red sky and my little black and white penguin.
Perfect.
I tried to take some photos but I was shacking, theses are the best of a bad bunch. I don't think I will ever forget that night and I will never need photos to recall it.
Which is a result really as I messed them up.
It became so dark that we had to leave, we headed back to the pub for a beer to celebrate my first ever penguin sighting.
The next day the penguin was removed by the department of conservation to a stretch of beach that didn't have public access, so that my penguin could moult in peace.
I had signed up for knife making the following day.
But this night I went to bed dreaming of my penguin.
