Great Walks

I like the idea of hiking. Wide open prairies that lead to petrified forests where what used to be trees are now solid rock. Winding mountain paths in the woods to find crystal clear waterfalls. Discovering ancient petroglyphs after a mile or more journey over ancient lava. Canyon trails that lead to emerald green pools in the cool early morning. Wild looking rock formations shaped by wind and water in a volcanic canyon. They all sound great, right? Romantic, peaceful, wistful, a return to simpler times. And since I started this blog, I've made every one of these hikes right here at home in the U.S. of A. and always in one of my trusty pairs of Timberland boots.

Have to take the Timbas on vacation with me.

So what's the problem? Why do I just like the "idea" of hiking and not the hiking itself? Well, I do really like the hiking too. If I didn't do you think I would have done everything I listed in the first paragraph above? It makes me feel like slowing down is a good thing and I love the scenery and the clean air (especially with a little old man's beard around to make me feel really good about what's entering my lungs). I just don't want to meet any of the wildlife that I love watching and photographing from afar. And for sure that inhibits my enjoyment of hiking a little bit. No way do I want to meet a bear or mountain lion in the woods or a bison or wolf out on the range or an African oryx in the middle of the New Mexican desert (seriously; apparently those things are kamikazes).

Done laughing yet? I know, I know, I'm a chicken. Or worse. Go ahead. Take your best shot. I don't care.

View from the beach on Ulva Island during a half day's tramp. Mussels on the rocks at the bottom.

So why am I writing about all this when I just got back from New Zealand? Well because New Zealand doesn't have any native mammals so that country is like the perfect place for me to go hiking. Only they don't call it hiking in New Zealand; they call it tramping. Is a tramp a predator-free hike? I have absolutely no idea although I don't really think so. I just knew I was pretty excited to do some tramping in New Zealand.

New Zealanders (using this term so I don't confuse you by using the term kiwis) apparently love tramping. They love it so much that they have created a series of Great Walks which range in distance from 32 kilometers long to 145 kilometers long and are outfitted with reservable huts for sleeping in. Just bring your own sleeping bag and food. There's no place to buy snacks along the way. 

If 32 or 145 kilometers seems like a long way to tramp, or walk, you'd be correct. The New Zealand Department of Conservation recommends between two and five days to get any one of these Great Walks done. Want to do all ten? Well, that's going to take a whole lot of time.

So this post is about us conquering one of the Great Walks while on the other side of the world, right? Nope. No way. Not even close. No way were we going to do that on this trip. But we did do plenty of tramping. Around Auckland and Stewart Island and Fiordland National Park and Wellington and Ulva Island and even past a few hobbit holes in Hobbiton in some place called Middle Earth. We always seem to do a lot of walking when we are away from home; personally I think it's the best way to see wherever you are. All told, I averaged (according to the pedometer built into my iPhone) an average of 4.7 miles per day. That's a little more than 7.5 kilometers per day, which would be good enough to get a 32 km Great Walk like Rakiura Track on Stewart Island or Routeburn Track across the Southern Alps in about three days if you ignore the fact that we weren't carrying a backpack full of stuff with us.

While this post may not be about New Zealand's Great Walks, it is about some of the places we did walk purposefully and deliberately to slow down, take in the scenery and breathe in the clean air. And yes, we did see some old man's beard along the way. Let's start right where our trip started in Auckland.

One Tree Hill
If you own U2's The Joshua Tree, you might have heard of One Tree Hill. You also might know the story. In case you don't, or (like me) your U2 collection skips from War to Achtung Baby, read on.

One Tree Hill is a (not necessarily extinct) volcanic cone not far from the middle of the city of Auckland. Much of New Zealand, like many of the other island nations in the Pacific, owes its existence above the ocean to volcanic action, and despite the danger of eruption which eventually seems inevitable to come to pass, both Māori and European setters were determined to build their homes in what would end up as Auckland. Something about the harbors, if I'm guessing.

The Māori called the hill Maungakiekie which means "mountain of the kiekie vine" and it happened to be the site of the one of the most important and impenetrable pā, or forts, which sheltered and protected a population estimated to be approximately 5,000 people. That is before the Europeans arrived and inevitably and permanently altered Māori history for the worse. Something about the muskets, if I'm remembering right.

There is no tree on Maungakiekie today but there was one when the place got it's current name. Let's see if we can recap the tree / hill status quickly. The Māori in their pā were defeated by the Europeans (again...something about the muskets) leaving a single tree which was sacred to the Māori (this is when the name came in). In 1852, that tree was cut down by a European settler angering the Maori. To make amends (don't laugh) John Logan Campbell planted a series of pines in the 1870s, which died. Pines!!! Well, all but two died anyway. Those two lasted about 90 years until Māori activists cut one down. They tried for both but were thwarted. In the year 2000, others finished the job. So from one to some to two to one and then none. Got all that?

Atop One Tree Hill looking towards Auckland. The fenced area is where the trees used to be.

For an urban walk, tramping to the top of One Tree Hill is a bit of a workout. It's all uphill on the way there and it's about the highest point in Auckland so the view to the city and the water beyond is pretty spectacular. We kept the obelisk shown in the second picture above in our sights and kept following the signs. It's longer than it looks because after the initial climb, the walk takes you all the way around the base of the hill before you start going up in earnest.

So about that obelisk. The same John Logan Campbell who tried to grow a stand of pines on the hill also paid for the obelisk, a monument to the Māori people, whom he apparently admired. There is a statue of a Māori warrior on the front of the the thing and two panels with some words on either side. You can decide for yourself if they are a little patronizing. Oh...and Campbell is also buried right in front of it, so it's also one of the tallest and most grandiose headstones that I've ever come across.

In all likelihood, unless you take a taxi or drive as close as you can to the summit, you'll end up walking to the Hill through Cornwall Park, a combination of planned, formal roads and allées of trees surrounded by informal landscapes and maybe the odd one or two or whole herds of sheep (it wouldn't be New Zealand without sheep, even in the largest city in the country). There are tons of trees in the Park which provide much needed shade on a sunny day. Once you start the last ascent, there's no relief from the sun, unless (unlike me) you take a hat with you.

Māori warrior statue with John Logan Campbell's obelisk.

For us, this tramp was important as our first connection to some place sacred to the Māori, which we wanted to learn more about on this trip. And the view was pretty cool. There's something satisfying about climbing a hill and seeing how your perspective changes once at the top. I'd say tramping up here was worth it.

When we visited Stonehenge in 2014, I listened to Spinal Tap's epic song about that mystical circle of rocks. We therefore had to listen to U2's One Tree Hill when we reached the top. I may have skipped The Joshua Tree in U2's catalog but my wife did not.

The best thing about climbing to the top of a hill? It's all downhill on the way back. On to something less urban.

Rotoroa Island
One of the things I wanted most to do in New Zealand was to get out onto the water in the Auckland harbor (and beyond) to Hauraki Gulf and maybe spend some time on an island for the better part of a day. Ultimately it would have been nice to head further north to the Bay of Islands, but we didn't think we had time on this trip so we settled for a day in the Gulf. Settled may be underselling the experience by a ton.

The island we chose to visit was Rotoroa Island (not to be confused with Rotorua where we headed right after we were done in Auckland), an island inhabited by two permanent caretakers, a number of different species of birds and the occasional overnight lodger. While it might have been cool to stay on the Island for a night, we decided a day trip would do us just fine. Maybe next time...

Now, if I had been heading to Rotoroa about 15 years ago, I would likely not be going for an day trip or an overnight stay. That's because from 1905 to 2005, the Island was operated by the Salvation Army as an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center. Nothing like some time on an isolated island to detox for a while, right? It ended up being so effective that people actually didn't want to leave and some fell right off the wagon when they left so they could get back there. I mean why would you want to get off an island where you were taken care of and return to society where there are challenges and temptations all around you? I'd probably want to stay too.

The Salvation Army still owns Rotoroa Island today but the property is leased on a 99 year term to the Rotoroa Island Trust which operates the island as a wildlife sanctuary. And in New Zealand, a place with no endemic mammalian species except for a short-tailed bat, that means birds.

A family of takahē. Rotoroa Island.

Unless you have your own boat or intend to hire your own boat or seaplane, you'll likely need to take a ferry over to Rotoroa and you'll need to make an all day commitment. The ferry drops off passengers at about 10 in the morning and picks everyone up at 3:45 in the afternoon. Need some lunch? Bring it. There's no food available for purchase on the Island.

Our tramping agenda for the day was to basically cover from the north to south end of the island seeing as many species of birds as we could along the way. There's a guided walk available for purchase as a supplement to the ferry ticket. We started there and then took care of the rest of the island on our own. The guided walk, led by our guide Toni, who is one half of the permanent resident caretaking couple, got us a good look at the north side of the Island including some history and some information about the birds. And the Trust's efforts to eradicate all mammals, most especially rats, from the Island.

Rotoroa is semi-tropical, which meant when you got off the paved or gravel paths that are marked around the island, you are essentially in a less humid and less hot version of a jungle. Even some of the paths that are created around the Island are overgrown in parts which makes you feel like you are crashing through someplace a lot less tame than New Zealand. The first photograph of this post was taken on Rotoroa. It's sort of cool in a stupid sort of way.

Chris Booth's sculpture Kaitiaki at the south end of Rotoroa overlooking the Hauraki Gulf.

It's a decent almost one hour walk from the north end of the island to the south so spending about six hours on the Rotoroa is perfect. It gave us time to spend about 90 minutes on the guided walk, stop for some lunch and then make it all the way to the south end where there is a sculpture overlooking the water and the adjacent islands. Along the way there was plenty of time to check out the flightless birds (New Zealand has more than its fair share) including the endangered takahē, the mischievous weka and the pukeko, which makes me totally believe dinosaurs and birds share common ancestors.

Two things stick with me from our tramp around Rotoroa. First, the water in Hauraki Gulf is just the most gorgeous blue-green color. I expect to see water as cool and inviting as that in places like the Caribbean; I didn't expect to see it in New Zealand. Second, spending a day on an island with nothing to do but walk and surround yourself with nature is good to do once in a while. We spend a lot of time rushing from one place to the next while we are traveling. We deliberately slowed down on this trip a couple of times. Rotoroa was the first of a couple of days where we made ourselves relax a little more than we normally do.

Redwoods Treewalk
Of all the tramping we did in New Zealand, our walk in the woods at the Redwoods Treewalk in Rotorua (why any place has two places worth walking named Rotoroa and Rotorua is beyond me but it is what it is...) was definitely the most unusual and not just because we were walking among a forest of California redwoods.

But since I mentioned it, let's start there. I mean why is there a grove of California redwoods in an island country thousands of miles from California? Well of course there's a logical explanation that speaks right to human greed.

When European settlers first arrived in New Zealand, the entire landmass was mostly old growth forests. So, being European and used to plundering natural resources of newly discovered lands as soon as possible, they started cutting down the forests for lumber. I mean, why not, right? They found lumber from the kauri tree perfect for use in ships due to its height and exceptionally straight growth. Then they started realizing the forests were disappearing at a pretty alarming rate and would need to find something that grew faster than the native trees if the lumber industry was going to survive. 

Enter the California redwood, which was introduced by the New Zealand government in 1899 to the Whakarewarewa Forest near Rotorua and then in other areas in the 1920s and 1940s. This initiative was after experimenting with several species, including the Monterey pine, since the mid-1800s. Turns out the redwood takes very well to certain parts of New Zealand, particularly the area near Rotorua. 

California redwood. Rotorua, New Zealand.

So what's so great about roaming around a stand of redwoods in Rotorua? Well, you aren't walking on the ground. You are walking on a series of bridges suspended from the trees anywhere between 30 and 65 feet off the ground. For someone who is constantly in search of getting a new perspective on things, I had to do this. I've never walked around a forest from this sort of vantage point. I mean...why would I? And how?

There are some rules. There are person and weight limits on the bridges that span between trees and there are weight limits on the platforms that circumvent the each tree. Don't want to strain the cables holding up either the platforms or the bridges and certainly don't want some kind of wild swaying of the bridges due to tons of people walking in step with one another. And don't worry about the bridges harming the trees. Everything is hung off the branches and there are no mechanical connections, which admittedly makes everything sway a little bit. 

As for the person and poundage limits? Not an issue, at least not when we were there. We rarely had to cross a bridge at the same time as another group. 

I'd have to say this experience is one of those that fits into the "where else can you do this?" category. The best part was never having done this before and never in all likelihood going to have the chance to do it ever again. It for sure got us a different look at a redwood forest. I'd only ever walked through one at Redwood National Park north of San Francisco before and this was definitely a unique experience. As a tramp, it wasn't particularly difficult but I am counting it as one of my personal great walks in New Zealand. We went there to walk and nothing more. Therefore it's on the list.

Timbas. Walkway. Fern. Not often you can have this perspective.

Even if one day I return to New Zealand, I'm not likely to ever tackle any of the real Great Walks, if for no other reason than I can't see myself slowing down enough to do nothing but walk for three days or so. One day is fine. Three days separated by less walking is also fine. Heck tramping every day is fine if I can do something new or exciting when I get to the end of my walk. For this trip, these three will have to suffice. Each meant something to me and I'm glad I did them all. I got something out of each one, which is not something I can say about every experience I've had in the last almost six years. 

Would I have done these in a place other New Zealand? Maybe. But I can't say for sure. The fact that the kiwis (the human ones; couldn't resist using it once despite the earlier disclaimer) have Great Walks and call this stuff tramping made it irresistible. I have a feeling I'll be doing some tramping in the very near future on another continent. And maybe some more towards the end of this summer.

Didn't need this on this trip. Maybe one day...

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How We Did It
One Tree Hill is located about five miles from downtown Auckland at the very highest point of Cornwall Park. You can walk there if you want. We opted to take the light rail known as the Auckland Train Network to the Greenlane station on the Southern Line. It's pretty easy to use. From there, it's a pretty good mile and a half walk (or tramp) to the top through Cornwall Park. If you get into the Park and it seems like you have been walking forever, I found that the last walk up the hill was steep but quick. Don't give up. Reward yourself with some hokey pokey ice cream at the Creamery on your way back if you must. I must.

If you decide to go to Rotoroa Island and you opt to take the ferry instead of procuring your own custom transportation, it leaves from the Auckland docks at 8:45 a.m. on the water side of downtown. It does not run every day. Check the Fullers360 website for details and to reserve tickets. Follow the directions to the dock and be sensitive to the instructions for arrival time and for packing food. Fullers runs other boat trips to other islands in the Hauraki Gulf if the Rotoroa trip is not available on the day you want to go.

Redwoods Treewalk is located south of the town of Rotorua. While you could tramp there, it's probably too far to bother. Better to take a taxi or the Number 3 bus from downtown; it drops you off right at the end of Long Mile Road and it's about a 1km walk from there. We got to the Treewalk by walking from the Māori village of Wharekarewarewa which seemed like a quick walk but depended on us cutting through an office property which was prohibited. We went around through the woods, which was longer but not as long as walking on the road.

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The Bird Is The Word

Standing in the middle of a grass field with no lights at about 10 p.m. on a Tuesday evening seems like a strange thing to be doing on vacation but that's where we were. All seven of us. Standing dead still trying not to make any noise, although the morepork (think: owl) in the distance hooting away didn't seem to be understanding the rules of the game. It was just about five minutes earlier that we passed through the quarantine gate and into this particular field because we just weren't finding what we wanted outside the fence. Pretty creepy and sketchy stuff if you ask me.

Now, no lights isn't exactly accurate. There was a quarter moon shining somewhat brightly and there were what seemed like hundreds of stars in the sky including Orion blinking high up above us and the Southern Cross less visible but still there down towards the horizon. It was a similar picture to what played out the night before up at the airfield. No quarantine gate on Monday but we did just open up the airport's "no access" gate and drove on through like we had the right to be there and started poking around in the high grass with our red light flashlights (or torches, if you will). Pretty impossible to see without them after all although it's not all that bright with them.

Monday night the company for our mission was one larger, but the goal was the same: find a knee high (at most) ball of feathers weighing all of six pounds when fully grown. That's it. It's not a pest and it's not really threatening to us and we weren't out there to kill it or for sport or to gather food. All we wanted to do was get a look at one. And maybe follow it for a bit. Just one kiwi bird is all we wanted. Rare? Sure. But if they weren't rare this wouldn't be worth it. We'd come a long way and invested a good amount of money to get there so we were clearly serious about what we were doing. This had to pay off. Had to!

Quarantine sign: keeping rats out and away from kiwis and other birds not able to withstand an attack.

The where in this whole quest was Stewart Island, the third largest island of New Zealand and the only one other than the largest two that stands any sort of chance of showing up on an average sized map or globe. It's an island with a single town (Oban), 98% of the land devoted to a national park and about a 50 to 1 kiwi bird to kiwi human ratio. If there's any place in the country that you have a good chance of spotting one of these birds, Stewart Island or Rakiura (as it was called by the Māori) is it. 

Oh, and it's all sorts of out of the way of everything. We had multiple New Zealanders tell us that they had never been there when we told them we were going or had been. I feel lucky knowing that. But it took some effort to get there.

Stewart Island was the second to last stop of our trip. We'd landed in Auckland and bounced between Rotorua and Wellington and Queenstown and Fiordland National Park by plane, taxi, light rail, smaller plane, boat, bus, car and even smaller plane to get there. We'd placed all our expectations and the majority of our allocated trip funds into this one place. When I wrote earlier this had to pay off, I meant it. No way would we be happy coming all that way to strike out and not see New Zealand's most famous natural resident. No way could we go home without seeing a live, in the flesh kiwi.

Truth be told, we cheated a little bit here. Yes, we may have focused on Rakiura (it means glowing sky in Māori) as our great hope to see a kiwi bird, but we did have a safety net which we'll get to in a few paragraphs. You can call me overly cautious or accuse me of spoiling the excitement of searching for one under the stars (it didn't spoil the excitement for what it's worth) when we get down to that point in this post but we made darned sure we'd see a live kiwi earlier in the week. I don't like to be disappointed. What can I say?

Of all the largish reasonably habited land masses in the world, New Zealand perhaps remained isolated from human contact the longest. The first Māori settlers arrived from elsewhere in Polynesia in the second half of the thirteenth century and European explorers didn't "discover" the islands until 1642, almost 400 years later.

What the Māori found when they arrived in New Zealand (or Aotearoa as they called it) was likely a forested landscape filled with unique species of birds and zero mammals. Well, zero land mammals anyway; there were some bats. And because of the lack of mammals to prey on the native birds and particularly their eggs, the birdlife on the islands had evolved to be significantly flightless. After all, if there are no predators at all on the surface of the Earth, why bother flying any more? Several species of moa (now all extinct), the pukeko, the takahē and the kakapo were just some of the strange land-bound birds found by the Māori. Oh, and of course, the kiwi.

Man changed all that and quickly. The Māori hunted the moa to extinction. They also brought pigs and rats, as did European settlers after them. When rabbits introduced by white men started multiplying beyond reasonable numbers, they introduced stoats, ferrets and weasels to kill the rabbits. Pigs eat bird eggs. But then again pigs eat everything. They are also and fortunately not necessarily equipped to get into all sorts of birds' nests. Burrowing protects from pigs. But rats? Nope. Stoats, ferrets and weasels? For sure not. All of a sudden these predators found themselves with foods they love right on the ground level and a native population ill-equipped to fight them. 

Native bird populations started to decline. Fast. As of October 2017, there were an estimated 347 takahē in the world (this after they were already and accidentally declared extinct). The kakapo wasn't so lucky as that (although it hasn't been declared extinct yet); their numbers dwindled down to double digits and likely number between 100 and 200 today. There are way more kiwi than takahē or kakapo but that doesn't mean they are not endangered. About half of all kiwi eggs laid are hatched and chicks hatched in the wild have a 5% survival chance in the first six months they are alive.

Today, the kiwi are getting a helping hand. There are kiwi hatcheries spread around New Zealand including right across the road from our hotel in Rotorua (called, appropriately and simply enough, The National Kiwi Hatchery). So knowing we wanted to see a kiwi in our two weeks in country, we had to stop by this place. It was right next to our hotel, after all. 

I know, it's sort of cheating. But we HAD to see one.

Our first kiwi sighting. His name's Bennett. And, yes, he is in a box.

We try our very best not to visit zoos, aquariums or aviaries or anything like that sort of thing but we figured The National Kiwi Hatchery was likely doing some good to save a species, so we made an exception. We are glad we did, although seeing the mercifully small enclosure that their three permanent resident kiwi live in was admittedly very discouraging.

The National Kiwi Hatchery is located within the Rainbow Springs Nature Park. We didn't spend much time in the zoo-like part of the Park, opting to spend all our quality time within the Hatchery itself. This is definitely the place to spend your time. And if you are determined to take a picture of a live kiwi while you are there, you have to do it in the Hatchery. But only when you are told it's OK.

I mentioned earlier that 95% of the kiwi hatched in the wild won't make it six months out in the big bad world. When they hatch, they are pretty much left to themselves. They are genetically programmed to hunt for themselves as soon as they get out of the egg so dad leaves them alone to have at it. And fend for themselves. And yes, it's dad who sits on the egg or eggs; mom splits as soon as she's laid the egg. You might too if you'd just laid an egg which weighed 20% of your body weight. And if you laid two, you definitely would take off.

The Hatchery flips the script on the survival rate, turning the 5% survival rate into a 98% one. Pretty awesome, right? How do they do that, you ask? Well, quite simply they steal the eggs from dad as soon as mom does the deed and takes off. They can tell when dad is incubating based on his movements from the geotracking tags they've got on him so they swoop in before he can get too emotionally attached to the egg to give the kid a way better chance at life. And yes, the doing it before he gets too attached is for real. Dad will give up on a missing egg after about six days and go look for a lady kiwi to breed with again.

Bennett the kiwi, everyone!! No longer in his box.

Once the Hatchery poaches the egg from the nest (yes, pun intended) they make sure it hatches then they take care of it until the chick is ready to enter the wild and defend itself, although they do release them into predator free environments. Getting to the release process takes about four to six weeks after hatching. Generally speaking they wait until the kiwi reaches its birth weight before letting him or her go. Kiwis are born with part of the egg yolk still in their body; they absorb it for food while they are getting their feet under them which causes their weight to drop. Once they are confident finding insects to eat, their weight starts to go back up again.

The Kiwi Hatchery releases about 120 chicks back to the wild per year. If they were left to nature, about six of those 120 would survive. Using the Hatchery's numbers, that number goes up to about 117. A pretty significant difference, right?

I feel pretty good about visiting the Rainbow Springs Nature Park even if it is a sort of zoo. The work they are doing to increase the kiwi population in Aotearoa is important and the education we got in the Hatchery portion of the Park was important to us. We learned a lot. The kiwi is a strange bird, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. It's almost a sort of missing link kind of species: they are the only birds that have marrow in their bones and umbilical cords, traits otherwise reserved on this planet for mammals. Strange stuff.

Scene from a night walk. What's that round thing? Could it be? Is it? It's got to be, doesn't it?

Speaking of strange stuff, let's get back to that night adventure we were on shall we?

So kiwi walks at night are a sort of a thing on Stewart Island. I know I didn't mention it but the kiwi is nocturnal, in case that wasn't reasonably inferable. Tuesday night, the one with the whole quarantine fence, was a bust. We struck out on our kiwi walk entirely. We spent about 90 minutes roaming around a beach being assaulted by thousands of sand hoppers (insects) and then tramping around some random fields in the pitch black with green and red flashlights and saw nothing. Well, that's not exactly true. We did see a few rats. Ironically. Although they were on the right side of the quarantine fence. I guess that's good. At least the fence works.

It's also not exactly true that we saw no kiwis that night either. We saw one on the drive home but I (and not our guide) spotted it. It was visible for maybe 20 seconds in the car headlights before our tour operator turned them off and broke out the flashlights. Poof! It was gone before that switchover happened.

But up at the airfield the night before? Yeah, we saw some. And it was pretty amazing.

There is an excitement about seeing a wild creature in its natural environment that seems to never get old for me. Whether it's coming across a bear or a bison somewhere in North America or a lion or elephant in Africa or a blue footed booby or shark in the Galapagos, there's a spark there each time it happens. I think it's knowing that this is not a concocted experience, that it's not guaranteed and there are no certain outcomes. Now I'm not going to sit here and write that the first time I saw a kiwi in the wild was as exciting or memorable as a whole herd of elephants but there was something special about this encounter because it was at night. Nope I wasn't going to get gored or eaten by a kiwi bird, but I was wholly not equipped to see them in the pitch black, flashlight or no flashlight.

Night photos by flashlight with an iPhone. This is about as good as it gets with the picture quality.

From the time we exited the van we were riding in (after passing through the "no access" airport gate; we apparently had permission...) it look us about 20 minutes to find our first kiwi and it literally looked like a fluffy ball. See the second photo above. While it's easy to believe that we could have walked right by this thing if it had stood still, that's really not true. First, there's no way our guide would have let us but second, it just didn't look like part of the landscape. It was clear it was not a plant.

Apparently we had spotted a three month old kiwi bird. Cool. Later on, we'd stumble across a larger bird, likely aged about 18 months. The second one was clearly bigger than the first but neither was full grown. It takes about three years for that to happen.

So what does a kiwi do when it's out in it's natural environment, you might ask? Well from the maybe an hour tops of checking these creatures out by flashlight I have two things. First, they poke around in the ground with their extremely long beaks. They are looking for insects and worms in the ground and really nothing more. They didn't seem skittish or concerned much about eight humans watching them because they don't really have any natural predators. So they did a lot of poking around while we watched dumbfounded about having found a bird looking for worms. 

I'm not downplaying this experience by saying this. It was awesome. But that's what they were doing.

Last red photo, I promise. Pretty much the same as the last one but further away so less grainy. Maybe.

Now if you get just a little bit too close, they will flee but they obviously don't fly away like most other birds that you get too close to. They don't even flap their wings, which have evolved to be so small as to be completely vestigial and actually non-visible. Instead, they run. This is the second thing. And let me tell you these animals are comedic runners. How nobody has ever made a successful cartoon about the kiwi bird running is beyond me. The roadrunner has nothing on these birds.

I don't know how to put this delicately so I won't. It's a like a butt with bird feet (no legs; just feet) and a spherical head with a beak at least 1.5 times as long as the head is round. Don't get me wrong, they can move. Fast. But the way they do it is hilarious. It's like a bobbing scamper. I've never seen any other creature move quite this way.

So does a trip about to the other side of the world and then traveling right to the north end to the south end (like right to the south) of a country to spend like an hour watching a bird eat and run sound like a worthwhile effort to you? If it doesn't I don't particularly care. It was worth it to us. There is literally nowhere else on Earth that you can check out a kiwi in the wild other than in New Zealand. And there's a better chance of doing it on Stewart Island than anywhere else in the country. It's also not like this is the only thing we did on our trip; it was just a component of the journey. Live dreams, even if they are small ones.

All told, we saw five kiwi in New Zealand: one in the National Kiwi Hatchery; one in the nocturnal part of Rainbow Springs Nature Park right next to the Hatchery; and three on Stewart Island. We placed a lot of faith in Stewart Island to pay off as the centerpiece of our New Zealand trip. It delivered, for the kiwis and everything else we hoped it would be.

Inevitably in a lot of these guided tours we take there is a "let's find out where everyone is from" moment at the beginning. What ensues is a country naming exercise by everyone in the group. We had one of these on our National Kiwi Hatchery visit and when our guide found out we were from Washington, D.C. she told us there is a kiwi in Washington. Who knew? It's apparently at the National Zoo. We won't be visiting. We no longer go to zoos and it won't be like Stewart Island anyway. And that's the whole point of actually being there.

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How We Did It
Rainbow Springs Nature Park is located in Rotorua about two miles north of downtown. Drive or take a taxi (for about $20 NZ) or take the number 1 bus (super easy!) and get off at Skyline near the Volcanic Hills Winery. There's a bus stop about across the street from Rainbow Springs. I would recommend the Kiwi Behind the Scenes tour when you get to the Park. The menu of pricing is confusing but we said we only wanted the Kiwi tour and somehow we got ours for $20 NZ each. I'm not sure we were supposed to get admission to the Park for this price but we were told we could walk around anyway.

Getting to Stewart Island is not the easiest trip in the world but we found it so worth it. Fly or drive or bus down to Invercargill airport (where you can get on the pilot-plus-eight-passengers three times daily Stewart Island Flights) or to Bluff (where you can take the Stewart Island Ferry) to make your way down there. We took the plane there and the ferry back (keeping it fresh...) and both worked well although the flight is faster and way more fun, although I'm not sure I'd want to be on that plane in windy weather. I would highly recommend a trip to Stewart Island.

All told, we spent three nights on the Island. We went kiwi spotting on two of those three nights: once with Ange from Beaks and Feathers and once with somebody else. Ange was recommended by our hotel and we got good words from everyone we met on the island when we mentioned we were going kiwi spotting with her. We (or should I say she) found kiwis pretty quickly and she clearly knows these animals both in general and the specific individuals we found that night. I'd highly recommend calling or emailing her as soon as you decide that seeking out kiwis on Stewart Island is for you. Click on Beaks and Feathers earlier in this paragraph for the website.

I will not mention the "somebody else" we went with on the second night we were on the Island. We spent about two hours for 20 seconds of kiwi time and as I mentioned that was based on spotting one on the drive home. We were disappointed but then again we may have just picked the wrong night. The tricky thing about nature tours is sometimes nature doesn't cooperate.

If you decide to spent a night or more on Stewart Island, I'd recommend looking and booking early. We started looking for hotels a little more than five months ahead of our visit and found extremely limited availability. And by that I mean some backpacking places, a couple of Air B&Bs and one hotel. We ended up price comparing between the hotel and the Air B&Bs and decided that there wasn't much difference in cost between the two. We ended staying at Church Hill Lodge which was expensive but way worth it for us. I'd recommend looking for a hotel as soon as you know you will be traveling to Stewart Island.

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Let's Talk Continents

When I started this blog in June of 2013, I had set foot on just two continents. Those would be Europe and North America, in case you haven't been reading since the beginning. One of my goals when I started this blog was to make it to more than just those two in pretty short order. Through February 2019, I had clearly visited Africa (three times), South America and Asia in addition to trekking all over the two I'd already notched before I decided to start traveling more adventurously on my 45th birthday. 

That would give me two more continents to go to get all seven. I figured one day I'd land in Sydney and head up the east coast of Australia and continent six would be in the books! After that I'd just have to bite the bullet, shell out a pile of money and head to Antarctica and claim I'd been to every continent on the planet.

But then this month I visited New Zealand. It was special in so many ways and there were some parts that were absolutely gorgeous. But now I'm confused. Or maybe I was just never clear on something to begin with.

Oban harbor at sunrise. Stewart Island.

Growing up studying geography, I remember being told there were seven continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica and Australia. Or is that last one Oceania? Or Australasia? Was the name of the seventh one really that clear? I also remember being told Australia was the only continent that was a single island. How is that true? Where does that leave Tasmania (which is part of Australia the country)? Heck, what about New Zealand? If the continent of Australia is just the one island, what continent do New Zealand and Tasmania belong to? Not to mention Fiji. And Tonga. Or Vanuatu, even.

For almost 51 years, I've been able to gloss over the details of what defines some sort of continent on the other side of the world from where I was born. Now that I've been to New Zealand, I can no longer do that.

There's one thing I knew when I booked my trip to New Zealand last year and that was that New Zealand is not part of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America or South America. By that logic, I was in line to definitely, unquestionably, for sure, no doubt about it visit my sixth continent on this planet of ours this March. My assumption is that continent would be Oceania. Or some place named something like that. Then I discovered that in February 2017, the Geological Society of America claimed New Zealand is not part of the same continent as Australia or Fiji or Tonga or Vanuatu. It is possibly, in fact, part of a mostly submerged eighth continent that has been dubbed Zealandia.

What the heck do I do with that?

Maybe we should go back to the beginning.

No pics allowed inside Waitomo Caves so this pic will have to suffice. Worth the trip, although over in a flash.

For a long time, there were only three continents, although not too long before that, there were just two. And yes, I'm talking from a European perspective here. 

The ancient Greeks accepted the idea of Europe, Asia and Libya, although it took a little while for Libya (now Africa) to be considered a separate continent. The Greeks, we assume, did not have the benefit of the understanding we have today of the Earth being a sphere rotating around the sun and the continents being a result of tectonic movement. Their concept of continents likely was a result of generally classifying land masses bounded by water, although I'm speculating here a little. For a couple of millennia, that's where things stood, continent-wise.

Then in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and found some new land. Or some new land that Europeans didn't know about. Or did he? Apparently Columbus thought he'd just landed in Asia, but just from the other side. It actually took Amerigo Vespucci sailing all the way down to the tip of what is now South America in 1501 to convince folks that this new land was actually a fourth continent. And yes, the Americas were at first just considered one continent. North and South America wouldn't be universally recognized as separate continents until all the way into the 19th century or maybe later.

So how did we get to seven? Well (and super quickly here), North and South America would eventually each get full continent status although as noted above it took a while. Australia was discovered by Europeans in 1606 but was classified initially as part of Asia. Although by 1800, some folks weren't so sure and the idea of it being the fifth continent (remember North and South America were just America at this point) was definitely on the table. And Antarctica? Explored by Russia in 1820 and the United States 18 years later but not fully acknowledged as a continent all over the U.S. until after World War II. Not a typo.

And then March 2019 and February 2017 happened to me. Is New Zealand actually a continent or not? Apparently, it was classified by some experts as a microcontinent before that time. In fact, it turns out there had been microcontinents being classified for years and I didn't even know it. And I claim to be interested in geography...it's sad sometimes how out of touch I am.

I have no idea what to think so I'm going, right or wrong, with what I was taught growing up and calling the continent I just visited Oceania. Maybe it's lazy. Maybe it's me getting older. Maybe it's just plain wrong. I'm open to other evidence. But for now, the label on this post and the remaining New Zealand posts I'll crank out over the next few months will read "Oceania". Call me wrong if you must. 

It really was pretty amazing by the way. Especially heading way south. Stories coming. From Oceania.

Chilling (although that might be the wrong word here) in a volcanically heated pool in Rotorua.

Cabmen's Lunch

It all started with a single, simple question: can you take us to a cabmen's shelter where we can get some lunch? I know what you are thinking: what on Earth is a cabmen's shelter? I'll start there.

And by "there" I mean the late 1800s, more precisely in the 1870s. And yes, that was before cabbies drove cars. Back then in London, cabbies drove carts powered by, well, a single horse. I'm sure there were far fewer cabbies on the road at that time than there are now but apparently, drivers spending time in pubs between fares was a particular problem in the city. And some folks wanted to remedy this.

Their solution? Build a series of miniature restaurants with a tiny kitchen and small seating area that would cater only to cab drivers. These buildings, sized to fit on the street in a spot typically occupied by a cab and horse, were erected all over London at a cost of about £200 each. The funding for each of what would eventually be 60 or so of these structures was provided by the Cabmen's Shelter Fund, a charity started by the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1874. The goal was to provide cabmen with "good and wholesome refreshments at moderate prices" while also keeping them off the drink and providing safer rides for the general public.

THAT is a cabmen's shelter.

Today, there are just 13 of these shelters in existence and they are all protected. To go sit inside one of these things and get a meal you have to be a London cabbie. No exceptions. After all, that is why the things were put there in the first place. But if you are willing to get some food to take away, some offer window service to the general public, including to tourists like me interested in London's history. My aim was to get some grub at one of these spots on this trip.

On our way to whatever cabmen's shelter our cabbie is taking us to.

So how do you find a cabmen's shelter? Well, I figured why not just hail a cab and ask the driver. Sure, there are lists available on various websites but in a rare departure from what sometimes for me are strictly scripted holiday agendas, I figured why not ask a cabbie and see where I ended up.

Maybe a word or two about London cabbies is in order. If I asked something vague like this of a cab driver in Washington or Arlington or anywhere else close to where I live, I would not expect good results. Heck, about 50% of the time when I hop into a cab in my adopted hometown I either have to (a) give turn-by-turn directions to my destination to my cabbie or (b) wait for the cabbie to punch the address into his (or her) GPS and then live with the results. Sometimes the routes we take under option (b) make no sense whatsoever. That wouldn't happen in London. That's because London cabbies have "The Knowledge".

The Knowledge is not some mutant power or some cheap parlor trick, it's a test that all London cabbies have to take before they are granted their license to drive a black cab. It's been called by some the most difficult test in the world. It requires London cabbies to know absolutely everything located within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. Doesn't sound too hard? That's 25,000 streets and everything on them. Every roundabout, every dead end, every housing estate, every hospital, every sports arena, every park, every monument, every pub. Everything. Think about how many pubs there are in London (there are a lot if you don't know). They need to know where they all are.

As it turned out, the cabman we flagged down had to think about our request. He admitted he'd never used a cabmen's shelter. So we waited outside the cab for what seemed like a couple of minutes but was probably actually just about 15 seconds or so until he knew where he was going to take us. We hopped in, fastened our seatbelts (have to be safe!) and we were off. He knew. He had The Knowledge.

We hailed our cab just a couple of blocks from the Bank of England. We ended up at the west corner of Russell Square, just about 2 miles away. It cost us £11.60, including a small tip for the cabbie. Totally worth it. Let's have some lunch.

We found ourselves outside a green (Dulux Buckingham Paradise 1 Green to be precise) wooden shed about 8 feet wide by 19 feet long with a small door in the middle portion of the long, non-traffic side and a serving window just to the right of the door. All the other cabmen's shelters in the city are similarly sized, although we didn't know that when we were deposited in Russell Square (we walked by a second the next day near the Embankment Tube station), but the exact configuration may differ a little.

Inside our cabmen's shelter was Jude Holmes (we found out her name later) and about the tiniest kitchen I have ever seen in any place I've ordered food from. We found Jude by stepping a couple of steps up to the serving window, not by walking through the door (we dare not do that!) reserved just for the cabbies. Two sandwiches, please, including a Cumberland sausage, bacon and egg big sub for me. And that would be with English bacon, not the inferior American stuff. Jude clarified our order along the way with a series of questions, each one ending the word "darling". Good stuff!

Efficiency. Sausages and bacon pre-cooked and just needing a bit of warming up. My egg is in the pan!

If you are looking for a gourmet haute cuisine experience, look elsewhere. But if you want some classic English energy food to keep you going through a long day of playing tourist (or driving a cab, I guess) step up and order some food at a cabmen's shelter. I unknowingly made a wise choice with my sandwich order because at least one part of it was freshly prepared. Given the potential volume of orders required to be filled by a single cook, some food items are precooked or microwaved. Can't really do either with an egg that comes with a runny yolk. 

I suppose there are some shelters which come with no seating area for non-cabbies. We got lucky with Jude's spot because she's got a couple of picnic tables outside (painted Dulux Buckingham Paradise 1 Green of course) for people not in the trade. 

My foot long (or is it 30 cm?) protein and carb sub was gone in maybe 10 minutes. Classic English sausage, rashers of bacon with a ton of meat and a fresh cooked egg on a buttered white bread roll. How can you get much more English than that in a sandwich without adding something messy like baked beans or Branston? No messing about with fancy good for you stuff like lettuce or tomato or anything resembling salad; just fuel to keep you going for the rest of the day. Maybe not wise as an everyday lunch but once a trip between pies and scotch eggs is OK. Or maybe traditional English food is just not that healthy after all.

Tucking in to a very English lunch sandwich.

Lest you think our cabbie that got us to our lunch spot represented all cabbies in London in his abstinence from these establishments, while we were sitting and eating our lunch, a black cab pulled up to a parking spot near our cabmen's shelter, the cabman got out of his car and headed straight through the green door for some lunch or maybe just a cup of tea. These things are legit used by cabmen to this day. They are a slice of London's history that is largely overlooked by most tourists. Hopefully this post inspires someone else to give one of these things a shot.

On our cab ride to lunch, I offered to our driver that he probably didn't get asked for a fare to a cabmen's shelter, since it took him a minute to think of where to go. His response: "Never. Ever." There's a first time for everything I guess. We left happy and full and ready for an afternoon spent underground at an old air-raid shelter near Clapham Common. We took the tube located across Russell Square but we could have hailed a cab I guess. And the driver wouldn't have needed any directions.

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How We Did It
You don't have to take a black cab to a cabmen's shelter but it seemed like the way to go to us. I mean what better way to be taken to somewhere like this than by one of the very people they were originally set up to serve. If you are interested in duplicating our experience, just flag down a cab and ask the driver the question I asked at the beginning of this post.

If you want to target a specific cabmen's shelter to visit or want to find one near where you might be doing other things, there's a list of all 13 remaining shelters on the Cabmen's Shelter Fund Wikipedia page. I have no idea if this list is correct or not but Wikipedia rarely steers me incorrectly and I don't think anyone's trying to Maurice Jarre people who are looking for lunch in London.

Interestingly, there's a note on the Wikipedia page that says the off limits parts of these shelters are open to the public during the annual Open House London event each September. I searched for "cabmen's shelter" on their 2018 website and found nothing but it might be worth checking out availability if you are in town on that weekend. Happy hunting! Say hi to Jude for me if you visit Russell Square.

For those of you wondering about the single sex nomenclature I've used...I'm using the term "cabmen's shelter" (rather than "cabperson's shelter") because that's what they are called. That's not to say there aren't cabwomen in London. Just that these shelters aren't called that.

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1066

I spent the first half of my childhood in England. Well, maybe two thirds is probably more accurate, from the time I was born until just after my 11th birthday when our family emigrated to the United States. From my six years in primary school in Castle Donnington and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, I know astonishingly little about English history. I guess I was focused on other things. Sure there were wars with France and Spain and a revolution led by Oliver Cromwell and some dude named Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament once on the fifth of November and some kings and queens were involved in there somehow I think. Other than that, things are a little fuzzy.

But if there's one thing about history that every kid in English primary school understands, it's what happened in the year 1066. That would be the Battle of Hastings. Seriously, every child knows that and likely responds by rote mentally or actually when someone says 1066. What did it mean for the history of England? No idea. Where is Hastings, again? Also, no idea. What happened after the rule of William the Conqueror (who won the Battle)? Yep, no idea again. But when you say 1066, I say Battle of Hastings. I got that much down.

This year, it was time to get a little smarter.

When we decided to take our last trip of this year to England (with a couple of nights side trip to Cologne, that is), the first place I put on my agenda was Hastings. Four years ago, I knocked Stonehenge off my list. This year it was time to head to Hastings to learn about what happened in the year that the teachers of my youth were relentlessly driving into our heads. And the first lesson learned here was that the Battle of Hastings wasn't fought in Hastings at all, but in a spot which in 1066 had no name. They just called it the Battle of Hastings because that was the nearest settlement. Six miles away on the coast as it turns out. We would be going to the town of Battle instead. See? Already a little smarter.

As it turns out, there was some pretty wild Game of Thrones-type drama happening on the island of Great Britain in the middle of the eleventh century. In the year 1066, Edward the Confessor, who it seems had a pretty firm claim on the throne based on his 24 year reign, died with no heir. And apparently, having an island for your kingdom was pretty desirable. All eyes were on the Confessor's empty chair.

The first man up was Harold Godwinson, better known as Harold II, who actually did take possession of the throne somewhat lawfully it seems. Harold was apparently either voted into the position by fellow nobility as was custom back then or nominated specifically by Edward as his successor on his deathbed. Harold was crowned king at Westminster Abbey, likely on January 6, 1066, one day after Edward's death. How Harold got the throne really depends on what you choose to believe. There seems to be little definitive evidence either way and it probably doesn't matter at this point. For what it's worth (and it's probably not worth much), Harold was Edward's brother-in-law, meaning he was really in no way in the line of succession as we think about these things today.

Others had eyes on the prize. Namely, Harald Sigurdsson (or Harald Hadrada, as he was better known) and William the Conqueror, although I suppose he wasn't know as "the Conqueror" before he decided to take the English throne (sorry if that's a spoiler). 

Harald Hadrada's claim to the throne was, in my estimation, a bit of a stretch. Try to follow along. From the year 1016 to 1035, England was ruled by King Canute of Denmark (he also ruled Norway). When Canute died, his two sons, Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut, succeeded him one after the other. When Harthacnut was on the throne, he allegedly made an agreement with Magnus the Good (who was King of Norway following Canute) that if either died then their lands belonged to the other. By coincidence, Harald Hadrada had inherited half of Magnus' kingdom after Magnus' death and decided that entitled him to England as well, which was conveniently king-less when he decided this to be the case.

View of the battlefield from the ruined Battle Abbey dormitory.

Then there was William, Duke of Normandy, who was sometimes called William the Bastard because, well...he was one, being the illegitimate son of Robert I, also Duke of Normandy, who was unmarried at the time of William's birth. Yes, there are bastards (or at least one) in this story. Told you it was Game of Thrones-esque.

William didn't much like being called a bastard and whether it was this that drove his mean temper and spirit or something else I don't suppose it's much known. But it seems that for sure he was a spiteful kid who was good in battle and at killing people. William's claim to the English throne stemmed from his blood relationship to the wife of King Canute (William was not a descendant but both he and Emma of Normandy had common ancestors) and an alleged promise from Harold Godwinson that he would support William as Edward's successor. To be fair to Harold here, (a) he was captured and being protected by William at the time of this supposed promise and was probably not in a position of strength and (b) promises and even blood succession was not how kings were crowned in England at that time.

No matter how valid or invalid the claims to the throne were by these three men, 1066 was shaping up to be a heck of a year in England and we were heading for a couple of full on fights with no real way to the end without just one man standing. It would all be over fairly quickly.

Two wooden figures, presumably English and Norman, fighting it out in Battle.

Harald Hadrada struck first, commanding an army which included Harold Godwinson's brother, Tostig. After an initial victory in the north of England at the Battle of Fulford, Harald and Tostig's forces were met on September 25 by Harold's army, which had marched north to stop the invaders. By the time Harold was done (and I know the Harold and Harald thing is confusing), both Hadrada and Tostig were dead at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Problem solved, right?

Not so much. While Harold was away from the south of England, William had landed from France with his army of maybe 10,000 or so men (estimates are very debatable) and spent six weeks or so pillaging the coast of England from Hastings headed north. Harold raced south to engage and found the Normans at the present day town of Battle on October 14, although as I've already stated, there was no town there at the time. Let's get ready to rumble!

This is not the first battle site I've visited in my life. I've been to a few open fields where conflicts have occurred in the United States and I usually can't make any sense out of what happened, no matter how detailed the diagrams of attacks and counterattacks and flanking by cavalries and whatever else happened at the site are diagrammed for me. It's usually difficult for me to envision opposing forces engaged in combat on what is typically an open landscape either dotted with trees or heavily forested.

There is no such ambiguity at the Battle of Hastings.

Let me see if I can sum up succinctly what happened here. 

Each side that day numbered about 7,000 or 8,000 men, or at least maybe we think they did. The English, the home side with Harold II fresh off a hard ride south, stood at the top of the hill and the Normans, the invaders with William the Bastard (and soon to be Conqueror) at the bottom. The English were on foot; the Normans had both infantry and cavalry. That's not to say the English didn't have horses, just that I guess they only used them for transportation and not in fighting. Since William wanted the top of the hill and the whole entire island, the onus was on him to attack or go away and try somewhere else. He chose the former.

The first attack was pretty much a stalemate until heavy losses were inflicted in one portion of the invading army's line causing the troops in that part of the army to retreat back down the hill. When William's army cracked, the English broke ranks and followed, thinking they had the Normans on the run. When that happened, William's cavalry closed in, surrounded the English who had been in pursuit and killed them all. The English closed ranks and the fighting resumed without either side seemingly gaining an advantage.

Then the Normans had an idea: they hadn't intended to retreat and break the English line the first time it happened; maybe if they faked it a second time, the same thing might happen. Sure enough, they tried it and it did and another portion of the English army was wiped out. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. From this, there was no recovery. Shortly after the second ranks-breaking, Harold was killed, either from an elite assassin squad sent in person or from an arrow (maybe to the eye). It's not clear but it seems pretty certain that once Harold fell, the end was in sight. William the Bastard became William the Conqueror and the country was his.

The ruined Battle Abbey. You can see just how steep the hill the Normans had to climb was.

All this history in on display today (along with the ruined Battle Abbey which we'll get to soon enough) under the stewardship of the English Heritage organization and it's just excellent. The entrance to the property is through the Abbey's gatehouse which was constructed in the 14th century. The first stop on the guided audio tour is the visitor center, which provides background on the history leading up to the conflict. It also has an exhibit which allows you to feel how heavy the arms and armor wielded by the troops likely were on that day. This last part is valuable.

The tour around the battlefield is simply awesome. All told, from the time we entered the property right at opening time, it took us about two and a half hours and we listened to every part of the audio tour and read every exhibit along the way. It seemed to me to be the perfect length to both keep our attention and not have us get too hungry (more on that later) while also covering the history in what seemed to be a very comprehensive fashion. Maybe because it's the logistics of the battle that day were so simple and the place where it happened was so small. 

The self-guided walking tour will take you from the top of the hill where the English stood, past many many sheep and about five or six wooden soldiers of uncertain (at least to me) allegiance down to the bottom where the Normans started their assault. The walk downhill is pleasant and easy; the walk uphill not so much, which I think is part of the point of making the entire walk. It's easy to imagine how difficult it would have been for the Normans to get up the hill with any sort of speed, especially considering the weight of their shields that we had felt in the visitor center. Your biggest challenge walking up the hill today will likely be the avoiding the sheep poop along the way (rather than a hail of arrows or something like that).

At the end of the day on October 14, the Battle of Hastings was over and the English had lost. And not just the battle, by the way, pretty much the entire war. Other than some pockets of resistance after William's coronation, there was only one real honest-to-God battle to be fought near London. He'd gone a long way to winning the entire island in a single day on a site that we walked while listening to the entire audio guide in just a bit more than two hours. I realize claiming that William's army had wiped out an entire nation on one day is hyperbole, but it's not far from the truth. In all likelihood, all the men who took the field that day for the English were killed and their houses and lines of succession died with them. Sure there were plenty of other surviving noblemen elsewhere in the country but the majority of the damage was done near Hastings in mid-October. One day for an entire kingdom is pretty good.

The town of Battle today, seen from the top of the Abbey's gatehouse. Try the Bull Inn for lunch.

Today, the town of Battle has grown up around the old battlefield (and hence the name). It started not because of the spot where William defeated Harold but because four years after 1066, William decided to build an Abbey on the site where Harold died to commemorate the victory. Whether the decision was brought about by William's need to glorify himself or by censure for the massacre from the Pope in Rome, I'm not sure history knows for sure. 

One thing we do know is that William ordered the Abbey built so the altar would be placed right where Harold was slain. The tour at the battlefield told us that the monks charged with building the Abbey and outbuildings preferred a different, more suitable spot and started there before William directed them to stop, tear down what they had built and move the altar to exactly where he said it should be. Seems pretty consistent with his reputation as William the Bastard who gets his way by any means necessary.

William held England for 21 years until his death in 1087. By the time his rule was over he had completely transformed the land ownership in the country, altered the language forever and changed the influence of the church. He also had broken traditional alliances with Scandinavia in favor of those with France, which makes total sense. On the landscape of England, he constructed forts and castles to allow the ruling Normans to retreat to in the event of attack, including the White Tower in the Tower of London which is still standing today. He built the country up by taxing landholders which he had installed in power, ensuring a steady revenue stream. He was the only ruler in western Europe at the time to levy taxes, I suppose operating on the old Roman model that was so successful for them.

The alleged spot where Harold fell, and former location of the altar at Battle Abbey.

Towards the end of his life, William ordered the creation of the Domesday Book, a comprehensive survey of the land ownership throughout the country including records of the value of each parcel and how many people were resident on each piece of land. Historians are unsure of William's motivation for ordering such a project but the product serves as a detailed historical record of the state of a nation from a time when precious few documents exist.

The current royal family in England is not directly descended from William the Conqueror. Indeed like most royal lines from that time, the process of transfer of rule from one monarch to another could not stand a few hundred years in peace, let alone an entire millennium (OK...956 years). Indeed, calling the almost ten centuries between the Battle of Hastings and today anything but messy would be foolish. But there seems to be no doubt that William's rule pointed the island of Britain in a fundamentally different direction that lasts today. It's also the last time a foreign army fought on English soil.

Of the eight days we spent in England in late August and early September of this year, this day was my favorite. I learned more than I did on any other day about an event that I knew about but didn't really know anything about when I was probably just seven years old. As I grow older, I feel more drawn to learn about the history of the land where I was born and spent half my youth. Hastings, or make that Battle, filled in one more piece of history for me. There's a ton more to go if I ever want to find out more, which will likely one day be the case.

All told, our trip round the battlefield and property took just about three hours, long enough to work up a thirst and a little rumbling in the belly that was fortunately satisfied by a pint of John Smith's and a lunchtime portion of fish and chips at the Bull Inn just up the main road from the old Abbey property. If you know me or have read my food posts on this blog in earnest, you'll know for me there's nothing as good as English food. 

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How We Did It 
We made our trip to Battle a day trip from London. Considering the proximity to the capital, it's a good solid six to eight hour day without rushing, which for me is a nice pace. Trains leave about twice an hour from London Bridge Station and take about 75 to 90 minutes to get you into Battle station. From there you can get a taxi into town or head west on foot for about a half a mile easy walk to the old battle site just at the bottom of the town's main street.

The site, dubbed the 1066 Battle of Hastings, Abbey and Battlefield by the English Heritage, is open at 10 am on days when it's open. We went in late summer when it appears the property is open daily. It is clearly not open on the same schedule year-round. Check the Prices & Opening Times on their website for current information. As of this writing, admission is £13.00 per person which may seem like a lot but it was worth every penny for me.

If you are looking for some grub, The Bull Inn is located halfway up High Street on the left and I can attest it serves some excellent lunch. Or at least I can vouch for the fish and chips, the beer and the atmosphere.

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