Our girls are great walkers, no doubt about it. We’ve been up Rangitoto a couple of times and round the mud pools in Rotorua and just last week a nice stroll in the bush. One of our favourite local walks is a low tide walk along the rocks to Brown’s Bay.
Yesterday we were having breakfast and the sun was streaming in through the windows and there was an air of adventure around the table so we looked up the tide times (I now have a tide calculator app on my phone) and low tide was hitting around 11am. Absolutely perfect for us to get our stuff together and take a really nice long meander along the waterfront to Brown’s Bay looking in rock pools and finding crabs. We had a couple of books to return to Brown’s Bay library and needed supplies from the scoopy shop (also know as Bin Inn – a bulk buy shop that sells dried fruit etc.) We had a plan!
Setting off we only had a vague idea that we might try and walk the whole way. In our heads it was far more likely that we’d get a bus back from Brown’s Bay instead.
So we ambled off down to the beach, across the sand (getting a closer look at our exciting new swim pontoon for summer!) and onto the rocks.
The kids are just brilliant ages for this activity now. They are old enough to walk confidently on the uneven surface and still completely absorbed by the whole thing. Looking in rock pools, spotting exciting things. The first rock pool we can to we spotted a little fish. Something we’ve never done before in previous rock pool visits.
The pace was necessarily very slow along this part of the trip because it was all about the adventure, we had plenty of time to get where we were going. As we wandered we used a trick that our lovely native Kiwi friends had taught us of upending rocks to discover what was underneath. It’s very exciting because sometimes although sometimes you’ll get nothing at all, the jackpot is finding a load of crabs. They are all hiding under the rocks having a nice relaxing stretch of the claws and then they all scatter in all directions. The kids love it! (So do Josie and I as a matter of fact) On a side note I just looked up the collective noun for crabs. There appears to be no consensus, although the words ‘Cast’ and ‘Bushel’ do seem to be suggested a fair bit. Although ‘Consortium’ and ‘dose’ were both also suggested. I think ‘dose’ might be referring to a different sort of crab though…
Where was I? Oh yes, lifting up rocks. I have no idea what sort of crabs these fellas were, but they had huge disproportionate claws to their body size. Emily suggested that they may have been called “Big Pincer Crabs”. Given the way most other fish seem to be named in the Australasian region, I reckon she might be spot on. Whoever named all the fish down here would have been brilliant on Roy Walker’s “Catchphrase”… “Say what you see…” Red fish with a big fin? It’s a big-finned red fish… maybe.
Half way along we heard a strange sound like wave breaking, but behind us, and turning round we spotted a few loose pieces of the cliff face rattling down. This was a great lesson for the girls, because ever since we started walking these routes with them we’ve emphasised the need to stay a good distance from the cliff face. There has been one death from falling rocks since we’ve been here, although we were well aware of the potential dangers before that happened. On this occasion it was a few pebbles and they fell harmlessly a good safe distance from us. For the rest of the walk Lucy kept saying she was going to stay away from the cliff. Practical lesson reinforced.
In the end we did our chores and stopped for refreshments. Ice cream, milkshake, coffee and muffins at our favourite cafe in Browns Bay,Ben Gusto, at the Northern End of the main street. As an aside, I recently had fantastic coffee in a place in Takapuna and asked them which roaster they use. It’s the same one as Ben Gusto, Supreme Coffee and I have to say that I think it’s probably the best tasting coffee I’ve had in New Zealand. I’m going to see if I can mail-order some for the house.
Despite having already clocked up a few kms the kids insisted on a play on the playground and larked around on the roundabout for a while. Josie and I sat on a bench nearby and had a bit of a ‘we live here’ moment, because it felt like the sort of day we used to only have when on holiday.
We set off home again and took the cliff path, because by now the water was coming up and our route back on the rocks was slowly being covered by the incoming tide.
Our route along the low tide line rockpooling and back along the cliff path
Just before writing this post I mapped our route in MapMyRun and discovered to my surprise we’d actually covered over 5km once you looked at our route around the shops. Oops. No wonder the kids were buggered. Still, they managed it brilliantly and only got a little grumbly in the last section home. Nevertheless they still walked it all under their own steam anyway. Proud Mum and Dad!
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