East of the Ranges

Central Hawkes Bay and the Wairarapa

Lands east of the Ruahine Forest Park are in Central Hawkes Bay, lands east of the Tararua Forest Park are in the Wairarapa: The Manawatū Gorge / Te Āpiti divides the Ruahine and Tararua Ranges. Background map data ©2020 Google. Names of Hawke Bay, Cape Kidnappers / Te Kauwae-a-Māui, Manawatū Gorge / Te Āpiti, Central Hawkes Bay, The Wairarapa, Lake Wairarapa, Maungaraki, Putangirua Pinnacles and Ngawi have been added for the present post. Haurangi Forest Park is an old name, the correct name is now Aorangi. North at top.

GROWING up in Hastings gave me a very outdoor lifestyle. I probably played about eight sports at secondary school and was always outside and active. My favourite beaches were Ocean Beach and Waimarama. They have golden sand and I remember doing a lot of boogie boarding.

Another place we used to go was Cape Kidnappers/Te Kauwae-a-Māui (‘the jawbone of Māui’), an amazing headland that sticks out a long way into the Pacific at the southern end of Hawke Bay, a bit like Young Nicks Head / Te Kurī only bigger. The Cape has a gannet colony at its tip.

Cape Kidnappers / Te Kauwae-a-Māui from a point near its tip. Photograph by Nicolas Aub, 10 January 2016, CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

‘Uncaptioned photograph of bird colony, possibly gannets at Cape Kidnappers Archives New Zealand Reference: AEFZ 22625 W5727 2598 /3103/0209’, undated image, CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. For “possible” read almost certainly. That’s certainly what the colony is like.

We would pile into informal trailers and the 4WD Gannet Safari bus that drove along the beach all the way past the huge cliffs that faced north, all the way out to the tip where the gannets wheeled and dived and thronged in huge numbers.