Thursday 6 February 2014
Mozilla At Motuihe
Today was Waitangi Day in New Zealand, a public holiday. Since we haven't had our usual annual Mozilla office excursion, several people from the Mozilla office decided to go to Motuihe Island for the day with families/partners. Motuihe is a fairly small island between Waiheke Island and Auckland, recently cleared of predators and subject to a large reforestation and native bird repopulation project. In particular, little spotted kiwi have been reintroduced. This means I can see, from my desk, a place where kiwi live in the wild :-).
It's a short ferry ride from the city --- about 30 minutes --- but the ferry doesn't run most of the year; after this weekend it won't run again until December. (I've been to Motuihe lots of times but in the past, always on my parents' boat.) The weather today wasn't as good as forecast --- very windy, lots of cloud, and a spot of rain. Nevertheless I think we all had a good time. We walked around almost the whole island in a few hours, having a picnic lunch along the way at one of the smaller beaches (Calypso Bay). Then we walked on Ocean Beach a bit --- a very pleasant beach, generally, although today it was a bit wild with the wind blowing in hard. A few of us went for a swim, which was surprisingly fun, since the water was warm and the waves made it interesting. Auckland has also been experiencing a sequence of very high tides and the high tide today was no exception, which made it fun for the kids swinging on rope swings over the water.
Definitely worth doing if you're an Aucklander and haven't been there before. You can camp overnight on the island, and it's interesting to learn about the history of the island (which includes quarantine station and WW1 POW camp, which hosted the famous Count Felix von Luckner --- a most extraordinary man.)
