The dock where the ferry lands at Stewart Island faces a small half-moon bay full of fishing boats. Though the remote island off the southern tip of New Zealand is increasingly “gentrified” by tourists, it is still far from posh. A ramshackle grocery store, a single hotel/bar, and a top-notch fish and chips restaurant operating out of a modified travel trailer are the highlights of the tiny town of Oban. There are a handful of other attractions: one phone booth, an art gallery that is open for a few hours each day, and a bead-drenched hippie coffee shop offering very expensive internet.
But the main attraction to Stewart Island is the nature. More than three-quarters of the place has been designated as the Rakiura National Park. The endangered, ground-dwelling kiwi bird thrives here, as do many other native birds. Before successive waves of human inhabitants began to arrive, no mammals or predaceous reptiles lived anywhere in New Zealand. Many of the country’s native birds and reptiles – such as the prehistoric, lizardlike tuatara that can live to be over 100 years old – have been driven to the brink of extinction or beyond by a long list of pests featuring rats, cats, possums, mice and pigs. Stewart Island has largely been spared the invasion, by virtue of being so small and so remote. The winters here are harsh; the summer days are long. It is at roughly the same latitude as Seattle but is a microscopic landmass, buffeted by the massive weather patterns that accumulate over the open sea.
My visit to the island was a lazy affair: six of us in a friend’s rustic hut ten minutes outside of town. We drank foliage-flavored water from a tank that funneled rain off the hut’s roof, and watched plump New Zealand pigeons rummage for berries in the bushes outside while muted parrots called kakas swooped overhead. One night I’m pretty sure I heard a kiwi, but we never saw one. During the days we strolled to nearby beaches, and one day hired a local with a little boat to take us over to the neighboring Ulva Island for the afternoon. One friend fished for snapper off the dock, and I got a sunburn while watching one of the kiwi’s un-endangered and unafraid cousins, a weka, try to sample both my beer and my chocolate. The majority of visitors are more motivated than we were, and come for the hiking. The 18-mile-long Rakiura Track is typically done in three days; hikers sleep in the two huts along the way, which come stocked with firewood provided by park staff. Despite long sections of boardwalks, the track is renowned for its mud: deep, slick and absolutely everywhere. But one hiker told me the beaches and the forests are beautiful, and it is less overrun than the tracks on the mainland.
