Since we were talking about road trips a few threads ago, I thought I'd write about the one I took today. I had an unexpected day off work and decided to pick a random location off the road map which I had never been to, or heard anything about, and go find out what was there.

I chose South Kaipara Head, a peninsula on the west coast several hours' drive from here. The west coast is very sparsely populated and has some remarkable scenery. Since the map only shows one road, going all the way along the peninsula to the end, it looked like being a straightforward journey. So I got in the car and wandered off to see what I could find out there in the middle of nowhere.

It turns out that South Kaipara Head is *not* the middle of nowhere. People who live in South Kaipara Head, if there are any, would go to the middle of nowhere if they wanted a wild night on the town. To get there, you drive to the middle of nowhere *first*, then take a turnoff and drive for another hour and three quarters until you get to the back of beyond. From there, you continue up a one-car-wide mud track for another three quarters of an hour until you get to ... the end of the road. It just ended halfway up a hill, and then there was a farm gate with some bulls behind it and a handwritten sign saying "Private Access Only." And that was it. I looked at the bulls; the bulls looked at me. Then I turned the car around and drove home again. It ruled.

On the way, I saw some interesting things. There are a lot of wild peacocks in the area, for some reason, and I saw large numbers of them. There was quite a large flock in a cow paddock, and at several locations I saw single peacocks in trees or fields. They are so bright against the green grass -- their tail feathers were a bit ragged and tatty compared to the captive ones you see in zoos or parks, but the colours are just as vivid, and of course they're so *huge*. You don't expect to see them in the wild, so it has a lot more impact when you do. Leen would have liked this trip. Besides the peacocks, I saw a big parrot of some sort flying across in front of the car, and large numbers of pheasants and quail hurtling out of the undergrowth to cross the road, plus lots of other birds.

An odd and rather disconcerting thing happened at one point in the trip. I had been driving past a lot of deer farms, and it made me remember how some people here found it funny when I told them about deer farms. So I thought I'd stop and take a photo, just to prove such things really exist.

Well, I stopped the car in the middle of the road and got out to take a photo. That's when the creepy thing happened. There were several hundred deer in the field, and when I got out, every single one of them raised their heads in unison and LOOKED at me with this creepy intense stare. There was a brief pause. Then, every deer in that field stopped what it was doing and the whole herd started walking towards me, slowly but purposefully, not taking their eyes off me the whole way.

This was great for taking a photo, of course, so I waited until I had all several hundred of them pressed against the fence and staring at me, and then I took their photo and thanked them and got back in the car and got the hell out of there fast.

Brunnen-"is that normal?"G