- On the pennisular road about a kilometere from Taiaroa Head
- Old tunnels and bunkers used in the war
- About a half hour drive from town
- Take a torch
- Ship watching and albatross spotting can also happen here
This sunday we did a mini-mission to Harrington Point. We were actually going to walk up Habour Cone but didn't realise the track was closed due to lambing - a trick for new players on the Dunedin scene! We'll save that one for another time.
Instead we headed to Harrington Point to check out some old tunnels used as far back as 1890 until WW2. To get there you head out the Otago Penninsula road pretty much all the way to the end. Harrington Point is a small community made up mostly of batches and up the hill after the houses is where you find the tunnels (see map below). The site is not marked. You basically park your car just before the bend in the road and you'll see worn tracks heading down the hill to the tunnels and other various paraphenalia left over from the days we were worried about invasion! When I say tunnels, they are actually more like underground bunkers but you do need a torch when you are inside
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| The tunnel to the sea! |
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| Entering the bunker, torches on! |
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Tunnels!
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There is lots of gorse so that adds to the challenge for the little legs (and the big legs too!) but it is mostly off the tracks. It's only a short walk (like really short, two minutes) to the first tunnels and then you can muck about from there. The one we thought was the best was down to the left from the first tunnel. This one has steps at the entrance (see photo) and goes down, down, down, pretty much all the way to the sea. It goes for about 100m so it was pretty exciting. But at the end there was a big surprise, heaps of MUD!!!! The little legs all got a lift over this so only mum and dad got very muddy shoes and feet (it was up to my ankles!). Luckily the sea was pretty close so we washed our feet off there. On that though, it was a little bit of a scramble down to the sea, so bear that in mind if you decide it's worth your kids walking through the mud! You can walk back up the tracks without going back through the tunnel.
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Just hanging about
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| Big Ship! |
We were out there on a beautiful, still, sunny morning so we spent most of two and a half hours just mooching about checking out the tunnels, watching big ships come in and out, spotting for albatross, and having a morning tea picnic (food is always good when doing missions with little legs!). There were quite a few folk out there fishing too. It was a nice spot to spend some time. However, if it was blowing a noreaster I imagine it wouldn't be quite so nice.
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| A sample of the graffiti art - pretty detailed. |
One of the unexpected highlights was some of the incredible graffiti art inside the bunkers. Most of them were covered in the usual kind of graffiti but there was some pretty amazing stuff too. Whoever did it is pretty talented. I always think it's a nice gift to find something unexpected in a place and the graffiti did that for me this time.
After the Harrington Point tunnels we headed to Taiaroa Head for a picnic lunch and some penguin spotting on Pilots Beach before going back to the beach at Harrington Point for a play with sand and water (another favourite activity for the little legs in our family).
More information about the tunnels and bunkers and a map of how to get to each of them, if you don't want to just follow your nose, can be found in "Dunedin Tracks and Trails" by Antony Hamel.
Enjoy it out there, Rose
