To get to Rangitoto Island from Auckland, you have a few choices.  Two of the tour companies offering ferries there are 360 Degree Tours and Fullers.  We took the Rangitoto Explorer Tour from Fullers which includes a round trip on a ferry to the island, and a tour of the island.

The tour is good, and is a tractor pulling a giant trailer which holds about 30 people.  The driver is the tour guide, whose microphoned voice is piped into speakers in the trailer.

His tour was fantastic and full of all kinds of interesting tidbits about the island.

Rangitoto is an island which is under perpetual conservation by the New Zealand government and has been for about 100 years.

The craziest thing to me about Rangitoto is that it didn’t even exist 800 years ago.  Maori people (indigenous people descended from the Polynesians who came to this area in the 1300’s) actually witnessed the birth and growth of this island, which became part of the oral history of their people.

Over the years, it has served as a lookout for the Maori, a lookout for European settlers, an island for storing military equipment and broadcasting station, and a lookout during World War Two.

A couple of interesting stories we learned about Rangitoto Island:

• People have tried to introduce a variety of plants and animals onto the island over the years, including wallabies and possums.  The wallabies and possums were destroying the native and young (300 year old) forest on the island, so the government began a plan of eradication… over 25,000 of them were removed from the island over a 10 year time period and today the island is free of them.
• When the island served as a military outpost during the second world war, someone who lived on the island was charged with keeping watch.  The war ended in 1945 of course, but no one got around to telling the watchman that the war was over until 1950.
• There are a variety of small cabins on the island called Baches.  A Bach is short for a Bachelor (as in Bachelor Pad) and is pronounced the same way.  A Bach is actually (today) a concept in New Zealand as well.   Check out this sign from the airport pub.

The baches on Rangitoto today are only there through a variety of different people being charged with care of Rangitoto Island.  When the government took back over the island and tried to remove the people who had bought plots on the island for their Baches, those owners took the government to court.  The people won, in a way… Anyway, today, the descendants of some of the original owners still use the Baches as vacation homes.

On Rangitoto Island, with the tour, we went to the summit, which offers amazing views of Auckland and the nearby islands.  If you are going to go to Rangitoto, I recommend taking the tour.

We learned a lot in a short amount of time, and got to see most of the island, including seeing our first wild penguin (spotted from the tour by Carrie)!