The airport terminal is a lovely colonial style building, really laid back, with beautiful Mount Lidgbird backdrop and the grasslands surrounding the thin strip of tarmac runway.
The island reverses time to the 1950s and adds a few dollops of modern comforts to complete the magic. No one locks their door, everyone waves and smiles at everyone. The populated area of the island has thick tropical plant cover, Norfolk pines, and feels like a tropical village on playtime.
A quick look at Ned's Beach takes us to the beach frontage where dozens of sooty terns are hovering and fluttering above their babies right beside us in the fading afternoon light.
Just time to head to the water's edge to feed the massive, colourful shoals of fish, gawping their mouths above the surface for a special food treat.
Before Dinner at The Anchorage restaurant, Gen dashes across the road to take pictures of the sunset.
Next to the beach with a birdseye sunset view, the dainty white terns balance their eggs and themselves precariously on nothing more than a thin Norfolk Pine branch.
Next to the beach with a birdseye sunset view, the dainty white terns balance their eggs and themselves precariously on nothing more than a thin Norfolk Pine branch.
Dinner at the restaurant with its gas flame decor is much more fancy than anticipated. The chef pulls out all the stops for fillet steak and kingfish followed by Belgian choccie mousse, where I almost died and went to heaven, washed down with Chardonnay to make the 5 minute walk in the dark back to Somerset Villas a dance on a puff of sea air.
Day 2
Next morning, Simon at Wilsons hires us a car. No need for paperwork, leave the keys in or take them out. No need for safety belts. No extra insurance, just make sure no trees jump up and hit you in the rear.
We head off around the island looking for birds at the spectacular 9-hole golf course, the airport, and to the end of the road where the trail starts to Mt Gower, the towering peak wreathed in clouds and reminiscent of Venezuela's Mt Roraima.
At the airport, Gen stands behind the jetstream as the plane buffets us before lifting off.
Day 3
Dawn chorus is wave after wave of birdsong overlaid in a crescendo of chirruping, chirping, tweeting, and singing: birds rule at dawn, ok!
We give the hire car back after one day of extensive tootling and 24.8kms. There is effectively only one road on the island, a 25kph speed limit, and we hire a car to get a quick overview of the place whilst lugging photo gear before decanting onto bicycles. Life on the island is open, leisurely conversation and a wave from all and sundry. Simon, the car hire man and master of three hundred hire cycles is also ready to impart his wisdom about the white terns whose main predator is the Lord Howe Currawong partial to an egg or two or tern chick for main course. James from Thompsons general store greets me outside the turtle tour shop and shows me the fledgling white tern in residence on a tree stump next door.
Today we are up for a sea trip in the motor vessel Carina, departing from the jetty with Chas and Hopper. We leave the reef and roll and carve our way through lumpy waters on our circumnavigation of the island. En route we have stunning views of the Admiralty Islands and Mt Lidgbird and Mt Gower.
Boobies, shearwaters, and terns swoop around the boat in search of fish.
Meanwhile the lumpy sea turns rock and roll as we heave the boat and our stomachs up and down to Ball's Pyramid for 40 minutes. Quite a spectacular destination as the highest sea stack in the world. What a splendid moment to arrive at this spaceship spire jetting hundreds of metres into the air, surrounded by flocks of wave-skimming ternlets.
Dick Smith and a team of climbers scaled the peak in 1965, although the island is now off limits to all except researchers. Dick Smith went on to become a multimillionaire from selling IT goods and good true Aussie tucker.
As we left Ball's Pyramid, we braved more waves and bottoms wet from spray. Out to stern, petrels, masked boobies, and terns performed elegant ballet, careening, swerving, gliding and soaring along the contours of the rolling waves.
As we head home, we pass close to the other side of Mts Lidgbird and Gower framed in the cascading wake of our vessel.
Day 4
Time is very relaxed on LHI. I delight myself by putting feet up outside on the terrace in the midst of palm fronds rustling in the wind. For some reason there is a superabundance of hyper blackbirds singing duets then feebly attempting macho warning tweetoffs.
As if Ned's Beach wasn't enough, The Lagoon is a superb alternative with its fabulous views, turquoise waters, snorkelling and kayaking as part of the Lord Howe Island Marine Park. It is the icing on the cake of the Island's World Heritage listing.
At late lunchtime, we hike through the forest pockmarked with muttonbird holes,then emerge onto a
Past the fenceline, we enter more dwarf forest along the ridgeline with beautiful views across Ned's Beach. Curious sooty terns hover within inches of our heads.
Puffing ever higher, we reach the top of Malabar cliffs, a perpendicular dropoff to the turquoise sea.
Graceful tropicbirds with pink streamer split tails dance on the updraughts and mingle with sooty terns circling with laughing cries intent on their agile antics as they jink and jive.
The sun shines on a vista of the Admiralty Islands and a perfect day.
Day 5
Some days rain must fall and then it is time for a day off. Our sortie for the night is a walk up the road into the palm forest where we had seen burrows. Sure enough, we find muttonbirds or shearwaters (flesh-footed ones) blinking in the harsh torchlight at our feet. They barely move from the edge of their burrow. No wonder this docile, tolerant bird and its chicks so easy to catch have been a source of food for islanders and seafarers across the oceans for centuries.
Today the sun shines again. We have rented a bike each from Wilson's Hire who have some 300 bikes available - Gen's has a snazzy trailer for the camera gear.
A bit of gruntwork over and around Anderson Lane gets us to the generator shed which is the current surprisingly quiet source of all the island's power. New plans are afoot for solar and wind power.
The trail starts here to Valley of the Shadows and The Clear Place. No one steals bikes on the island, so we follow the usual custom of parking unlocked. A couple of minutes' walk through the forest, past amazing aerial roots of banyan trees, brings us to a memorial plaque for Jake, a 20-year-old snorkeller who disappeared Dec 2015 off Middle Beach lying peacefully below. My theory would be a shark took him, but no one knows.
We continue through the lush palm forest and occasional banyan trees to drop down deeper into the
Two adults start pointing beaks at each other in a vicious standoff when suddenly their chick has a brainwave and positions itself strategically between the beaks, so the antagonists desist. Clever chick.
Other chicks coax squid from their parent's beak or flap and flap their wings in takeoff practice.
In the late afternoon, the wind sprang up, so we set off for the sunset at Lagoon beach. Waves rushed in at high tide, leaving sprinklings of bluebottle jellyfish stranded at high tide mark.
Gen knelt to photograph one and squashed another with her knee. Even though there was trouser fabric in between, the creature left an inky blue stain and a few stingers on her knee, just a small price to pay for a fiery sunset.
Once it was nighttime, we cycled in the dark to the jetty and beyond to see the island sky at night specked with zillions of stars.
Day 7
Today's destination is Muttonbird Point. We cycle out to the airport cafe for a water refill and a look at the incoming de Havilland Dash 8. Then we drop the bikes next to cows in the pastures and take the trail up into the low forest before winding across the ridge above Blinky Beach. An evergrowing sand dune on the beach backs onto the runway, so recently needed reducing by 4 metres of excess sand which was spread back across the beach.
On the walk we brush past orb spiders and are accompanied by Golden Whistlers, brightly coloured, friendly singers. The viewpoint overlooking Muttonbird Point covers the island in front with its population of Australasian Gannets or Masked Boobies and a few soaring Sooty Terns plus solitary Common Noddies. Less welcome is the Black Rat or rattus rattus Gen spots beside us on the platform.
Just at dusk we head to Ned's Beach to join groups of people having barbies and awaiting the dusk return of the Muttonbirds or Shearwaters. What a show! In the dimmest of light the Shearwaters wheel overhead, then zoom in over our heads to land beside the palm forest like jetfighters on an aircraft carrier. As it grows totally dark, we head into the forest which is alive with the wailing and agitated calling of the birds as they seek their burrows and stand outside. As we stand there, birds pass at our feet and flip piles of earth in our direction. There must be hundreds and hundreds of shearwaters all around us bedding down in the forest before waking at dawn to head far out to sea again after fish.
Day 8
Late in the afternoon, we pass Peter, the local taxi and tour guide's place. Parked outside are some wondrous pushbikes, one kitted out as the Last Indian, and another as a Volkswagen cycle complete with steering wheel.
A trip to the jetty proves a big hit when a bloke fishing there shows us a stingray and a beautiful turtle surfacing.
Next we return to Peter's place to attend an amazing slideshow on the warbirds, flying boats and birds of the island. The next door room is Peter's man cave, full of airplane models, old newspaper cuttings about the flying boats, and the boyhood dreams of a man whose father loved birds and grandfather lived for airplanes.
Peter delivers his commentary with droll humour. Married to the ancestor of a fifth generation American whaler, he recounts the origins of the island as a whaler's rest. Feathered heroes include the endemic woodhen, reduced to only thirty birds in the world by rats, then restored to the present population of three hundred by captive breeding.
The masked owl, introduced to prey on rats, instead turned its talons to the woodhen - tangle and interfere with nature at your peril. The aircraft stories extended from Francis Chichester on a Trans-Tasman flight being upended near the jetty; to NZ Airforce Sunderlands being sold to the Aussies with a clause to return the aircraft in case of an Aussie-Kiwi war! The question is, would it be over rugby or cricket?
Day 9
Nestled in the foliage of Lagoon Rd, the lovely museum takes you through the various and hilarious sides of the island.
Super exhibits show with cotton thread and relief model how Dick Smith, the Aussie entrepreneur, climbed Ball's Pyramid in 1965; how the whalers used the island for rest, revictualling, and recreation, and released pesky porkers and other animals that went feral and upset the indigenous fauna and flora; how the portly, totally fearless woodhen was saved from just thirty specimens threatened by rats, to be captive bred up to the current count of 300; how the huge Catalina and Sunderland flying boats provided transport with the mainland, not without a few crashes into the shore and mountains; and how the cultivation and sale of Kentia palms has a long tradition, plus the growing of tomatoes for seed during WWII. A super cafe made it a great spot much more interesting than the name museum might make you think.
Last day
It's all over!
Howe much fun and a tad sad to say goodbye as we banked away over The Lagoon to the mainland and Sydney far away. The lunchbox had a fun picture of how we would have travelled when Qantas was in its infancy.
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