Our Place: Bluff Hill a spectacular, spellbinding spot

In "Our Place", reporters go to a location in the region, stay for two hours and observe. Roger Moroney takes a stroll around Bluff Hill lookout.
I have seen it from the sea, emerging over the horizon, three times - twice with the navy and once aboard a storm-battered replica of the sailing ship Endeavour.
Bluff Hill.
The eastern seaboard's Rock of Gibraltar, albeit a slightly more modest version of the great Mediterranean lump and devoid of baboons.
I saw it how Captain Cook would have seen it in 1769 when Endeavour (Mark 1) entered the bay, although he described it more eloquently.
"The southernmost land in sight and which is the south point of the bay, distant four or five leagues, and a bluff head lying in the SW Cod of the bay - on each side of the bluff head is a low narrow sand or stone beach."
The "bluff head" was later dubbed Scinde Island as it was effectively then bounded on three sides by water and swamplands, but the 1931 earthquake changed that.
That northeast-facing, cliff-topping plateau overlooking what is the region's seaport was always going to be a lookout.
I guess the challenge was building an access route up to it. Even today, that narrow and winding last 400m of the appropriately named Lighthouse Rd reveals the difficulty in carving anything more substantial into the steep gullies that accommodate it.
But as I discovered only last summer (despite living here nearly all my life) you can walk to the top via the paths from the Sturm's Gully Reserve ... and it is not a daunting walk by any means.
I can't remember the first time I was taken atop the bluff for a look at "the boats and the sea and the hills" but I am sure it was memorable ... if you understand my drift.
I would have been a kid of five or six, I reckon, and probably tried to clamber up the clifftop wire-mesh fence thereby forcing our visit to a halt.
I have been up dozens of times since and never fail to be spellbound.
I have seen orcas in the harbour and seen distant burn-offs in the far hills beyond Waipatiki; in winter the low snow and crisp, clear air - white caps on the blue sea.
I have seen great ships tied up below with ants swarming over them loading containers that appear the size of shoeboxes.
Once, while peering at the life just over 105m below, some guy on a hang-glider swooped up from nowhere and briefly terrified the dozen or so horizon-gazers.
I was strolling up there just an hour ago, as I write this from the comfort of air-conditioning, and it must have been 28C.
I chatted to a couple of locals, Te Kaha and Nat.
"Yeah we come up here quite a bit in the summer," Te Kaha said.
"It's just a really good place to kick back."
Nat said they picnicked there, and I could see why.
So too could a couple of blokes who turned up in a well-worn car and who perched themselves on a bench seat that provided a huge vista of coastline and distant terrain to muse over.
A bite of a burger and look up at the scenery ... another bite and look up at the scenery ... another bite etc etc ...
Two groups of travellers arrived - one couple, with a six-year-old in tow, and a couple of English backpackers.
They recognised one another.
"Didn't we see you in Wellington?" the father of the excited little girl asked the couple.
"Yeah," they said.
"You doing the same route as us then?"
The family trio had never been to Napier before and were loving it.
It was all new to the English pair also, and they were "blown away" by the bluff and its views.
"Just magic," one of them said.
I stuck around for a time and from one of the bricked and sunlit picnic spots, serenaded by cicadas and entertained by swooping fantails, did a rough average on how many people arrived, and how long they generally stayed.
It averaged out at about 65 people an hour and they stayed on average about 28 minutes.
Relevant?
Probably not.
But any excuse to tarry atop the bluff, amid the beautiful flowers and trees, a little longer.
Before I returned to base camp (and the air-conditioner) I strolled toward the east, to take in the smudged shallows of Pania Reef and the white flecks of boats in the aqua.
Then I wandered to the west over a great sloping grassed, and distantly fenced, paddock.
The view of Ahuriri and the channels and hills and forests beyond is remarkable.
You feel uplifted on the bluff, and my only regret is that old Cooky never got to summit it.
Many a sailor got halfway up the face, however, as until the early 1970s crews off the British freighters would clamber up, or rope themselves down the face, to daub the names of their ships upon it.
Doric, Cedric, Port Auckland...
The names lasted many years until the weathering of the face erased them (after a ban had been placed on the practice for obvious safety reasons.)
All part of the charm of a bluff.
"Our Place" is an occasional series which runs when space permits in Hawke's Bay Today.