Greetings from the Southern Hemisphere Jun 3, 2007
So, as you may or may not know (and for those of you who don’t frequent our message boards and didn’t know, shame on you. There’s nothing else on the internet you should be concerned with) my wife and I are on a vacation on the north island of New Zealand. It’s winter down here, but it’s extremely mild. As I write this, it’s about 8am Saturday (4pm Friday on the east coast of the US) and the sun just came up about half an hour ago. It’s about 60, with a nice offshore breeze, but not a chilly 60. It’s nice and comfortable.
We’re mobile, seeing as how we’ve rented a motorhome and are staying in campgrounds. It’s about an 19 foot VW-TDI powered affair with a five-speed and the steering wheel on the wrong side. We had originally rented somethign a little smaller, but since this is the offseason, we were able to upgrade for only $9NZ (about $6US) per day. Not a bad deal, and another compelling reason to come here in the winter.
Our flight almost led to disaster when we were delayed for over four hours in Dallas on our way to LA. Our LA-Auckland flight on Air Tahiti Nui took off at 6:10pm, and when we finally got American Arilines to reschedule us after getting to Dallas, we were scheduled to land at LAX at 5:45. Not much time to change terminals, go back through security and get on an international flight. And if we had missed it, it meant waiting in LA for two days for the next Air Tahiti Nui flight.
We landed on time, but got held up waiting for someone to come park the plane. When we finally hit the terminal, it was 5:52, and the dash over to the Tom Bradley International Terminal, we rushed up to the ATN gate at 6:02. The incredibly nice lady at the gate radioed the plane, and told them to wait for us. She then ran us through the airport body checking people out of the way and waving a clear path for us. we got to go through the “backdoor” of security, and literally got on the plane as they shut the door behind us.
Sadly, our luggage didn’t make it yet, but we expect it today. We stopped and bought some clean clothes and groceries and heaed to our first stop: The Auckland Zoo.
After about 34 hours of total travel time, we were a little wiped, but we had arranged for a ZOOm tour, which is a guided, small group tour of specific displays, in this case, native New Zealand Animals. New Zealand has inly been populated for about 1300 years, so the animals that had been here in the millions of years since the islands broke away from Australasia were allowed to evolve completely independently, producing some of the most interesting species you can imagine. NZ has no indiginous mammalian predators, save for a couple of species of bats, so some fascinating ground-dwellers, and even more fascinating birds, developed. I won’t go into the whole story—I’m no biologist and I’m sure a Google search would give you better info—but we did see some cool stuff.
As it turned out, we were the only people on the tour, so we got a personal, up close look at some of the natives, including the Kea (a giant parrot the size of a Eagle), the Kaka (the Kea’s little cousin), various Lorikeets, ducks, and Pigeons, the Blue Penguin, and the big two: the Tuatara (ancient reptile that looks like a cross between an iguana, a komodo and an alligator—but it’s not technically a lizard) and the Kiwi, the symbol of the country. Kiwi’s are larger than we realized—about the size of a big chicken, and incredible muscular and fiesty. While we were in the Kiwi house with the keepers, the pair on display began making sweet Kiwi love to each other. Apparently someone had left some Luther Vandross on in the Kiwi habitat or something. Even the keepers were shocked, stating that they had never seen the pair “engage” before. Usually Kiwi breeding takes place in a much more controlled environment. The vent became quite the buzz on the keeper’s radios for the rest of the day among zoo employees.
Here’s some video from the day. It’s pretty much just dumped out of the camera, but you should be able to follow what’s going on. It has a more cohesive plot than “The Fountain” does, anyway.
UPDATE: I’m having a heck of a time uploading the video from the campground we’re currently at. I’ll post something else if I manage to get it actually posted.
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