Cuddly animals, not so cuddly animals, and Jodene...
Hello again!
It's been a while since my last email, so lots to catch up on.
I last emailed you when north of Auckland, admiring Kauri trees. The next day, the weather was attrocious, with torrential rain, and howling gales - a massive storm had hit the north island. Plan A (to visit the beaches west of Auckland) was clearly out of the window, so I visited Sheepworld instead! A very interesting (and largely indoor) demonstration of sheep, sheepdogs, shearing, milking (of a goat) and the chance for the school children to feed various baby animals (aaahh!). Muggins decided afterwards to explore the rest of the complex (they have a mini farm there) and got completely drenched...
Having dried out and made it back to Auckland in one piece, that evening I met up with Jodene (ex Numerica, now back in NZ) and Troy. They live in a suburb of Auckland, and have a nice house, full of her relatives over for the wedding, which is this coming weekend! Both are fine, though Jodene's job hasn't worked out - the Numerica Finance crowd were a hard act to follow! The suburb they live in is quite quiet, and shockingly the nearest pub is quite a distance away, though it's probably just as well, the amount of times she used to drag us out to the pub, didn't she Rebecca ;-)
Next day, the weather was still poor, but as I wanted to visit one of Auckland's islands, headed off to Waiheke island, but on a vineyard tour (with a coach sightseeing tour as well). A very pleasant day, Waiheke is a nice place, and we visited 3 winemakers, seeing their vines and (tiny) production facilities, with samples to follow...indeed, in 1 case, as it was a bit wet, we skipped the walking about bit, and spent the time sampling their products instead! Waiheke's poor soil, climate and coastal nature are very similar to that of Bordeaux, so unlike most of NZ's production, they specialise mainly in claret style reds, and very nice they are too, though with the small scale production, and lots of manual intervention, they are quite pricey.
The following day I headed south out of Auckland to Waitomo, famous for it's glowworms (which are the larval stage of a gnat). I stayed in Otorohanga, where I visited the Kiwi house, and caught my first glimpse of the Kiwi bird, a shy nocturnal creature, and increasingly rare in the wild.
To see the glowworms, I joined the 'Spellbound' tour, which avoided the crowds in the main Waitomo caves. We drove out into the countryside, put on our miner style helmets (I will upload the obligatory silly photo) and entered the first cave. There we quickly saw glowworms everywhere (I got a good close up photo), then the highlight was when we got onto our raft, extinguished all the lights and floated down this cave stream. Everywhere were glowworms, emitting the blueish light to attract insects, a magical sight, like the night sky. Incidentally, these were the glowworms filmed by the BBC for David Attenborough's recent brilliant series, I hope the fame doesn't go to their heads. The second cave we visited was dry (the stream had rerouted) but had some interesting limestone formations, and some recently discovered Moa bones! (Stuart, there's plenty of the adventure caving stuff around too, though I left that for others!)
Smitten by glowworms, I stayed dry over dinner that evening so I could drive out into the woods, as there's a stream there with glowworms in the bushes above it. A magical sight, and on the way back I even managed to photograph a possum (NZ's number 1 animal pest), the only ones I'd seen up to then were squashed ones on the road...
Mike
It's been a while since my last email, so lots to catch up on.
I last emailed you when north of Auckland, admiring Kauri trees. The next day, the weather was attrocious, with torrential rain, and howling gales - a massive storm had hit the north island. Plan A (to visit the beaches west of Auckland) was clearly out of the window, so I visited Sheepworld instead! A very interesting (and largely indoor) demonstration of sheep, sheepdogs, shearing, milking (of a goat) and the chance for the school children to feed various baby animals (aaahh!). Muggins decided afterwards to explore the rest of the complex (they have a mini farm there) and got completely drenched...
Having dried out and made it back to Auckland in one piece, that evening I met up with Jodene (ex Numerica, now back in NZ) and Troy. They live in a suburb of Auckland, and have a nice house, full of her relatives over for the wedding, which is this coming weekend! Both are fine, though Jodene's job hasn't worked out - the Numerica Finance crowd were a hard act to follow! The suburb they live in is quite quiet, and shockingly the nearest pub is quite a distance away, though it's probably just as well, the amount of times she used to drag us out to the pub, didn't she Rebecca ;-)
Next day, the weather was still poor, but as I wanted to visit one of Auckland's islands, headed off to Waiheke island, but on a vineyard tour (with a coach sightseeing tour as well). A very pleasant day, Waiheke is a nice place, and we visited 3 winemakers, seeing their vines and (tiny) production facilities, with samples to follow...indeed, in 1 case, as it was a bit wet, we skipped the walking about bit, and spent the time sampling their products instead! Waiheke's poor soil, climate and coastal nature are very similar to that of Bordeaux, so unlike most of NZ's production, they specialise mainly in claret style reds, and very nice they are too, though with the small scale production, and lots of manual intervention, they are quite pricey.
The following day I headed south out of Auckland to Waitomo, famous for it's glowworms (which are the larval stage of a gnat). I stayed in Otorohanga, where I visited the Kiwi house, and caught my first glimpse of the Kiwi bird, a shy nocturnal creature, and increasingly rare in the wild.
To see the glowworms, I joined the 'Spellbound' tour, which avoided the crowds in the main Waitomo caves. We drove out into the countryside, put on our miner style helmets (I will upload the obligatory silly photo) and entered the first cave. There we quickly saw glowworms everywhere (I got a good close up photo), then the highlight was when we got onto our raft, extinguished all the lights and floated down this cave stream. Everywhere were glowworms, emitting the blueish light to attract insects, a magical sight, like the night sky. Incidentally, these were the glowworms filmed by the BBC for David Attenborough's recent brilliant series, I hope the fame doesn't go to their heads. The second cave we visited was dry (the stream had rerouted) but had some interesting limestone formations, and some recently discovered Moa bones! (Stuart, there's plenty of the adventure caving stuff around too, though I left that for others!)
Smitten by glowworms, I stayed dry over dinner that evening so I could drive out into the woods, as there's a stream there with glowworms in the bushes above it. A magical sight, and on the way back I even managed to photograph a possum (NZ's number 1 animal pest), the only ones I'd seen up to then were squashed ones on the road...
Mike
posted by Michael Conway at
6:18 am
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