Gone to New Zealand

OK, wildlife, perhaps because I haven't posted many pictures of living things, or maybe just because we enjoyed Wingspan.

Trout

First, a trout.

You can't buy trout here (at all), so if you want one, go and catch one. I like the approach, except I am very unsuccessful. However, here is one looking innocent and edible:

Birds

Next, birds.

We went and visited a bunch called Wingspan, who run a bird of prey conservation centre, and are totally fascinated by hawks, falcons, owls and anything to do with them. They promote conservation, studyand research, rescue injured birds, and just love them - and are interesting about them.

The Morepork

They had a Morepork (similar to the Oz species, but not qute the same), whose nest had been levelled when the local forestry people cut down a tree - and who rang Wingspan, explained, and told them they'd left the tree alone, until someone could rescure the egg. Anyway, with the aid of an obsolete incubator donated by the local people hospital, the Morepork is doing fairly well:

He/she isn't very big, only about 8 days old, but down to being fed and weighed 3 times a day.

A very determined gaze, though:

Anyway, very cool. We liked him/her (hard to tell gender at this age)

Baby Falcon

Another rescuee was a falcon (the other native bird or prey in NZ , although Australian Harriers have replaced the extinct NZ Harrier). This one was bred in captivity, but was rejected by it's parents, which is apparently unusual, but it happened. Some weeks old, a few weeks from flying, and totally curious about everything:

Anyway, I have attached a pile of shots of the little falcon, because he is very cool:

I have some nice videos, but they are a bit big, so I only put one short one up of the falcon deciding handbags are REALLY GOOD TOYS!

Adult Falcon

Anyway, they were about to fly one of the falcons, but had been holding off because another was out hunting, and they are pretty territorial - anyway, a rather nice falcon called Ruby needed excercise...

I had trouble getting good still shots (and more trouble trying to get good video), as falcons move very quickly. Anyway, lovely to watch:

Wingspan are near Rotoroa, and are definitely worth visiting. We spent about three hours there, and enjoyed it immensely.

Kiwi

I am just about out of wildlfie, and we are about to take off to the South Island to see what's there, but we thought should post the instructions to our innovative Complete Kiwi Cruiser Kit - everything you need to create your own Kiwi Cruiser!

Here it Is:

http://www.quickfiles.net/37324

Sorry, been a while since an update. This one is about the trip to Wellington in mid-December - still way behind!

We took a trip down to Wellington, partly to look it over as a place to live and work, partly just to have a look. It takes a while to get around in NZ, as the roads are single lane and windy, so you allow for slow trucks, and generally get around 80-90km/h. The trip down was beautiful - we had a lovely day, beautiful scenery, and we wern't in a hurry.

Stopped at a suitably strange looking service station, complete with the obviously useful and necessary DC3:

It even had it's own coin-operated rubbish bin. Weird idea, but...

We had coffee, and kept going

Lots of beaut scenery, but I only took a few photos:

Driving into Wellington is interesting - wriggling along the coastline with bloody great hills next to you:

Wellington itself is odd. It's built on the edge of a magnificent harbour, but the harbour and the hills don't leave much room for a city, so most of it is bunched betwen harbour and hills. Expansion tends to be by reclaiming bits of the harbour, or by moving further away - good public transport up to what seem to be dormitory suurbs.

One side-effect is that a little thin city has tall, thin buildings hunched together on a slope, which gives an odd effect of vertigo and/or claustrophobia. It's hard to explain, but it is an unusual combination.

Walking around was interesting - dress, hair and piercings are rather less conservative than the other places we have been. Cafes and pubs are closer to Australian styles than rest-of-North Island, although some, like Fidel's are just different, and rather cool.

I went and had a look at the beehive, and the park nearby - government offices here are not nearly so paranoid - the receptionist at the IRD (tax) office was easygoing and helpful, and gave us a pile of forms and brochures as to what was involved in tax and working in NZ, and the surroundings of the Beehive are terminally relaxed comared with the Parliament House in Canberra!

Attitudes to politians appear healthy:

Driving back, we stopped a couple of days at Masterton in the wine area north of Wellington, then made our way back. I should have taken some pics of the Desert Road earlier, but only really got interested on the way back. It's a stunning bit of scenery, dominated by a couple of mountains created specifically for the film industry.

The main training area for the NZ Army seems to be either side of the road here, and one small town seem sto exist for this purpose - and contains the Army Museum, which was rather cool, although we were a bit late in the day, so only had about 40 minutes to look through it. True to the National Religion, there was even a section on the Army's relationship with the All Blacks.

The following phot was taken outside the museum, showing from front to back:

- Kiwi Cruiser
- Old Gun
- Another Old Gun
- Large Tank
- Large Mountain

The Kiwi Cruiser is not part of the musueum display, and does not belong to the museum. Mountain likewise.

Anyway, some shots of mountains from the Desert Road:

Mountains............

We've been down to Welly, and back, and I've been sailing, and messing with the rigging on the boat, trying to get some sort of reef on the sail, but I'd have to post lots of pictures for that, which takes forever to upload, so I thought I would just chuck in some of the odder things about NZ.

1 It rains. Often. Except now we are in a drought, with much of the North and West of the North Island approaching extreme fire danger and water restrictions, even our tank at the lair is now only half full..why? Well, it hasn't rained solidly for at least 10 days! And the tank at the lair is about the size of a beer keg.

In case you don't believe me, check out stuff.co.nz

2 Obsession with crime. The newspapers are obsessed with crime. Every home is unsafe. Every Kiwi Cruiser has been stolen (close, in our case, but no cigar). However, there is far more fear of crime than actual crime. And the local approach is very sensible. From what I understand, it the cops stop you for speeding or similar, they will often just warn you - the are more interested in deterring crime than handing out tickets.

However, some crimes must be punished. If you read the link , the punishment for a fairly dumb armed robber who tried to outdrive the cops was 4 years in prison, and he can't drive for a year. I assume the sentences are concurrent - it doesn't say.

Mind you, if he robs a bank with underwear on his head, and is recognised by the staff as a regular customer, maybe he shouldn't be allowed to drive. Or use any sort of machinery. Or procreate.

3 Art for dumb tourists. There is lots of strange stuff, some bad, some good. I try not to photograph the bad, as it just encourages people. However, the Kiwi Terminators were cool. I don't know whether the artist calls them that, but we could only imagine demented Kiwinators croaking "Sarah Connor" in an Austrian accent.

They were also bloody expensive - about $500 for the smaller, $1000 for the larger. But someone must buy them...

4 Second hand bookshops. These aren't bad, except we keep acquiring books, which at some stage we will have to get rid of, or ship back to Oz. They also have really strange ideas about categorising, and what topic goes with which. Or maybe they just know more about the antarctic than dumb Australians. Made me wonder about Mal Cambell and penguins (David, you should point him towards this page).

We got back from the Bay of Islands with a little boat on the roof, and took a break for a few days. I tried some sailing, and scared myself quite a lot. Lake sailing is a bit interesting as the wind will change abruptly in direction and strength. I think the boats sail layout needs some work - in a stiff breeze, it is easy to get caught up going nowhere, and the sail tends to pick up a lot of wind - and there is no way to reef it at the moment (and no boom vang), so it can get a bit exciting. Haven't killed myself yet.

So we decided on a trip to Lake Taupo and Huku falls. Lake Taupo is about an hour away, and is the remains of a VERY large series of eruptons. The last one was about 200 AD, threw some hundreds of cubic kilometres of ejecta up, pretty much decimated the North Island, and then left a very lovely lake about 20 miles across, which is now the trout capital of the world.

Approaching Taupo wasn't that exciting - the town looks like Sydney, in that it is a lovely spot, rather spoiled by buildings:

It turned out later that this impression was a bit unfair - the town only takes up on little bit of the shore, and the rest of the lake is pretty unspoiled. But it still looks like a town that would be fairly unattractive at Christmas.

we went and did touristy things, and looked at huku falls, which are very cool.

and again..

And then on to the Huku Prawn Pakr, which was very touristy, but interesting...

...especially the idea of belting off golf balls into the prawn pools. Mind you, I think golfers are targets.

Anyway, Taupo was worth a look, but the town is very tourist, with jet boats, prawn parks, and so on.

Also, the locals have NFI about prawns - they aren't nearly as good as Australian prawns. It turned out these are tropical Malaysian proawns, with their pools warmed by waste heat form the geothermal power station next door. Odd.

The prawn park, geothermal power station and jet boat wharf:

The jet boats spend a lot of time showing off and seem to be mostly like a roller coaster - and impression of danger, but mostly just noise and scenery and rushing water. I photographed one anyway:

So we cruised back to Lake Tarawera, stopping only to buy a boat (of which, there will be more, later).

We realised we need to vote or do something, or get fined, so we checked out the election. So sorry not to be there for the advertisements and electioneering. Twats.

However, we needed to vote, so we checked out our candidates on the web. Some were interesting, some were not. The Socialist Alliance have a professional popular cause activist, Farida Iqbal, who seems to be a fairly balanced character http://socialistallianceact.blogspot.com/2007/10/farida-iqbal-in-seat-of-fraser.html/">

The citizens electoral council want us to defeat the British Empire, who seem to be controlling everything. I think they are a little behind on their history.
http://www.cecaust.com.au/

The Liberty and Democracy Party seem to be pursuing a traditional libertarian approach, and are dead keen on firearms, which is good, except the candidates surname is Milat, which is a bit disconcerting.

Then there's "What women want", which is not at all what you might expect, or aleast, not what I expected:

http://www.whatwomenwant.org.au/

So we sent in our postal votes, and proceeded to ignore the whole thing. So sorry to miss all the ads.

We did find a nice cartoon...