Saturday, February 22
The water pressure in NZ is so strong that it feels like you are standing under Niagara Falls when you take a shower.
Here is the difference between Frankie's suitcase and Anton's suitcase:
From our hotel room, we watched a helicopter hovering over the building across the street, only 50 feet away. Then we saw a cable drop and it flew to the street and dropped something, but we couldn't see what it was. It did this 4 or 5 times. Replacing something from the building rooftop?
It was a hot sunny day. No sudden rain storms today! We left the day free to spend with Jonathan. We picked him up and made our way to Zealandia for a 3 hour hike.
At 556 acres, Zealandia is the world's first fully-fenced (8.6 km) wildlife urban ecosanctuary. The goal is to restore the area to a pre-human state. They are focused on reintroducing natural habitat and species to the area. Some of which have not been seen on mainland New Zealand for over 100 years.
What makes New Zealand unique is that for much of its history, there were no mammals here. It's only over the last 700 years that humans brought mammals with them, which became predators for the natural inhabitants. That left many of the endemic species extinct, including 51 bird species. Sad. In fact, it was a member of a birding society who proposed the idea for the sanctuary in 1990. The following is a summary of the Zealandia website in my own words:
At the time, the area was being used for water supply, so the idea of a sanctuary had to wait. In 1992 the dam was decommissioned, and studies were undertaken to see if the sanctuary could be made. The most extensive study related to what type of fencing could keep ALL the unwanted critters out. They tested different fencing on different animals.
They eventually ended up designing their own fencing (tight wire weave mesh), and the process of eradicating began. For example, possums were a huge problem, and over 1000 of them were culled within 2 months. All pests have been successfully removed, except they keep having a problem with mice (they aren't the only ones!).
The trail made its way through dense forest vegetation. We super enjoyed it:
We saw a family of very young partridge chicks:
We drove back to Jonathan's flat for leftover pizza from yesterday. We made some phone calls, but apparently you can't buy Google Pixel phones in New Zealand 😒
After lunch we walked half an hour through the city and caught a cable car up to Wellington Botanic Gardens.
The Wellington Botanic Gardens is 64 acres with gardens, forests, landscapes, etc. It was established in 1868. In the spring, they have a display of 30,000 tulips. We were too late for that, but we did see the 106 different rose gardens:
We made our way back to Jonathan's via the Bolton Cemetery, very historic.
Wellington is very condensed and hilly. Some of the pedestrian crossings use a picture of a drag queen instead of the normal walking man.
Jonathan cooked us an excellent dinner again but we are not to tell his parents that he can cook now. We said goodbye to him around 6 pm, got gas for the car, and headed back to the hotel to pack up before our evening excursion.
In the evening the 2 of us headed back to Zealandia for a night tour. We tried to get Jonathan on this tour but it was fully booked at 12 people. The tour started at 7:45 and lasted 2.5 hours. We were on different paths than we went on this morning, and it did get quite dark. We got a nice view of the southern night sky.
Some of the highlights we saw were real live wetas (like crickets on steroids), a kiwi in the wild, and a rock wall full of glow worms. We saw a lot of tuatara, a species of reptile endemic to NZ. The first ones introduced to Zealandia had beads put on them so they could be identified, since they live up to 100 years.
We got back to the hotel around 10:30 pm and squeezed into the very last parking spot.
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