Day 5 – Save the Kiwis
Today will be our full day in Rotorua. And, we will finally get to see some kiwi birds! At our welcome dinner, the guides had asked us each to share one or two things we were looking forward on this adventure. This is one of the items on Mathmagicland’s list.
After breakfast at the hotel, we were treated to a short tour of the city by our bus driver, Gavin, who lives in Rotorua. We then arrived at the National Kiwi Hatchery.
We learned that there are multiple kinds of kiwis— all are flightless ground dwellers —and as a result they are at great risk of extinction. Kiwis are about the size of a chicken, and related to the ostrich and emu. They are found only in New Zealand.
This is why the work of the National Kiwi Hatchery is so important to their survival. They receive kiwi eggs, hatch them, and then rear the chicks until they are big enough to be released back into sanctuary areas. We had a tour with one of the people who work at the hatchery, and were able to see some baby kiwis being weighed, and a couple of adult kiwis in a nocturnal enclosure (Kiwis are active at night); unfortunately we were not able to take any photos of the kiwis themselves.
After the Kiwi hatchery, we headed over to the Agrodome, a working tourist farm. We took a short tour of the farm, and see both a sheep dog demonstration and a sheep shearing demonstration. We also saw some alpacas and cattle.
A llama -
Before - which sheep will get the haircut?
You can just see it thinking - why me?
Shearing in action !
And, after -
After our farm tours and demonstrations, we had a delicious BBQ lunch at the Bowen house on the farm property. This is one of the meals where we were asked to pre-order our protein, so the staff could be prepared with sufficient quantities of each. Steaks were frying up on the grill outside when we arrived. The proteins were accompanied by a buffet of sides and desserts.
From here, our group split up for the afternoon. Scheduled on the adventure was another ziplining experience, a Rotorua Canopy Tour. This is a different ziplining experience from the one on Waiheke Island, so we are encouraged to experience both of them. The Canopy tours company picked up our group from the Agrodome to get to the ziplining, and would deliver them back to the hotel.
Two in our group decided they wanted to visit Hobbiton, so skipped the ziplining and booked a tour to go there. It is a shorter distance to Hobbiton from Rotorua than from Auckland, but no Second Breakfast, so if you are interested and missed a tour out of Auckland, you can also get there from here.
Two others decided more ziplining was not for them, so the bus took them back to the hotel. No surprise here, Mathmagicland was one of those two. While the tour itinerary indicated an alternate activity of an interpretative forest walk,
AbD guide Kira said it would be based on available staff. Considering Mathmagicland would be the only one in our group not ziplining, she wasn’t optimistic about a forest walk, and also didn’t want to ask limited staff to guide a walk for just one person. Thus, it was back to the hotel for some exploration of the city around our hotel. On the way back from the Agrodome, bus driver Gavin pointed out a park area with several geothermal vents. While we’d be visiting the geothermal park tomorrow morning, it still looked like a nice place to visit.
Continued in next post -