Ginger Without Borders

The end of our grand adventure is coming into sight. We will fly to LA from Auckland next week. Auckland is the home of one third of the people in NZ, over 1.6 million. It has the largest Polynesian population in the world. Like most places in NZ, it is a port city built on the hills around the bay. We decided to spend a couple of days here but our last two days will be in the Bay of Islands at the north end of the north island.

To get to Auckland from Rotorua, you have to pass though “the Shire”. The Hobbittown movie set from the Lord of the Rings movies is a big deal for the folks of Matamata (and apparently for a lot of tourists, too). So much so that the good folks of Matamata turned their tourist information center into a Hobbit house. We elected not to take the two hour tour of the movie set since we had a three hour drive to Auckland.

But like everywhere else we have traveled in NZ, our progress towards Auckland was delayed by the sign “Queue Ahead!” Because of the constant seismic activity and flooding rains, NZ is always repairing its roads. Since the roads are generally only two lane, the only way to repair a road is to have one way traffic. Usually it is only a 5-10 minute delay, but this one was on Highway 27, the main route to Auckland from Rotorua. It took over 30 minutes to clear this one because it was a Friday afternoon. Once we cleared the stop sign, we passed stopped traffic for over 2 miles. Once we made it over the bridge into Auckland, we hit rush hour and crawled along at 20mph for the last 30 minutes into Auckland.

We settled into our Auckland hotel (a 10 minute downhill walk to Queen Street, the main drag of the CBD), and decided it was time to go to the zoo. And like we have done in all big cities on this adventure, we figured out where to find the botanical gardens. Actually the Auckland zoo is well known for its NZ collection. The bird we have been trying to find since we got to NZ was walking beside the carpark. The pukeko is supposed to be fairly common everywhere in NZ, but it had been hiding from us.

We decided that we would try to find the NZ animals in the zoo that we couldn’t find in the wild. We had been looking for the Tuatara in several of the ecosancturaies, but with no luck. Here, the zookeepers were feeding them when we got to the lizard house.

The kiwi house was supposed to have the NZ bat but we only saw the kiwi. There were three adults and (unlike our last kiwi encounter) you were allowed to take pictures. We probably spent 15 minutes just watching them forage for insects in the leaves with that long beak.

We also visited our old friends, the takahe and the kea.

Then we returned to Australia to visit some of their parrots and cockatoos.

And to Tasmania to say good bye to the devil.

It was probaby an exaggeration to call the Domain Wintergrdens a botanical gardens. They were two very large greenhouses set in a large park. The park had a statute of Robert Burns (the one in Dunedin is more famous). A suzuki violin class was giving a recital underneath the statute.

We ate dinner together at the Princess Wharf downtown. While it was a good dinner in the open air on a sunny afternoon (once we got to the north island, most every restaurant has at least an open air option like in northern Australia), the hustle of the city reinforced to us that we have particularly enjoyed the smaller, scenic locations on this journey. So it is fitting that we will end our two month adventure in the Bay of Islands in a small town.

PS., Lena this is the biggest city in NZ so we had to spend a bit of your inheritance on the hotel, parking and our dinner, but Mom got to see otters and red pandas today so she is HAPPY. If your Mom was going to do anything to me, she is running out of time.