Day 5 was a Travel Day (plus Kiwis!!)

So today we traveled south from Rotorua to Blenheim which is on the north end of the South Island. And Blenheim is wine country!

But before we left the Rotorua area we made a quick visit to the Kiwi Hatchery. We'll each describe our views on that:

Lauren : NZ is known for the Kiwi bird. I thought we would see them everywhere. However, they are actually an endangered species (only 20,000 brown Kiwis are left in the wild). So, there is a great effort to protect them and build up the population. We visited a hatchery today that captures eggs in the wild and assists with the "hatching". This is because Kiwi eggs only have a 5% chance of making it to adulthood in the wild. So, their numbers have dropped significantly. The hatchery increases the survival rate to 65%! Kiwis are nocturnal birds and we were able to see a few of them running around in a nocturnal setting. Unfortunately, due to Steve's terrible night vision he had a hard time seeing them. He also had a hard time finding me in the enclosure and spoke to a few strangers by accident before tracking me down. Sadly, the hatchery did not allow pictures of any of the exhibits as they are trying to eliminate any factor that may impede the birds' survival. However, we got to witness incubating eggs and newly hatched kiwis. They were REALLY CUTE! We learned a lot about kiwis today and I am really glad we had this experience. I would have been disappointed if we hadn't seen a kiwi in New Zealand!.

Steve: OK so the baby Kiwi (not shown due to the photo ban) was super cute and did look like the pic above) but call me crazy I was expecting the Kiwi hatchery to be full of Kiwi's. You've seen the baby chick exhibit at your local County-Fair right? We were 30min into the visit before we entered the room with the Kiwis and as Lauren mentioned I was struggling a little with my night vision in the dark/red-light exhibit (who knew they were nocturnal?). All I saw was something about the size of rabbit rushing around in the enclosure but not much else. The several people I talked to, thinking they were Lauren, were all very nice though. The one good look we got of a newly hatched kiwi was pretty cool though. And take a look at the skeleton pic above, Kiwis have the biggest egg relative to body size of any bird - imagine trying to lay that sucker. I did especially enjoy our tour guide who had a deadpan delivery and was prone to some unexpected comments like "they're actually mean and spiteful little birds" - I swear she said that!

After the Hatchery we hopped a short flight from Rotorua Airport to Wellington and then across the Tasman Sea to Blenheim. Rotorua was a tiny airport (pic below) with bizarrely no security....at all! No metal detectors or scanners, no shoes and belts off, nothing. When was the last time you boarded a plane with zero screening? It felt super weird! Wellington Airport was more traditional, and I appreciated the extremely large and lifelike "the eagles are coming" Lord of the Rings display. And I still don't get why they didn't just use the eagles to fly Frodo and the ring to Mount Doom....but hey...

For those interested Blenheim (and the Marlborough wine region) is named after the battle fought by the Duke of Marlborough in the War of Spanish Succession against the French in the town of Blenheim, in Germany. Got it?

Rainy today but hoping for better weather tomorrow for vineyards and wine tasting