We arrived at about 5:50 am at the airport in Auckland and the process through immigration and customs was very easy and smooth. You should be aware that they are quite strict in regulations for biohazards as they are an agricultural country and do not want to introduce any foreign biohazards for their plants and animals. If you fail to declare that you have any fresh foods or vegetables in your presence, you will be fined $400 NZ dollars.
We went to the Avis car counter and checked in to obtain our vehicle which was parked right outside of the terminal. I went to the Vodafone desk and got a $49 NZD sim card for my Nokia cellphone that appeared to be adequate for the number of call we would be making in the country. I believe we have 200 minutes of talk time and 3 gig of data for this price but I doubt I will use it much. You cannot make calls to the USA for this price but you can text to the USA.
The vehicle we rented for the first leg of the journey was a new Mazda and it appears to be a hybrid of some type as the engine stops and starts. I’ll have to search to see if this is a new innovation for saving emissions. We then drove to meet our hosts, Graham and Katrine Patton at the Hillside B&B. Graham is a retired English teacher and Katrine is a retired primary school teacher. They are pleasant hosts and offered to keep our luggage for us while we toured around so that we did not have to worry about thieves.
Even though we were tired from a 12 hour flight, we decided to drive two hours to the south of Aukland to visit the Waitomo Glowworm cave and to see the Ruakuri cave. The tickets for these two attractions costs $174 NZD and it takes about 45 minutes to see the Waitomo cave and they will not let you take any pictures in the cave or in the gift shop afterwards. You do see an amazing number of glowworms and a portion of the tour is via boat. The Ruakuri (Two Dogs in Mauri language) cave is magnificent and it takes about 2 hours to see this cave that is about 1/2 mile long. It also has glowworms and the guide did allow pictures to be taken. This cave has a river flowing through it and another attraction is provided by Black Water Adventure Tours where you can float through the dark cave on innertubes. Having done Waitomo and Ruakuri, I would recommend that if pressed for time or money, just do the Ruakuri cave.
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| Entrance to Ruakuri Cave |
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| River in Ruakuri Cave |
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| Ruakuri Cave |
Glowworms are the larval part of the life cycle of a creature that hatches from eggs laid by a small fly. The larva lives it’s life in the dark cave that must be fed by a flowing river. The creature produces a luminescent chemical called luciferin that glows when it reacts with oxygem. The tail end of the larva glows to attract other insects brought into the cave by the flowing river and they are trapped by sticky threads produced by the larva, much like spider web threads, except that hang down in a linear fashion. When the insect is trapped, the larva feed s on it and it eventually forms a pupa stage from the sticky threads until metamorphosis lets it emerge as a small two winged fly. The fly mates and lays eggs before dying in a couple of days to start the life cycle again.
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| Glowworm Threads |
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| Waitomo Cave |
After we toured the caves, we started back to where we are staying for the evening and decided to visit the Otorohanga Kiwi House to see if we could see a rare, live kiwi bird. This center has three kiwis on display. There are about 70,000 kiwi left in all of New Zealand and they are losing about 2% of the kiwi population every year – this equates to 27 per week.
Kiwi are mostly nocturnal. They are most commonly forest dwellers, making daytime dens and nests in burrows, hollow logs or under dense vegetation.
Kiwi are the only bird to have nostrils at the end of their very long bill. Their nostrils are used to probe in the ground, sniffing out invertebrates to eat, along with some fallen fruit. They also have one of the largest egg-to-body weight ratios of any bird. The egg averages 15% of the female's body weight (compared to 2% for the ostrich).
Females are larger than males (up to 3.3 kg and 45 cm). Kiwi are long-lived, and depending on the species live for between 25 and 50 years. The Kiwi center has a rare great spotted kiwi that is one of only three in captivity. There are no males in captivity and thus any eggs laid are infertile.
We did get to see a live kiwi after paying our admission fee to the center and then complaining that we were sorry we paid because we could not see a live bird. Finally, one or the staff tapped on the enclosure glass and brought the kiwi close for our observation. The birds are much larger that I imagined, about twice the size of a large rooster. The wings are rudimentary and thus making flight an impossibility.
You can read more about this unusual bird here: http://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/birds-a-z/kiwi/
By the time we got back to our B&B, it was about 6:30 in the evening and we were starved after not really eating much since we got off the airplane. We asked our hosts for a restaurant recommendation and were directed to an excellent Italian place called Volare (91 Charles Prevost Drive. The Gardens, Aukland). The food was excellent and we got a bottle of Pinot Noir that was wonderful.
By the time dinner ended, we abandoned our thoughts of going back to Auckland to dance tango. We just crashed at 8:30 pm from a day of excitement.
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