Same shit, different day. (but in a really cool way) We woke up at 9 (well, I wake up at 6 and Mazie wakes up at 9) and headed out for a local breakfast. Today we found a GREAT little breakfast spot called Third Place Cafe. We had great views of the lake in Rotorua. It's called Lake Rotorua.
I didn't realize that Rotorua was so thermal. Everywhere you go in this town there is a bit of steam rising from the ... well everywhere. Out our window at breakfast we noticed an interesting grouping of buildings and we went and investigated. It was a Marae Village. Most of the building were closed for the winter, but it was still cool to walk around and see the architecture of the area.
Then we visited a park that we had driven by a couple of times. There was steam everywhere, so we knew it was a thermal pool park. So cool that this is right in the middle of town.
After all the nice local adventuring, we were ready for the big adventure of the day. This is best told in pictures.
Here we go on our nature walk
So BEAUTIFUL. Some of the trees are more than 1,000 years old. Humans arrived on the island 800 years ago.
We walked along this cliff with a 200ft..sorry, 60m drop.
Hang on to that rail, Mazie!
Some beautiful bridges along the way.
Including this "suspension staircase." What???
We discovered and fed several little birds along the way. It was a Tomtit day!
Okay, okay. We didn't wear helmets and harnesses to enjoy nature!
So brave!
So happy!
We learned a little bit about their ecotourism plan here. In 2012, a company wanted to put a zipline tour through this virgin forest and the gov't said, sure. As long as you do conservation work at the same time. So greed and profit and creativity partnered with national interest to conserve, preserve, restore the forest. There are 3 mammals in the forest that have kind of destroyed it. Possums were introduced from Australia for the fun of it, Rats from wherever rats always come from...probably a boat, and Stoats to deal with a Rabbit issue. Not sure why the rabbits were introduced. (I can picture my wife reading this post and thinking...why is he capitalizing the animals in that sentence? I don't know. I did.) Possums, rats and stoats did quite well and now there are like a billion of each. Conservation in this forest looks like "KILL MAMMALS!!!" It's a little hard to get behind the lethal trapping of these animals, but they are trying to get the echo system back in order. Apparently the birds are easy targets of these mammals and we were told that 72k birds are murdered every night (maybe every week) by these predators. Okay, so how are there so many birds? If I got rid of 72,000 of anything every day, it should be gone soon. Did you know that 2 rats can produce 2,000 rat babies every year? Our guide told us that, so it's true.
I thought a lot about Anaclet, our wonderful friend from Rwanda who is the Chief Guide for Great Native Safaris. Taking people into the forest is fun, but educating them about the trees, the birds, the plants, the indigenous people, and the rodents was very cool. Anaclet would have loved this adventure.
As always, we had to move again. We hit the road and drove to Otorohanga for dinner. We made the mistake of having a 3pm "appetizer" that filled us up. So dinner was just a shared Bao Bun and some curly fries, but we watched the New Zealand v Switzerland game at a local pub with quite a few American fans again. We met a nice family from Raleigh, NC and the girl turned out to be a 15 year old Sophomore, so Mazie made a new best friend. We didn't get her name, but we've decided it's Emma. We'll see her at the game in Auckland for sure.
For the first time on the trip we have an Airbnb that I wish we were spending time at. We have a whole house, 2 bed, 2 bath, kitchen, living room, back deck overlooking the city (from a hilltop). It's really nice. But, we'll just sleep here and leave at 9:00am. :)
One more exciting adventure (our last planned nature event) tomorrow and then we head to Hamilton for the Costa Rica v Zambia game.
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