Last day in New Zealand

Kea, the mountain parrot

We spent a delightful day in Christchurch. It started at the New Zealand Air Force Museum. Since the NZ air force spent most of its time as part of Great Britain's RAF, this wasn't very exciting. A collection of mostly World War II planes, but they did have a Sopwith Camel (Snoopy's plane) from World War I. Next was the Antarctic center. Christchurch is the starting point for the New Zealand, American, and Italian expeditions to the Antarctic. We started with a disappointing simulation of a summer storm - 8 degrees Celsius and 45 km winds, so the windchill was -18 degrees Celsius, pretty sissy. Then we went on a fun ride on a Hagglund, the tracked vehicles used in the Antarctic. We climbed 40 degree hills and crossed water 3 meters deep. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to see all the exhibits, but what I was was interesting. The best parts were a colony of little blue penguins and the 17 minute movie of the highest, coldest, driest continent. The Willowbank Wildlife Reserve was the highlight of the day, a close-up view of both endemic and introduced species from the long-finned eels, which dominate the rivers to the geese, Pukeko, and ducks in the air. The hits were the Kea parrots and finally seeing a Kiwi with their long beaks (in the dark). We ended the day with a trolley ride around the center of town and beer at the Art Centre, basking in the sun.

Feeding the long finned eels

So how should I sum up this trip? What a lot of variety in a small country, though we did travel 2175 miles. Alpine snow, to glacier rivers, to thermal features, to prairies and deserts. The highlights were the helicopter flight around Mt. Cook, the water falls of Milford Sound and the glow worms in Waitoma caves. Another highlight was Paul Brown, our bus driver, who is Maori. He had many Maori stories to tell us, translated all the place names, shared the home towns of the rugby players for the All Blacks, the national team and sang us several songs. We've never had such an interesting bus driver.