Week 2 - Day12 - Kiwi Birds!

The local high school is quite pretty. The grounds are covered with large local trees. They have tennis courts and a football field with grandstands.
Students have another week holiday before the begin their final term of school this year.

This flower is outside the holiday home in Tauranga.

We were off today to see the kiwi bird at the Kiwi Bird Sanctuary outside of Rotorua. They had a very nice trail through the bush with large naturalized cages of local birds. Many of them you could walk in with the birds.There were wild New Zealand pigs, domestic rabbits, local donkeys, chickens with chicks and assorted wild ducks.

They also labelled all the trees and bushes, which, was quite helpful. The Kiwi birds were inside a building, as they are nocturnal. This place certainly was worth the visit.

The white duck is called a curly feathered duck. Its feathers are so long they drag on the ground. This wood pigeon is twice the size of our local pigeons.

We pick-nic'd in the car at a local down town park in Rotorua. This park was recommended to us, otherwise we would have missed it. Well this park certainly was a surprise! This is quite a large park full of hot springs.

They have most of the hot springs fenced off to prevent any mishaps. The hot springs ranged from steam escaping from rocks, looking much like a fire pit of smoldering ashes to bubbling mud. When you crossed the grass you could see tiny gas holes about the size of a quarter.

These tiny gas holes made me quite nervous as we saw one that had developed quickly and it looked quite dangerous.

The ground around the above crater (video) had just broken away from a gas hole, to become a meter deep crater, about two meters across. It was filled with bubbling mud and smelled quite sulphery. As we looked over this particular crater, I talked to a couple of local men and they told us this particular one was only a year old.

I started to watch where every step went. There were hot springs everywhere!

As well, the gardens in this park are spectacular. I found out, from the gardener, what that bright pink bush was - he spelled it as Azalea Amenone. These flowers are particularly small compared to the common azalea.

The park was filled with azaleas and rhotodendroms in all sorts of colours. The bridge over one particularly large hotspring pool was covered with purple wisteria.
I met the head gardener who explained that this was a rather new park as the train used to run through this property and it was not public land. I think it looked rather mature myself. I didn't ask how old it was! He was putting in a perennial bed covered in bark. He has decided to start using bark to keep the weeds down. The town employs three full time gardeners for this garden alone.

The final interesting features were the public foot baths. We found three in total. Two baths were covered and one outdoors. The were well used by the public.
Our next stop was to check out Zorbing. It was just was around the corner. We had a great laugh watching it.

We watched both wet and dry zorbing. The rider is strapped in for dry zorbing and then they are pushed down a hill going head over heals!

Wet zorbing is more interesting - you are not strapped in and they put water in with you to help with your position going down the hill. They push you down a zig-zagging course. These balls can also bounce.

They should take this up at Devil's Elbow in the spring, summer and fall! Alan and I plan on going back and trying this.

We checked out a farm that had sheep sheering etc. It was terribly expensive beginning at forty dollars a person. Most of the displays were free so you paid for a wagon tour of a farm and then sheep sheering. We opted out.