The last full day Down Under... we hate to end our vacation and leave but we can't wait to get home! We still had so much to do and our time was running short so we split up. I did the Aukland Zoo because I was not getting on the plane without seeing a kiwi! As I entered the zoo, there was a giant water dragon....
The kids loved to climb all over it and posing for pictures. I found the real 'water dragons' and this young lady was looking right at me...
I wandered through all the exhibits and found there was a lot of construction going on, re-vamping exhibits or building new ones. One of the newest and largest will be the Tasmanian Devil exhibit. If you remember from our earlier news, the Devils are in dire straights with a cancer that is killing off the wild population at an alarming rate. The Aukland Zoo will become one of the breeding spots for healthy Devils that will then be released back to the wild to try to keep the natural population going. One of the most popular exhibits was....
all the kids loved watching the wallabies and the peacock was just an added thrill. I rounded a corner and came upon 2 emus resting...
I hope you can see her eyes clearly because they are a beautiful amber color. She was quite calm with all the kids running around. One of the zoo staff was letting people see and touch, me included, an emu egg.......
They have a couple male emus in the zoo but they don't wander around like the females. The male birds seemed to be everywhere today and when I crossed the park area heading for the kiwi exhibit, this beautiful guy, whose name is Puau, walked right up to the walk....
I told him he was gorgeous and he started to preen his feathers. Then out of the blue...
he flashed all his colors and called out a couple times. Then he was done and walked away. The colors are breathtaking, almost like they sparkled with the light. I went on to the 'Night' zone and I did get to see a kiwi! No pictures of course but I can tell you they are larger than I thought. No wings that you can see, a very long beak, large feet for scratching up their food and totally helpless. They are the national icon for New Zealand and yet they are on the Endangered species list because of all the predators. The New Zealanders even call themselves 'kiwis' so maybe they'll be able to turn the tide in this crisis.
Roger's paragraph:
While Pat was enjoying the Zoo, I headed over to the Museum of Transportation and Technology, which houses a bunch of exhibits of old cars, old trams, old trains, and old equipment that was really interesting if you like that sort of thing. The largest piece of equipment was a steam locomotive built in 1930 for the New Zealand Railways and the second was a stationary steam engine built to pump water from a local stream to the central water reservoir for the city. It was built in 1877 and was huge. Very interesting place.
This afternoon, we drove over to the town of Piha on the west coast southwest of Auckland. As usual, the coastline was beautiful:
You can get some idea of how rugged the coastline is from this shot of Pat on the beach:
In addition to the coastline, Piha is known as the site of a radar warning station during WWII, which was also the site where two New Zealand radio astronomers, John Bolton and Gordon Stanley, first discovered the source of radio waves from outside our solar system in 1948, which kick-started the science of radio astronomy. Their experiments were conducted at the site of the old radar station. The only remnant of the station itself is this concrete slab and a couple tower pylons:
Today was our last full day in the Land Down Under, so here's one last shot of the rugged coastline around Piha:
We're leaving tomorrow afternoon for Tahiti, where we'll arrive the day before we leave Auckland...go figure. We'll be in Tahiti for a couple days and then off to Phoenix for Patrick's College Graduation.
