New Zealand, Part 5
5 Dec 2004
Today we drove from Rotorua to Cooks Beach. North along the coast on NZ2 to NZ25. Cooks Beach is on the Coromandel Peninsula, across the Hauraki Gulf from Auckland. It's a beautiful drive. But before doing that we did a couple of semi-touristy things. The first was to visit the Agrodome in Rotorua. It's all about New Zealand agriculture, which mostly seems to mean sheep. At least that is the part we saw. Sharon wanted to see sheep shearing, and we certainly did.
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This guy sheared that sheep in about 90 seconds it seemed. He really flipped it around and zip zap, done.
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This next was taken during the demonstration of the sheep dogs. They were a lot of fun.
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Next was a visit to the Maori village at the hot springs. This is more or less inside the city of Rotorua. We saw a Maori dance:
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I did not know if before being there, but the Maori make up about 16% of the population of NZ. I would have guessed the percentage much lower. In general they are treated very well in NZ, far far better than the Aboriginal peoples in Australia.
Before leaving Rotorua we went to Kiwi Experience which despite the touristy sounding name is a conservation organization dedicated to the kiwi, which is endangered. They really didn't let us take any photos here, so you'll have to take my word that the whole thing was remarkable. They are doing a lot of work to keep the kiwi around. It's a completely defenseless bird - all it has going for it is being nocturnal.
It was mostly raining the entire day as we did all this, but it was mostly indoors stuff anyway.