Day 10 - Christchurch area

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We got a REALLY late start this morning. We took care of a few things before heading out for the day. We all needed to do some laundry and Tony took the rental car to the local brach because the check engine light kept coming on. The rental company exchanged our Subaru for a Mazda, we'll see how that goes.

We went to the Antartic Expirence outside of Christchurch this afternoon. They had lots of information about Antartica and a few really neat things to do. They had one room set up to simulate a storm at the main base in Antartica. The room tmperature started at 17.4 deg F and when the wind started the wind chill brought the temperature down to 0 degrees. We were all bundled up in jackets though and the storm didn't last too long. (Tony had shorts on... his legs were quite cold!!)

After that we went to look at the little Blue Penguin Display they have. There are about 14 penguins that have been resuced after accidents with humans and other introduced hazards. They all seemed to have some problem or another but they were still interesting to watch.

There were lots of displays and videos throughout the rest of the center about life for scinetists in Antartica, the plant and animal life found there, and the history of it's exploration. All in all , very neat.

After we finished with the antartic Experience we went to the nearby Orana Wildlife Park. It's a very open feeling zoo with lots of animals. Most of the animals were from Africa, Australia and New Zealand. We got there in time to see them exercising the cheetahs. They have a very large paddock area that they run a lure on a string from one end to the other. They start pulling it back and let the cheetahs out to chase it.

There were three cheetahs in the batch we watched. One chased the lure full out, another trotted after the first and the third felt it wasn't worth the effort and only walk halfway down the paddock before turnng back. When they were done they came back to the pens to be fed. They got about 1.2 kilos of horsemeat that day.

We saw lots of other animlas, giraffes, rhinos, lions, wild dogs, meerkats, spider monkeys, samongs, native birds and lemurs. We sat and watched the lemurs for awhile and saw a mom with two babies clinging to her back

We also tried to find the kiwi in the kiwi house but it was hiding. So we took pictures with the big kiwi statue instead.

After the wildlife park we went out to a local winery and splurged on a big meal and dessert.

We've decided to stay one more night at the B&B and then head up to Kiakoura and Picton tomorrow.

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Photos

Babies
Ringtailed Lemur with babies in her back...very cute, and camera shy.

Cold
Anne is very cold... why did we do this again?

Big Kiwi
Suddenly, Hamster feels small and insignificant.

Comments

[katt]

crazy!
I can't believe you wore shorts at such cold temperatures! Geeze, it must be a "macho man" kinda thing... :P You have a lot of pictures of wildlife -- that's awesome! The lemurs are waaaay cute!