Our hotel was great, but I must admit those sleeping bags were pretty cozy the last few nights, and we woke up this morning back in the civilized world. Today's plan is to drive down the coast to Oamaru and stop on the way to see Deb’s college friend's daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter on their farm in Leeston just an hour and a half south of Akaroa.
The windy road off the peninsula gave us nice vistas again but you need to keep a watchful eye on the big trucks on the narrow twisty road. They use a lot of double trailer trucks here which you only see in the states up on the interstates. Sometimes they need more than their lane on the tight corners.
After heading back near Christchurch, we went south on Rt 1. This seaside land offers large flat plots of farm land and the grass is green and freshly mowed. I can see signs of more dairy, less sheep, and very little beef being raised down here. Rt 1 is the “big road” that goes down the entire South Island. After taking some small side roads we arrived at David and Ali Ackerman’s farm. Their father greeted us, a Swiss man who moved here and started the farm 26 years ago.
They milk a few hundred Ayrshire cows twice a day. It appears that they buy most of their feed from nearby (corn and hay) and most of their milk goes to a processor called Fonterra that converts it to dry powder and exports it. A lot goes to China. Their milking barn is all outdoors with a roof over it since the climate is so mild here. Their young daughter Esther, 16 months old, kept her parents busy and kept us entertained. She will grow up a real farm girl for sure. We had coffee and tea (with real maple syrup!!) and their dad offered lunch, but we declined since we had a lot left to see today and these folks have to run their farm.
Next stop was Timaru which seems like a small town on the coast, but we took the back streets and ended up driving around the huge seaport with containers and docks and cranes and trucks. We found a park and had lunch (crackers, cheese, ham, fruit) and then headed south on Rt 1 again.
Our final stop was Oamaru, which was overbuilt in the late 1800’s. By this I mean they had hoped this would be the big port city and it was, but the shoreline here was a bit too rough and even after building a large infrastructure, they failed and the city basically went out of business. What is left behind is a nice sized town with beautiful, ornate, limestone buildings on every street. It is the home of “steam punk” which, I may get this wrong being of advanced age, is a fantasy world where steam powered machinery runs features.
Think weird people flying steam powered air balloons.
We had dinner across the street at Fat Sally’s and I got my first real Guinness of the trip.
Deb set up a penguin show for dusk tonight. There is a penguin reserve here in town with 380 bird boxes which help the penguins successfully mate and raise their young. They have been able to grow their penguin population by setting this area aside. The penguins mate for life and together raise the next generation. They live to be 7 or 8 years old. They plant microchips in each bird so they can track them and learn their habits to help them be successful. One parent stays behind to mind the egg and the other leaves at 5 am to hunt and does not return until dusk. They fish all day and then crawl back each night. The parents take turns fishing each day and when the young (they have two eggs at a time) get bigger, they both have to fish each day. Once the young are almost full size, the parents actually cut back the amount of food they bring home, which forces the youngsters to go fish for themselves. They have a live webcam so you can see them any time.
The beach where they go into and out of the water is just a rocky shore and the penguins return in “rafts” or groups of a dozen or so at a time. We saw about 50 penguins climb on shore during our time there. They stop to cool off once they get to shore and then waddle off to their respective bird boxes. There were a bunch of big seals lying around watching the penguins come in to shore. They don’t hunt them but I assume they just annoy them.
So back to the hotel and off to bed. Another great NZ day.
.JPG)
No comments:
Post a Comment