The farmer’s markets here are so good and so cheap! I got like 4kgs of produce and veggies for like $8!
A blog to document my trip to Wellington, New Zealand during my gap year.
~ Sunday, November 27 ~
~ Thursday, November 17 ~
Picton
On Sunday, my friends and I took the ferry to Picton. Picton is a city in the Marlborough Sounds of the South Island. It was about a 3 hour ferry ride.
When I think of a ferry, I think of something the size of a dinner party boat.
…I couldn’t have been more wrong.
This thing was actually the Titanic of ferries—minus all of the structural errors that lead to the sinking of said ocean liner. It was enormous. It had like 8 floors (decks, I guess) and a cafeteria and a movie theater. It was crazy. The first and third hours are the prettiest, because that’s when you’re sailing in and out of the bay and sounds of the islands. During the third hour, I was in shock. If there was any doubt that I was actually in New Zealand, this totally eliminated that doubt. We were sailing into the Marlborough Sounds so we were amidst mountains after mountains after mountains, all beautifully green with their rounded peaks barely covered by clouds. When people think of New Zealand and how beautiful it is, this must be what they’re thinking of. I wanted to just live on the side of one of the mountains, it was so beautiful. Here’s an example:
(That sweater adds about 50 pounds to my image)
We land in the Picton harbour, and when you walk outside of the ferry station, this is what you see:
On the ferry we picked up some brochures about what to do in Picton, and we decided on a half day of sea kayaking. It was only $40 pp for 4 hours, which was about all the time we had anyway.
It was absolutely amazing! The water was blue, and clean, and incredible. Normally when you look at the Atlantic Ocean, it’s a blue-green-brown color. But the seawater in the sounds was a deep blue and not murky at all. It wasn’t, like, paradise cerulean blue like you see on tropical beaches, but it was a really bright color for being the ocean. Here’s a picture of the water taken from the ferry.
When we departed in our kayaks, we hugged the land on the right side of the harbor, found a small shore, crossed over to the little island in the middle (you can see it in the picture), then crossed the other half of the harbor and went around a point so we couldn’t see Picton anymore.
Cecily in the back, Neill in the front.
Chloe, our ex-roommate from England.
The first shore we stopped at was only big enough to hold me, Chloe, and our kayak. Also it had shells and rocks instead of sand.
Me looking SUPER cute in my tilly hat.
We crossed the harbor to the island, but got stuck on the rocks. After about 10 minutes of trying to rock (no pun intended) our way off of them, I finally had to get out twice to push us off them. Then we paddled to the other side of the bay/harbor and went around the point. There we landed on a shore a bit bigger and ate lunch.
We departed from here and made our way back to Picton, got on the ferry, and went home!
~ Wednesday, November 16 ~
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
The Zoo has 4 meerkat babies. They’re about 4 weeks old. We also have ducklings born every few weeks from the ducks that roam the zoo (but not actually affiliated with it, so we can’t help them if they’re hurt).
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~ Wednesday, November 9 ~
It never ceases to amaze me how many people think giraffes lay eggs.
~ Tuesday, November 8 ~
I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. For most of October my internet wouldn’t support Tumblr, and would take forever to load anything on the website.
Not a lot has happened since I last wrote, though. I can only really do small updates at a time, especially right now since I have to get ready for work.
Last week I drained a lot of ostrich eggs. They’re reeeeallll big, and the yolk is the same as about 20 chicken egg yolks—please, no omelette jokes, they’re incredibly old by now. I have 2 ostrich eggs shells that I kept for myself. I took videos of me emptying them, but I have to figure out how to make them into really small files so I can put them on my blog.
What I do is I take a power screwdriver with a drill bit in the end (1/4-inch, I’d say—thanks for teaching me to use power tools, Dad), and I screw one hole into on end of the egg. They’re elliptical so obviously I wouldn’t screw a hole in the middle. Then I pretty much just shake it up and down to let air in and yolk out. I was told to screw only one hole instead of two—I guess so it looks better. Then I can either save all the collected yolk, or throw it out. There’s about a kg of yolk in each egg so I didn’t really need to save all the yolks from the 6 eggs I drained last week.
Ostrich eggs have really thick shells, so when they’re full, you can stand on them and they won’t break or crack…most of the time. At the giraffe talk, the zookeepers talk about the ostriches for a little bit since they’re in the same “African Savannah” enclosure as each other. There they have an ostrich egg that people can stand on. Yesterday there was a group of little kids, probably age 5 or 6, and Kim, the girl who was doing the giraffe talk for the day, was challenging them to break it by standing on it. After proving her point after about 4 children, she invited this really tall old guy to stand on it. Aaaaaand, sure enough, he stepped on it and it broke all over the deck. It was actually rather funny because normally it would be able to hold his weight, but it’s been stood on so many times that it got weak.
Things I’ve learned about ostriches:
- We have 2 female ostriches and no male ostriches so the eggs can’t be fertilized. So, no baby ostriches for Lillian. ):
- When baby ostriches poke through their shells for the first time, they have something called a beak tooth (or something like that) that grows on the edge of their beak to break through their thick shell.
- It’s laying season so between our two ostriches, we may get up to one egg laid per day.
Last week when I was standing at the giraffe talk, some kids who might have been 5 or 6 came up to me and asked me about our display ostrich egg, and I told them about how you can stand on it, etc, etc.
Them: So is there a baby ostrich in here?
Me: Haha, no, there isn’t. We have two female ostriches but no males so the eggs aren’t fertilized. So none of our eggs will turn into baby birds.
Them: Oh…
Their Mom: See, guys? Because there’s no sperm to fertilize the egg, it won’t become a baby. We talked about this, remember?
Me: *feeling incredibly, incredibly uncomfortable*
I’ll write more later!
~ Tuesday, November 1 ~
