Clan Haley

Auckland Zoo

Today was a zoo day. To say James was excited is a bit of an understatement. He has spent the last few days asking if we are going yet...

We agreed to meet Angela and Daniel (who we will be spending Christmas with) there. Angela is a family friend that met my parents when they lived in New Zealand and I was born. She remembers visiting my mum in hospital just after I arrived and me trying to crawl a little later. I last saw Angela about 20 years ago when we were last in New Zealand. It was great to catch up and talk about how my parents and her kids are doing.

Our day exploring Auckland Zoo was fantastic. They have a good selection of local animals along with a wide variety of African, South American and Australian animals. There was a very strong influence on the conservation side of things which is great to see. Laura and I particualrly loved getting to enter all the aviaries so you see the bird flying around so close. The best animal for me was the kiwi which is in a special dark enclosure given their noturnal tendencies. James' current favourite is the Rhino, which they had a few of in Auckland including a young one.

It was a really hot day peaking around 30 degrees so we hopped from one shady corner to another and made sure to pause for ice cream later in the day.

After declaring yesterday that we hoped to find a geocache every day we immediately failed to find one today. Anyway we will endevour to catch up over the next few days.

Tomorrow our plan is to go for a walk around Mount Eden before catching a flight down to Dunedin to start our South Island leg of our adventure.