The wilds of Christchurch

The pace is a little different when you're visiting with friends. You get to wake up leisurely, have your meals with friendly company and wonderful conversations fill your hours. Plus, it's always nice change of pace to see a location from the viewpoints of locals instead of tourists.

The weather was pretty warm for a Canturbury autumn day, so it was a perfect day for viewing some predominately New Zealand wildlife at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. The Park is rather unique in that it has a very open, jungle feel to it. The jungle feel comes from the native New Zealand plants, mostly fern trees, growing thick around the pathways. Many of the enclosures are set up so that you can walk through them without there being anything more than a rope barrier between you and that animals. That means, that if the animals wish to step over the rope to closure to humans, they can, but humans are not allowed to pass over the rope.

The park has many endemic animals species, mostly birds, but it also had a large variety of domesticated and some wild animals not native to New Zealand. My favourites were probably the ring-tailed lemurs, kunekune pigs (what faces they have!), the friendly llama and all the random birds that have complete free range of the entire reserve. A bit of information that you might not know is that New Zealand does not have a lot of endemic species in comparison to the rest of the world and almost none of them are mammals. However, the bird population here is truly fascinating. Getting to see pukekos, keas, kiwis, and the New Zealand falcon was a delight. Corina and I had a grand time flexing our photography skills. I took many photos, but most of them are for personal reference. Don't worry, I won't subject everyone to lots of animals pictures!

After the park we went down to the New Brighton Beach to walk out onto the very tall pier. Apparently the water there can get high enough to crash into the top of the pier during a storm, which is crazy since it's much taller than most piers I've been to and I don't normally think of Christchurch waters as getting being plagued with tropical storms but apparently they do sometimes get cyclones. Once we were done watching surfers trying to ride the waves, we left stopped at a local bakery to grab some baked goods for us to take on the road. I've become rather fond of tan squares so I was able to grab myself some of those. Jacob got mostly his personal favourites, like short bread and thencaramel slices to try out.

Corina's Dad, Bill, prepared us a wonderful lamb chop and roast potato dinner in the evening, which we all enjoyed. Before it got too late, we went out to the local Pak n' Save to grab some of my Kiwi favourites plus some dessert. which was a pavlova that we covered with whip cream and gold and green kiwi fruit. I made sure to stock up on Tim Tams and get some golden syrup so I could be sure to try some more Kiwi classic recipes, like the ones I linked early. The rest of the evening was spent leisurely watching the Almighty Johnsons, a New Zealand tv show that I will try to see if I can catch up on in the states.