New Zealand has been amazing! We finished up our student led travel week was spent in a town called Rotorua. While there, we were lucky enough to see the legendary Kiwi birds! They are very funny looking but also strangely cute! They are pretty interesting animals- they’re nocturnal so when you see them you have to look at them in the dark! We even got to see a baby kiwi and by see it I mean we could only see its little back because of it being in almost complete darkness. Either way, little kiwi birds are the cutest things! We also got to go Zorbing during our stay in Rotorua. Zorbing is when you get in (you actually have to dive through a little hole in the side) a big, blow up ball (Or orb) that has is filled with a little water in the bottom. Once you’re inside the orb, they close the opening and then you are pushed down a hill. The whole ride is only about 30 seconds long but since you can’t really see outside of the ball so it feels like forever! There were a few different tracks to go down- straight down, which could be done alone or with up to 3 people, a zig zag track which could only be done alone, and there was even one with a few drops and turns for the more “advanced zorber” . Zorbing was fun and a big hit among everyone in our group. Our few days in Rotorua were fun and relaxing. It was definitely needed after our long hike during the beginning of our free week!
After our student led week, we headed back over to Auckland and got ready for our week at Conservation Volunteers of Australia (in New Zealand). We arrived at CVA bright and early on Monday morning where we met Claire, one of the workers at CVA who told us everything we would be doing for the week. We found out that the first day we would be doing mulching in a park because of the lack of rain here (we learned that mulching helps retain the moisture in the roots of the tree- who knew?). Then we met our team leader for the week- Ashleigh- a fun, enthusiastic kiwi excited for us to work. Ash would drive us to all the places we would be working and she show us everything that we had to do. She explained which invasive plants needed to be taken out of the forest and how to get rid of them. Most of our week here at CVA involved weeding plants in different parks around Auckland. Conserving is not easy work. Most of the time you have to work on hills that can be tough to stand on and you had to deal with evil mosquitos. You also have to make sure that you are killing the bad plants and not the native plants. Most of the parks and forests were overrun with the invasive plants and we had to clear all of the bad plants out, there were invasive vines everywhere that were all over the trees and bushes. Even though conservation work was hard and we had long days, we were able to help out the environment and the local parks and bushes by getting rid of the invasive species. We learned a lot about plants and native species from our leader during our time there. Ashleigh was a great leader who made the work fun and went above and beyond our expectations. One night she took us to the beach outside of the city and got us Fish and Chips for dinner which we ate right next to the water. We got to spend the evening hanging out on the beach and even played a few rounds of the game “spud”. Overall, our week at CVA was really fun and we will take away lots of new knowledge about the environment and how we can help out.
Tomorrow afternoon we leave for Australia. New Zealand has been so amazing! We are so fortunate to have been able to see so much of this amazing country and meet so many amazing people. We are all are sad to leave New Zealand but we all cannot wait to get over to Aussie and start the last part of this amazing adventure.