…A brief interlude before we tell you about our stay in New Zealand…

Chuck reported to Deborah as they were boarding the bus to the Auckland airport en route to Sydney, Australia, that his site had “thousands of hits since our first blog was posted about our round-the-world trip”. Apparently, many readers marveled at the quality of writing and couldn’t believe that Chuck had penned such prose being the ‘quant’ left-brainer that he is…and they were right! Little does everyone know that Chuck ‘hired’ a ghost writer – a.k.a Deborah (ok, he wrote the Tahiti stuff for the most part…).

…now back to New Zealand…


Following a 6-hour flight, our plane arrived in Auckland, New Zealand – a mere 2.544 miles from Tahiti.

Everyone in our tour group seemed to breathe a sigh of relief upon arriving in New Zealand…there’s something to be said about being in a place whose residents speak your language and the food is more familiar.

New Zealand is a beautiful place. Very lush and reminiscent of many places… like the Scottish Highlands, Wales, Ireland, parts of Canada, and even Italy. We stayed overnight in Auckland at the Stamford Plaza, a refurbished hotel in the heart of the city. The problem was, the “refurbishing” was still under way and many of our group had rooms without heat – including Chuck and Deborah. The big difference was, however, that while Chuck was shivering in his suite (he reports that he slept in the hotel room’s bath-robe) – Deborah stormed the front desk and asked for a new room WITH heat…in large part due to the fact the Deborah was feeling under the weather and needed a warm place to sleep.

After a lot of ‘back and forth’ Deborah secured a room whoseith a temperature above freezing, which allowed for a much more comfortable rest in advance of the next day’s foray to Rotorua.

Rotorua is the heartland of New Zealand’s Maori culture. The Te Arawa people of Rotorua were some of New Zealand’s first residents more than 600 years ago. However, the Maori were the first inhabitants of the district. Today the Maori community is mostly urban. There are approximately 35 “marae” – meeting grounds in the district, out of which 20 are located in rural areas.

Surrounding Rotorua are geothermal sites, Ohinemutu and Whakarewarewa. We visited the “Lady Knox-Geyser Te Puia Whakarewarewa – the geothermal valley art and crafts institute, and the Agrodome Farm Show.

The Farm show proved to be huge fun. We were treated to an array of bucolic activities and sites, including sheep herding, sheep shearing and feeding new-born lambs. We also saw the dexterity of the New Zealand’s amazing sheep-herding slane lamb.

Earlier in the day we visited caves that are home to “glow worms” which are brightly lit larvae that attach themselves to the caves by long threadlike fibers. We were taken by boat in complete darkness so that we could see the amazing glow worms that dot the ceiling of the caves. We also got to see a spectacular array of indigenous animals, including the Kiwi, which is a rather unusual looking bird because it doesn’t fly, hops around, has a long beak and is extremely timid. In fact, it prefers very dark spaces. There are two very unfortunate things about the Kiwi in Deborah’s opinion: 1, it has many predators because of the fact that it doesn’t fly; and 2, its females lay eggs that are almost two-thirds their own size…meaning, it would be like a human female giving birth to a three-year-old. Deborah wondered why the Kiwi females didn’t also have crossed eyes, too, because popping out one of those eggs must be quite the experience!

We also stopped for lunch at a wonderful dairy farm where we literally feasted on roast legs of lamb, roasted root vegetables, wine and beer. Speaking of which, the food on this trip has been good and plentiful. Fortunately, we figure we haven’t gained any weight, in large part due to our discipline of not going for seconds and thirds at the “trough”.