G'Day,
Today was my first day in New Zealand, however the blog is a little late due to Internet issues and little time. However it is here now and I hope you enjoy reading the NZ part of my trip as much as the Aus part.
I landed in Christchurch, NZ and I am so thankful I didn't need to face any jetlag like landing in Australia. I stayed at a modern hotel called Hotel SO, which has some very innovative features. These included a mood light which changed colour depending on the mood selected and sunbeam lights designed to help with jet lag.
As it was a Saturday I decided to see the NZ nightlife. The lovely girl at the reception pointed out some areas of interest and honestly I couldn't find any of them. I figured I would find a nice steady bar and have a drink only to find everywhere empty, I later learned that everyone drinks at home until midnight then goes into town. So I went to the local store for Cola and Chocolate followed by a night of TV.
Soon followed Sunday and I decided to visit the Willowspring Wildlife Reserve, which for me was a great experience. To start with I got to walk around a beautiful environment and interact with a group of Wallabies. They would jump around me, feed from my hand and allow me to take some great pictures so a great experience.
At the Wildlife Reserve I signed up for the Maori experience, which allowed me to learn a lot about the Maori uses of trees and importance of local wildlife. On this experience one of the young warriors perform a war dance during which a branch from a local tree was dropped. I then had to accept the branch as a sign of peace or reject as a sign of war, for obvious reasons I was only told to pick up the branch and only told the other option afterwards (I'm pretty sure I would have accepted peace anyway as the guide explained the men would have to go to war and in this particular tour the only other 'warrior' on my side had been using a bus pass for quite some time). Having accepted the gift of peace we met the Chief, which I did the native greeting and later performed the Haka, a native dance.
I then finished the day off with a night tour around the wildlife reserve to experience the native nocturnal wildlife especially the symbolic Kiwi bird. This ended a great weekend in New Zealand and I can't wait to see what ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management) has planned for me. For those who do not know about ALGIM they organised large amounts of my trip to New Zealand. ALGIM like SOCITM (Society for IT Management) in the UK provide tools, services, resources and conferences for its members mostly from Local Government. With that explained I will see you tomorrow...........
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