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June 04, 2006

The Endless Summer 2

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Bye bye NZ seagull, we're taking off tomorrow, hopefully see you soon! Our trip is almost over and, I think, its the longest travel holiday that we ever had, almost 8 weeks! The bank is broken, the muscles are sore, I am some 5kg heavier, tons of pictures taken, a lot of new stuff learnt and seen and we're ready for.. more holiday in Europe! :)

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One of the last things we saw here was kauri forest (forest, so they call it, to me it looks more like one tree here another overthere..). These huge trees are about 2000 years old. Couple of centuries back North of NZ was more or less covered in kauri forests. Enter the British... and 200 years later, the trees are almost extinct! First they log them, then they realize that "oh, they actually grow very slowly!" You can still see a fair bit of the Wild West mentality here. The history of NZ is so recent, that the scars that colonizers left in the environment are still very visible.

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Another interesting feature of NZ that pops up in unexpected places is its attempts to preserve the unique species of flora and fauna (your shoes will be checked at the airport and they better be washed well or you won't be let into the country!). NZ split from other continents such a long time ago, that the animals and plants evolved whichever way they liked. There's a huge population of non-flying birds that you can't see anywhere else, such as kiwi itself (furry bird, never saw.. :( and weka, because there is no large predator mamals in NZ (yes yes, no bears, wolfs, lions, native cats, nothing!). So the only enemies the birds had, were flying in the air (no other way to access the islands, lah!) One of the most famous birds that recently went extinct were moa (up to 3m tall!), as far as I remember, moa were hunted out by maori. There's also no snakes in NZ!!!

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However, some of the innocent animals imported from elsewhere may cause major ecological disasters (I'm sure everybody heard about rabits in Australia), here in NZ they have possums. These little furry creatures were brought from Australia at some point. In Australia they're known as little cute creatures, but here they grow to enourmous proportions, because they have so much food and so little enemies. They're apparently very harmfull for the forest and there's a lot of (very visible) attempts to cut their population. You wouldn't believe how much of poison is scattered everywhere around the island in the forest. There are traps and multiple other ways to deal with them. Possums make up the major part of the roadkill that you can see everywhere (I'd say 1 possum per 1 kilometer!). I find it quite strange that some of the species are so lovingly cared for while others are heartlessly destroyed. At what point you decide that "these are native trees and animals" and at what point you start killing everything else? Obviously there are too many possums here... But could there be a less traumatising way to deal with them?

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Otherwise, looking back, I'd say (and you probably can also see from my previous posts) that there were high and low points in this trip. Last weekend was definitely HIGH! We went to Raglan, a small town and NZ surfer mecca.

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We are absolute beginners... and we're absolutely happy...

Yes, yes, we managed to surf there, even I managed to stand on the board for up to 10s! See what kind of pro Kaj is?!?! :) The conditions were perfect for us - small even waves, perfect for carrying wobbly creatures on massive boards (Kaj won't be happy about this "wobbly" :).

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I could imagine us doing that more often. Its great fun and there are new challenges all the time - no 2 waves are the same! There's almost always perfect surfing conditions in Raglan and it is only 2h drive South from Auckland!

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So now there's 2 long flights ahead (with a couple of days stopover in Leijonakaupunki, thank goodness we're going back to the tropics!!! :) and hopefully the summer is picking up fast in Finland and Lithuania, as some recent weather reports were not that pretty...

Posted by gkligyte at June 4, 2006 05:51 PM
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