New Zealand 2014 - Day 11
This is a series of posts chronicling our New Zealand trip. For more context, check out the first day or the previous day.
Sadly, today was our last day in New Zealand. We didn't have anything in particular planned so we slept in a bit, checked out of our hotel, and had breakfast.
Our flight wasn't leaving until 8:30pm so we had a decent chunk of time to kill. Since we hadn't been able to see any actual kiwi birds on the trip (they are nocturnal) we decided to hit the Auckland Zoo, not far from our hotel.
The weather wasn't great as the rain had returned, but we were prepared with jackets and umbrella. The rain was tolerable since it wasn't coming down too hard and sporadically stopped.
The kiwi exhibit is a dark room where they trick the kiwis into thinking that it's night during the day so that visitors can watch them while awake. We were able to watch them hunting for bugs and what not for quite a while. Flash photography was prohibited and photos taken in the dark behind glass don't seem to turn out well anyway.
We wandered around the rest of the zoo taking a look at the various native and many non-native animals. We saw some orangutans who were hiding under blankets to stay dry in the rain. We also spotted some Little Penguins taking shelter under an overturned boat.
We left the zoo and headed to the Queen street mall where we had lunch and bought some last minute gifts. Back at the hotel, we met our driver and made our way to the Auckland airport.
We had an amazing time here in New Zealand! There's so much to do and see that we could easily spend another two weeks here. Even though we're sad to leave such a great place, we're looking forward to being home and spending the holidays with our families and cats. :)
Happy holidays!