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Last day in Christchurch

We took the campsite's advice and we went to the flying fox around the corner on a nature reserve and it was brilliant. It had a great fox and a castle excellent for playing tag. It also had a spinning plate, which looked harmless but on which we all managed to pick up injuries. Angela overcame her holiday attack of timidness and took to the flying fox to escape being tagged! The children did some mental maths and worked out that 2 children could go on the fling fox and still be under the max weight limit. The next bit of advice was to visit the Willowbank reserve where they had kiwi's amongst a lot of other animals. Before we started we had a lunch in the van then we spent a brilliant 3 hrs exploring the nature reserve. Highlights included feeding eels mincemeat , very scary as they slithered onto land. They can live to 60 and grow to an enormous length. The are brown and have a massive mouth with super-sharp teeth. They are a really popular fish here and found everywhere in NZ .

The nature reserve was divided into sections and explained to us that a lot of species introduced for good reason (a food source or to control pests) often had a devastating effect on NZ. There is a policy of culling anything that has become a nuisance, so we were on our best behaviour. We could also feed the animals including a huge hungry emu. Emus are massive and are the second fastest animal on earth! We saw wallabies (a small kangaroo), a lovely miniature breed of cows. Tame sheep, loads and loads of birds. We finally proved that it was a Weka bird we had seen that morning as we saw first a group of Weka's then 3 or 4 kiwi's in a special pen which was dark like the bat cave in chester zoo. The kiwi's have reduced in huge numbers from millions to 50,000 because of predators introduced by European settlers. They are quite big and look fluffy and their beaks are ridiculously long, it was really hard not to pick them up for a cuddle.

We saw the mad king out of Madagascar, King Julian, a ring-tailed lemur and we could go into monkey cage and its bedroom. The bedroom was quite cosy with blankets,pillow and a sleeping bag. Thankfully the two monkies had left a month earlier to emigrate to Australia,to mate, only days before. They were father and daughter and because the father had been captured as a baby in the wild they are really important to the gene pool. The zoo had built a new facility to house them which was much bigger and nicer than Willowbank.

The visitors centre had an enormous log fire with six chairs infront of it, just perfect for us.

After warming by the fire we headed off to the QE II baths near North Brighton This huge complex was built for the 1974 commonwealth games and what a great night we had.

It had 3 slides for use normally

Terror Tube- loud music and lights

Body bullet- scarily fast

The cruise- incorporating a very big stomach-churning drop

and 2 for use with single or double rings

A dark yellow fast one which twisted and turned

The collassal- blue so you could see a little bit and a little slower than the yellow one.

Isaac was too young for the slides but he spent lots of time in the hot pool, watching the divers dive , playing in the wave pool and most of the time in the biggest and best river rapids which included two spinning pools where the water appeared to be going down a plughole. Just before the slides closedand it was really quiet, the life-guard let Isaac have two or three goes down the accompanied slides. A very popular life-guard. In the 50m pool for adults only there was water-jogging. A big float is tied around your waist and you run in the water. The life-guard said Beth and Joe could try it out once the pool was quiet. It is SO hard but fun. We arrived back at the camp site tired and very hungry and sad to be leaving NZ the following morning.