Akaroa and a bit of a conservation diatribe

After stocking up at good old Pak 'n' Save we drove out to the Banks peninsula via the most hairy route possible, it had drop offs from the gravel track on one side and hardly any room for vehicles coming the other way. We had some seat of your pants journeys in NZ last time and this one was well up there. The journey was broken by spotting some kingfishers and taking in some spectacular scenery - the peninsula is made up of a ring of fire, it is a (more or less) circular bunch of extinct volcanoes and is proper up and down country, early in our journey we saw some cyclists dragging their way up spectacular gradients, as a fellow cyclist I was impressed.

Unsurprisingly for New Zealand we saw lots of sheep on our journey. When you think about it, it's quite an impressive feat that the first settlers and their immediate offspring achieved, that is to convert what was effectively thick bush apart from the odd Maori track into pasture in such a relatively short space of time. Think of how long the UK has been occupied and taken to get to the stage it's at and then consider NZ has made it nearly as far (minus 56 million people for a start) in just 150 or so years. Whether this achievement is a good thing is entirely up for debate with all the introduced species that the Victorians brought with them, (amazingly seals and bats are the only 2 truly native NZ mammals), including rabbits, stoats, possums, weasels chowing down on the many ground nesting/now flightless birds that had evolved over many years with no natural predators and are now in a lot of trouble. Nevertheless this switch is testament to mans (now rare?!) ability to endure real hardship. This may be something I come back to in Oz but for now on with the trip.

We stayed for 2 nights at a lovely hostel which was set up on a sheep farm, it was beautiful, so incredibly peaceful, we went for a walk around the estate and the only sound around us were skylarks and the sheep baaing interrupted for a moment by the farmer rounding up the sheep on his quad bike. It was interesting watching them, they barely had to do anything, the dogs were so well trained, it brought back hazy memories of One Man and his Dog! On the way back to the farm the track went down by the coast and we (with the permission of the hostel!) went down and picked some mussels for our tea. We cooked them up with white wine, garlic, onions and had them with some chips...they were heavenly!! The next morning we discovered the result of the sheep rounding up...they were being sheared. I had a chat with the farmer and it turns out that shearing takes place purely for hygiene reasons and that farmers make no money from it. Hmmm, never heard of a poor farmer, anyway, that got me to wondering about who's making the money on all these damn expensive merino wool clothes that Claire appears to have the full range of!! We were invited by the farmer into the shearing shed, although it might not sound impressive it was fascinating watching the 2 shearers at work, one of them was apparently a world champion. As I understand it there are many different types of sheep shearing records and I'm not sure which title the fella we watched held but they were both incredibly quick. The sheep were like putty in the shearers hands, a real contrast to when they are being herded into the shed, where a tiny cricket would make them run a mile. We also saw a new born baby lamb the birth of which we didn't see but most of the bloody evidence made it obvious what we were looking at, nature at it's finest!