Christchurch

Hey everyone! Made it down to christchurch today. We arrived in the early afternoon, and made our way to the hotel first. Brandon had to turn in our immigration papers so I endedup napping for the first few hours of our trip :) (we had gotten up early to pack and let Brandon do some work) Luckily Brandon was also able to get some work done while I was sleeping, so when I woke up at that afternoon... he was ready to go to the willowbank nature reserve.

We had a tour of the New Zealand animals. We touched some eels (very slimy) and were told about their sharp teeth after we had our hands right next to them. Supposedly they can stay on land for 10 hours before they need to go into the water again. They had blue eyes and long fins. (See the Picture) Then we saw some ducks and Weka which is like a kiwi but not as dumb and not as shy and not nocturnal... so it just looks similar. Then we met some mountain parrots, called Keas, that are only found in the South Island. They were very friendly as you can see in the pictures :)We were feeding them honey, and they would scoop it off of the spoon! Next we saw the Kunekune pigs. They are so ugly and cute at the same time. Similar to dogs in the fact that you can teach them tricks and the make a bark-sounding grunt, but they graze in fields and have pretty funky teeth. We saw our first Kiwi birds and learned all about the programs to keep them around since 95% of eggs laid don't make it to be adult kiwi birds. They have a ton of predators, and the parents just leave the eggs as soon as it hatches (way to go.. right). But there are some pictures to show how big the eggs are (third largest in the world, and pretty good for the size of the little guys). Unfortunately there was no flashes allowed for pictures and it was night so our kiwi picture is the really dark one with some lit feathers from a flash light :(

When we were done there, we headed back to our hotel to get dinner, then went for a walk around the city.. enjoy the pictures below from our day!!!!