New Zealand: #23 Adios, isla norte

I spent a couple days in Wellington, which is a really great city. Reminds me a bit of San Francisco. Much better than Auckland. I didn't take a lot of pictures, because I spent most of the time in the museum. Te Papa is a fantastic museum. I learned about volcanoes. And moas, the big birds similar to ostriches that are now extinct. NZ used to be bird land. The only animals native to NZ are a bunch of birds and just 3 species of mammals, all of which are bats. And if you think about it, bats are kind of like birds anyway. I guess it was too far away for non-flying animals to swim. Or jump. At some point someone introduced sheep though. There are 40 million sheep here, 10x the amount of people. No one thought to bring over snakes or bears or mountain lions so there are none here.

I met up with my friend, Courtney, and realized the last time we'd seen each other was 3 years ago in Santa Barbara. This is us outside of Mac's Brewery in Wellington Harbor. That's me there on the left.

And this is me being a tiger.

From Wellington I took the 3 hour ferry ride to the south island. It was stormy, to say the least.

The boat was rockin and rollin. The frames hanging on the wall were swaying back and forth. Then the ship turned and the pictures started leaning forward then slamming back into the wall. I don't get sea sick, so it was kind of fun. But lots of other people were getting sick, so it kind of wasn't fun.