Today we went to Wellington Zoo. We drove our van over to the zoo but it was pretty hard to find parking! We were expecting a massive car park but either they don’t have one or we just couldn’t find it. We ended up parking on the side of the road in what looked like a residential area but it wasn’t too far away.
As we entered through the gift shop we had a quick look around and bought our tickets. Rob was the 110th customer of the day and because they were celebrating their 110th birthday he was given free entry!
We made our way into the zoo and we were just in time for the kea talk. The kea is native to New Zealand and is a pretty incredible bird. They are highly intelligent and are known for their problem solving abilities, especially because getting food out of cars is an appealing problem for them to solve so they tend to damage cars by picking at the door lining and breaking aerials!
The zoo keepers need to keep the kea stimulated so they are constantly coming up with more challenging problems for them to solve often involving plastic tubes with food in them where they need to pull levers, remove pins and move pieces around in order to get the reward at the end. During the talk they gave the birds some food wrapped in leaves and the kea were able to unwrap their food pretty effectively with their beaks.
After a quick chat with the keepers we moved on to the next show which was tiger feeding. The tiger feeding show was pretty interesting and not overly elaborate. No one got in the enclosure with the tiger, they just fed it from the fence which is actually quite good. We had a fairly deep conversation with the keeper for that too. We were talking about the controversial topic of keeping animals in enclosures and the keeper explained that the zoo is very focused on conservation and that profits from the zoo are fed back into charities to protect the endangered species. She also emphasised how the wild is becoming less and less safe for the animals to survive due to hunting. A lot of rare and endangered species are being hunted for their body parts which can sell for huge prices on black markets. This has been happening for a long time and has resulted in such heavily reduced numbers that it makes it hard for an individual to find a mate from another family to reproduce which leads to inbreeding that results in birth defects and early death which further reduces the numbers of the species. This means that without the conservation efforts of zoos and the animal protection charities a lot of species will disappear. We even heard the term “insurance population” where zoos can collectively keep the species alive even if they have all disappeared from the wild.
It was a pretty interesting conversation and helped us understand why these animals were here. She even explained the effort they put in to make sure they have the best man-made environment they can and how this is very different to a lot of “bad” zoos around the world, especially in some third world countries where the animals live in pretty poor conditions.
We continued through the zoo at our own pace and ended up going through the Australian section which we weren’t really interested in but it ended up being pretty funny! The paths and sections were all named after Australian TV shows and there was lots of wildlife walking around along side the people. There was a wallaby sleeping on the grass and a couple of big emus walking around. We saw the emus and being Australian we naturally approached pretty cautiously because we know how dangerous they can be but being free to walk around people in a zoo they must be safer here than usual. The emu approached us and got really close to the point where its head basically resting on our shoulders. We assumed it just wanted some attention and maybe a pat but it seemed to take quite a liking to Rob and we think may have been attempting to seduce him! Good thing is we caught it all on video! As we left the Australian section another emu started approaching us too, but the first one chased it off. It was probably trying to keep Rob for itself!
We took a break for lunch but the food was pretty average and then continued through the zoo.
We stopped by the tortoises for Chris and went to see the kiwi birds. Because they are nocturnal the enclosures were very dark, we all had to stand really still and listen for where they were hiding until eventually they waddled out into the lighter areas where we could see them.
By this stage we had seen most of the zoo and made our way back to the car. The next stop on the agenda was Mount Victoria which was a public lookout area with a great view of the city. We spent a little bit of time there, took our photos and went back to our hotel.
We still had some daylight left so from the hotel we walked over to the cable car which was nestled away in an alley near our hotel in the middle of the city. The cable car was pretty cool, there was about 5 stops on the line and acted like a pulley system where there was a car at the top and a car at the bottom attached by a cable and as they moved along the cable they would cross each other at the middle. We bought our tickets and went to the top where there was an observatory and the botanical gardens. The observatory was closed but it was a pretty good walk around there anyway. It was getting dark but we decided to go for a walk through the gardens anyway, it was pretty cool that this was so easy to get to from the city.
The sun had gone down and we were still walking around the gardens, we eventually made our way back to the cable car station and went back in to town for dinner. It was actually pretty hard to find somewhere to eat because everything was closed! Because we have had mostly burgers and Japanese food we tried to do something different and came across I well rated kebab shop called “Abra Kebabra”.
The last stop for the night was the grocery store for supplies and then back to the hotel.