The first stop of the day was “Sheepworld” which I had read about as being a “sheep themed amusement park”.\u00a0 Although there wasn’t a wild sheep rollercoaster or bumper sheep the place didn’t disappoint.\u00a0 We had a brief look around prior to the “sheep show” which started at 11AM.\u00a0 The show started with a sheep dog demonstration with an eye dog bringing sheep in from the end of the field and then a big noisy dog barked at them to make them move\u00a0into a gated area.\u00a0 The initial dog seemed to disappear\u00a0for some time but\u00a0was eventually quite good whereas the noisy dog (I don’t think it was technically called that but it should have been) seemed to be slightly more random.\u00a0 After the\u00a0sheepdog demonstration we headed back inside and I was somehow roped into drafting.\u00a0 Drafting is basically sorting the sheep out into types as they rush through wooden gates.\u00a0 The sheep in question had\u00a0pink, blue or no colour on their heads and I had to move the gate so that they ended up in different pens.\u00a0 It was all going really well until I clonked one and then got all paranoid about hurting the sheep.\u00a0 Evidently I didn’t\u00a0need to be as the guy said that they had very hard heads and\u00a0small brains.\u00a0\u00a0I don’t think he should have made so much of this though as the guy who followed after me was seriously brutal\u00a0to the extent that I was\u00a0wincing as the wood smacked against the sheep.\u00a0 They said that I did a good job but I think they were just being kind to be fair.\u00a0 After they had seen how great Poms are at drafting the guy did a shearing demonstration and then lambs came flooding in\u00a0for the small children to feed.\u00a0 I must admit that I was slightly envious at this stage\u00a0but I did get to feed a cute calf\u00a0so it wasn’t all bad.\u00a0 Following the show we headed out to the area where you could feed the animals.\u00a0 Although I explained the warning signs to Lance he somehow managed to taunt an alpaca until it spat in his\u00a0face.\u00a0\u00a0Actually that may be slightly unfair as the two alpacas in question were seriously evil looking.\u00a0 Although in fairness this is what made me move out of the way quite quickly and explain the warning signs to Lance initially.\u00a0 After the alpaca spit incident we fed some other less feral animals including a very sweet, if slightly\u00a0tatty, deer.\u00a0 There was a nice walk through the forest and\u00a0a playground which was fun.\u00a0 The place was great actually and I would highly recommend it – just steer clear of the evil looking black alpaca!<\/p>\n
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We drove North from Warkworth and\u00a0headed to the Kauri museum.\u00a0 Kauris are large trees native to New Zealand and used to be one of the main timber sources in the country.\u00a0 The museum also had the World’s largest gum display.\u00a0 I’m not talking about Wrigleys here but tree sap which has been fossilised and hardened, a bit like amber.\u00a0 The museum was fascinating, a bit too much so actually as we suffered a bit from information overload.\u00a0 It was also much bigger than we expected initially.\u00a0 In one of the largest rooms they had all the old tools including the saws that were used to cut the huge trees.\u00a0 For some reason, unbeknown to me, as I was leaning into the machinery to take one of my funky industrial style black and white\u00a0photographs Lance\u00a0pressed a demonstration button which started a saw in motion dangerously close to my head!\u00a0 Maybe he was finally sick of listening to my “hour of Golden yodels” C.D. which I had overplayed in his car since buying it for my father!<\/p>\n
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We left the museum\u00a0but continued the Kauri theme by heading to the largest living specimen in the World, “Tane Mahuta”.\u00a0 The tree was pretty awesome, more so because of its girth than it’s\u00a0height.\u00a0 I’m not sure I should have used girth there, perhaps diameter may have been more appropriate, or maybe it’s okay if you don’t have as rude minds as I do.\u00a0 Anyway, it was very impressive.<\/p>\n
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Having seen sheep,\u00a0been spat at by alpacas, seen dead trees, nearly been decapitated and seen a very wide, alive tree we\u00a0finally arrived in Ahipara\u00a0(in Northland) where we checked into a holiday park.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first stop of the day was “Sheepworld” which I had read about as being a “sheep themed amusement park”.\u00a0 Although there wasn’t a wild sheep rollercoaster or bumper sheep the place didn’t disappoint.\u00a0 We had a brief look around prior to the “sheep show” which started at 11AM.\u00a0 The show started with a sheep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zelmastrip.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}