Amazingly Awesome Auckland

Auckland is the fourth most livable city in the world, and anyone who has ever visited or will visit it finds this designation easy to understand. Because we had taken the hop-on, hop-off bus to visit many of the must-see museums and man-made and natural sites last year, Ken decided that he wanted to watch sheep shearing in New Zealand. Fortunately, the ship offered a tour to the west coast of the northern island that offered a tour of a farm and Muriwai's untamed coast with its nesting gannets. Punxsutawney Phil needed to be assured that no sheep shearer would want his coat of very short, extremely rare groundhog hair so we told him we know of no one who weaves or wears garments of groundhog hair.

So we headed for the hills out west, which are really the eastern ridge of a large volcano. It was good for us that the last volcano erupted more than 700 year ago. The drive took almost an hour with a journey through the small village of Helensville, which an early settler had named after his wife. The people of Helensville want to keep their lives rural. Last summer, the government started a train that ran once a day to Auckland and back. Because of the lack of passengers, the train was discontinued in December.

The Hauomoana Farm, owned by Barbara and Greg Ross for the last 16 years, is north of Helensville. The name for this 200-acre farm means "sea breeze" in Maori. And the couple has a beautiful view of the sea from their house on a hill. In addition to sheep, which are Suffolk sheep from England, they also raise deer and cattle. Their 15-month-old granddaughter was visiting them, and she quickly became a favorite with the female passengers on the tour.

Andy, their foreman, informed us that the each sheep produces about four inches of merino wool fiber each year. The wool, which is not itchy, has many fibers per square inch with the kinks holding pockets of air that retain warmth. The sheep are usually sheared in December so they are ready for New Zealand's summer. A shearer receives $2 per sheep with the good shearers being able to shear 300 to 400 sheep daily. The record for shearers is 840 lambs in one day. Because the shearer bends over the sheep while shearing, the trick is to shear quickly in order to get a break while standing up. Andy demonstrated the technique that involves sitting the sheep on its rear, holding it between the shearer's legs and making sure the sheep is comfortable so it does not squirm.

Using electric shears, Andy was able to bring most of the wool off in one large pelt. He said it takes about 55 to 70 strokes or blows to shear a sheep. Squeak, the border collie that was of the breed that had their long hair bread out, yapped the whole time while Andy kept screaming to him, "Shut up!", which Squeak never did. Once the sheep was sheared, Andy stroked it at its pressure points behind its ears, and the sheep immediately quieted down and relaxed into a sleep-like position. "Just like your wife!" proclaimed Andy. Boo! Hiss!

The wool is pressed into a 150-kilo bale, with four bales put together before it is exported. The sheep on the farm usually live 10 years. At one time, New Zealand boasted 70 million sheep but the number is now at 55 million. A typical farm needs five acres of pasture to support one sheep. When we noted that the farm lacked barns, we learned that the animals are kept outside all year around.

An average farm usually has between six and 10 sheepdogs that work about six to eight years. After the shearing demonstration, Andy took Squeak to the pasture to show us how a herding dog stares at the sheep, making sure that they know they are being eye-balled and singled out so that the sheep wants to get back into the group. Squeak herded the 12 sheep to Andy and kept them in formation, whenever they started to roam. Bev (Bev and Brent), who had been raised on a sheep farm in Idaho, mentioned the sport of sheepdog trails. None of us thought that Squeak would make the finals.

Then we were treated to a delicious lunch featuring lamb. After lunch, we had the opportunity to feed the leftover bread to the deer. Sara, who was raised in western Pennsylvania where the First Day of Deer Season is a school holiday, had no idea that farmers raised deer. We also were invited to tour the Garden Walk, which had among its flora and fauna a very unusual form of iris that everyone photographed.

After the owners bid us farewell (as two tour buses from the Queen Elizabeth, which is a Cunard ship on a world cruise, pulled into their driveway), our bus driver drove us to Muriwai Beach to view the gannet colony. Bev commented, very sarcastically, that she really likes tour guides who never say anything. If anyone from Princess is reading this entry, two suggestions are to have a separate tour guide from the bus driver and to have the tour guide provide commentary on what we will be seeing when we get to each stop. Also, we could have used at least an hour at this stop, not a half-hour.

The black sand beach at Muriwai is one of the most popular surfing beaches in the country. There is nothing between that beach and Australia. Hang divers jump off the cliffs when the winds are right. That is also the reason why the gannets call the rock stacks home because the strong updrafts provide for easy takeoffs. We were told by Richard, our port lecturer, that the gannets will dive bomb at up to 65 miles an hour to catch fish. When we were there, the birds must have already caught the fish because they were feeding their young, who are born blind, naked and helpless. When the young are 15 weeks old, they take their first-ever journey to Australia, 2,000 kilometers away. There they spend two to three years before about 25 percent of the gannets return to New Zealand to mate and start the life cycle all over again.

At the beach, we also watched a photographer photograph a wedding couple on the cliff. Because of the updrafts, the bride was having some problems with her veil, which created some interesting photographic opportunities for Ken. Ken also was the only passenger on our tour that made it all the way down the cliffs to the beach by running down the cliff. There, he photographed a cave on the beach. The extra half hour would have given all of us the opportunity to walk along the beach.

On our trip back to Auckland, our bus driver did point out the grape-growing areas in wine country and the kiwi, which are now called zespri if they grown in New Zealand because the country exported the kiwi plants all over the world so kiwis are not special to New Zealand any more. We also crossed over the Auckland Harbor Bridge, which was built as a four-lane bridge in 1959. Because the bridge opened up the area, it soon could not handle all the traffic. So New Zealand had Japan produce extra lanes, that the country call clip-ons, to make the bridge eight lanes. The barrier on the bridge is movable so the lanes can be switched so that there are five lanes going into the city during morning rush hour and five lanes going out of the city during evening rush hour.

When we arrived back in downtown Auckland, we wanted to tour Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World and Antarctic Encounter, where giant acrylic tubes offer views of free-swimming marine life and a colony of 80 sub-Antarctic penguins play in the snow and water. However, the employee at the tourist center told us we would need to take a taxi and would only have about an hour before the attraction closed. So we decided to do something unique after being on a cruise for 30 days--take a one and one-half hour cruise around Auckland Harbor, which is absolutely magnificent. The other tourists were passengers from the Pacific Princess and the Queen Elizabeth, who just couldn't get enough of water travel. We learned that one in five people in Auckland own a boat and one in three have access to a boat. No wonder Auckland is call the "City of Sails."

We ended our perfect day by spending all of our remaining New Zealand currency on beer and wine. It would not have been worth to try to exchange it for U.S. dollars. Don't worry, we didn't have that much money left but we hope that the beverages last us until we arrive in Sydney on February 21.