Joe and Toni’s new babies are Paul and Theo. Both were near 7 pounds. Everybody is doing well.

It was a short and uneventful hop to our second port in New Zealand. I continue to find the countryside remarkable.

Our primary focus was on rock art. We started with a visit to a rock art museum, which included a lot of information about the first New Zealanders. Because of their physical proximity, one might assume a good amount of similarity between aboriginal people of Australia and New Zealand. That isn’t at all true. The first Australians arrived about 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. New Zealand received their first humans, the Maori, about 1,500 years ago. They came from one of the Polynesian islands. We’ve seen a lot about early Polynesian culture, but somehow I missed this Mokihi (reed boat). These were small boats used to transport goods downstream. They basically served a function similar to river barges.

Our next stop was a limestone overhang that had some Maori rock art. It is harder to see than the much older cave art in the France / Spain area. In part this is because it is much less well protected from the elements. It’s also more accessible which means there is more graffiti. The rock art we saw depicted the Maori creation story. It is quite difficult to see the art in thee pictures I took, so I am substituting rock art that was photographed and enhanced by a professional.

After the rock art trip, we went to town and visited their museum. This very pleasant lady knows a lot about Kiwis. She had a picture of a Kiwi with the egg about to be laid. Essentially the egg takes up the entire Kiwi body. Did you know that Kiwis have the shortest beak of any bird? The formal definition of a beak is the distance from the nostrils to the tip of the beak. The Kiwi’s nostrils are right at the tip of the beak, making the length of their beak essentially 0, using the formal definition.

The museum also has a replica of the first plane to fly. Richard Pearse first flew his plane on March 31, 1902 — before the Wright brothers. Apparently, he was just fooling around and having fun. He wasn’t interested in turning his invention into a practical plane. For just fooling around, it was an incredible accomplishment.

That’s it for today. I hope this finds everybody doing well.