"Jump inside my mouth! I won't bite..." 8/31/2011

Soon after waking up and eating breakfast, Ellie, her mom, Julia and I found ourselves packing the “chilly bin” for the day. Chilly bins are what we US folk call coolers. We were headed to Kelly Tarlton’s Aquarium in Auckland. The drive was a little over an hour and was very scenic, for the parts that I was awake for. We arrived at Kelly Tarlton’s a little after 11am and the first thing Julia and I did was run to the SHARK BUS! After taking many pictures of everyone with the shark bus we went inside to pay for our tickets and to explore the underwater world. Kelly Tarlton’s is named after Kelly Tarlton, a kiwi marine archaeologist and diver that decided to turn some disused sewage storage tanks into an aquarium thus the aquarium is entirely underground.

Julia and I jumped into its mouth...

The first aquatic creatures we saw were penguins. It was penguin feeding time and the penguins were all shuffling for their fish. During this time, I did the polar plunge, which was to hold your hand in icy water for 30 seconds. This reminded me of my biology class at Bryn Mawr my freshman year where my lab section turned some lab we were doing into this massive competition where everyone was sticking their hands in ice water for as long as possible. I held my lab sections record at a little over 7 minutes before the TA made me pull my hand out. A person in the next lab section beat me though, because the TA didn’t make her take her hand out, probably because they saw that my arm was fine and didn’t fall off after 7 minutes…

After the penguin feeding we wandered around playing with little (or big) gizmo’s that they provided. Julia and I climbed into a plastic sharks mouth and pretended it was eating us. We played dress up with the costumes provided but since they were made for 3 year olds we kind of just wore the head piece and the rest kind of just draped over us like a cape. There was also a chalkboard where we could draw fish. Here we have Abe the American fish, and Kiwi, the kiwi fish.

 

We then took a ride through "Antarctica” which basically was us sitting in a trolley and going through the penguin tank so we could see them up close. We saw some giant penguin babies that still had their baby feathers and they kind of looked like large kiwi birds that could stand upright.

This is not a baby penguin. 

Could I pass for a penguin? .... maybe?

At around 1pm we headed over to the really huge open top tank to watch a stingray feeding. Stingrays are huge, but really cute at the same time. They kind of climbed all over the feeder for their fish. Om nom nom…

The big cape-like thing is the stingray

After that we briefly looked at the other fishes before needing to find our own noms. We drove out to the beach where we could see Rangitoto island and had our picnic lunch there. At lunch we also met Ellie’s Aunt Jenny. Then Julia, Ellie, and I went to collect shells. There were so many pretty shells!

This is not a shell. It is a rock, but there used to be oysters stuck on it. Oysters have shells...

We started to head home after shell collection because Ellie’s dad had to get home to feed the cows. We got to ride the tractor again, and this time we also visited a neighboring wild pig and some calves. After feeding the cows, and ourselves, Ellie, Julia, and I proceeded to have a conversation of epic proportions before heading to bed. Epic does not even begin to describe it. Julia and I have concluded that Ellie would make a great Mawrter.