Monday, November 19, 2007

Hello from Tutukaka

Even though we are half a world away - as a Red Sox fan - Yeah! We signed Mike Lowell!!!

Now onto to our travelog. What a gorgeous place this part of the North Island is. We arrived in Auckland and headed north towards our destination Tutukaka. Along the way we stopped at Zion Wildlife Gardens. It's a Big Cat preserve. It's part of a world wide effort to save some of the rarer breeds of mostly lions and tigers. The star of the place is Zion. He was featured in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As you may guess he is Aslan.

He even let out a mighty roar for us.

We also got to play with 2 white lion cubs, Ivula(Rain) and Amafu(Cloud).

Ivula


Big brother is hogging the milk. Amafu(left) and the female Ivula on the right


My what big teeth I have


Our guide Ashley was the greatest. He is from South Africa and was part of the team that raised many of the younger lions at Zion Wildlife. To help keep the gene pool diverse, many Big Cat preserves swap young lions and tigers. Ashley was there to see how their lions and tiger were faring. The environments (Whangeri is much cooler than the Kruger Park outside Johannesburg) are quite different, but the lions were doing well. We were lucky to have Ashley as a guide as he will be returning home soon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello,


My name is Sara, I am french and I wanted to know more about the park Zion as the animals in the park, the number of employees and their diplomas, ...You can answer to

saraazerty@laposte.net


thank you

kind regards


sara