Encounters with wildlife (1)

I've done it again, haven't I?  Sorry blog world, I will try to stop disappearing for weeks at a time.  Anyway, what's been happening?  As you can probably guess from the title of this post, I have been interacting with the world around me...

I was lucky enough to spend a week in New Zealand recently (more on this to come) courtesy of the New Zealand Conferences and Meetings industry.  Oh well, someone has to go and stay in those hotels, drink the wine and eat the canapes at the parties.  We only got a little taste of what Auckland has to offer, other than the insides of hotel rooms, function spaces and convention centres, but the taste we had was pretty fine.  The Auckland Convention Bureau has embraced the theme 'From Mild to Wild' as a way of promoting Auckland as a business events destination, with the theory being that Auckland can offer everything you need.  I took the opportunity to experience 'wild Auckland'.  We kicked off our day with a ride on this baby.

Given that my sole experience with motorbikes was a dink up and down the driveway on Edward's scooter on my 40th birthday, I was a little nervous.  But I was in safe hands with Kerry in charge.  There were about 30 of us in the group, and riding in a pack was great fun.  I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, and I must say, it was a great way of clearing out the cobwebs that remained from a big night out the night before.

That's me, standing between the two bikes (although really, how would you know?).

Then there was some lunch, which is always nice, and then we hit the harbour for a sail on the Americas Cup yachts.  It had been a bit of a miserable, drizzly day with some rain around, and there had been some discussion about whether or not we should bother to sail.  I figured, we'd only get wet and cold, and both of those would be fixable later, so I was keen.  We headed out on two yachts and worked the grinders to put up an enormous amount of mainsail.  I now know why the crew had such well developed muscles.  It is hard work.  But we got our reward. Instead of spending an afternoon sailing (which I'm sure would have been lots of fun) we used the engine to head straight out into the harbour, because there had been orca (killer whales) sighted in the harbour.

It was the most magical afternoon.  It took a little while to find them, with a few false alarms (waves can look a lot like whales), but we got there in the end.  The skies cleared, there was late afternoon sun, the water was as still as glass and there were orca.  A big male, plus a female and a calf.  It was an incredible experience.  I took some of these photos, not all.  Thanks for sharing, whoever you are.

It was a wonderful thing to experience, and we felt very privileged. Not something I will forget in a hurry.