New Zealand is awesome!

Thursday, March 15

Today we went inter tubing under ground! We were in a place called Waitomo, New Zealand (south-west of Auckland, New Zealand). They are famous for there glow worm caves. Glow worms scientific name is "Arachno Campa Luminosa." Arachno- as  in spider or bug, and Luminosa- as in light or glowing.
What we did on the tour was hike through cow fields and some forest into a cave. When we were in the cave we saw the glow worms and learned a lot about them. We learned that glow worms have a cycle like a butterfly. They start out as eggs (2-3 days), turn into a worm (8-10 months and the stage we were seeing them at),  go to a cocoon stage (7-8 days) and later turn into a fly (2-3 days).  The glow worms live as a fly for so shortly becase in the fly stage they don't have mouths so they starve.
Also on the tour we got to float through an underground (100ft under!) caves and look up at the ceiling that was full of glow worms!
If you ever go to New Zealand, you should definitely try this out!

- Marin-

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Sunday, March 18

Today we went swimming with fur seals In the South Pacific Ocean!!!!!! How cool is that?!  
The interesting thing about this is that these seals are not tamed by humans. The people who take you to swim with them have never trained or fed these seals.
We took a boat and were dropped right next to seal rocks and we swam around the rocks. The seals would come in and swim around with us. They went under us, around us, and did tricks and jumps. The area we went to had a lot of seals because it was an area where they have no natural predators. This means that no sharks or whales came even close to that area which made it safe for us to be there too.
Another cool thing is that there are only 5 places in the world where you can swim with seals and we got to go to one of them!

-Marin-

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