Birds and Pies: a Guest Post by Chris Lennon

Being invited by Ann-Marie and Craig to be a guest blogger for Our Big Adventure has me feeling kind of stressed.  Keeping up with the high standard of journalism expected by Our Big Adventure readers is going to be a challenge.  Anyway, here goes...

Bird Watching Advice

One of the joys of travel to far off places is seeing strange flora and fauna.  In New Zealand the exciting fauna are the birds.  If you hope to achieve the New Zealand bird watching merit badge you are going to need to see a Kiwi.  Good luck with that because they are rare, shy, and nocturnal.  On the other hand you can cheat by going, as Kim and I did, to the Auckland Zoo.  There we managed to see one, but it was still challenging.

To see other interesting birds you might expect to have to travel into "the bush" and hunt for them, but that is not the case.  Just hang around in the parking lot and they will come to you.  Other than the elusive Kiwi, our two most significant bird sightings were a Weka (flightless bird that looks kind of like a snub nosed Kiwi) and a Kea (world's only alpine parrot).  In both cases we made the sightings in trail head parking lots after we'd gone off scouting around in the woods.  The Kea, in particular, had a lot of personality, and I was happy to get many good photos of it chewing away at somebody else's brake line hose.

We also saw many Swamp Harriers, a common New Zealand raptor, as they chowed down on road kill.

Meat Pies

Speaking of road kill, that's kind of what I thought of when in the past somebody would mention meat pies.  In my mind meat pies were connected with the pie shops of Mrs. Lovett (Sweeny Todd) and Mrs. Miggins (Blackadder).

Kim and I had tried a meat pie in Australia and we were distinctly underwhelmed.  So it was a bit of a laugh when Craig started lobbying to go to for a meat pie at the Fairlie Bakehouse.  Kim and I split a chicken with mushroom pie, and a silverflake (corned beef) with mash and mustard pie.  We were stunned.  They were great!

The crust was nicely buttery and flaky, and the fillings were high quality; no mystery meat to be found.

Later in the trip Craig led us to the Fat Bastard Pie Shop and Invercargill were we had a chicken and bacon pie, and a sirloin pie.  They were great!

On our last morning Kim had another chicken and mushroom pie at Bunrunner's Cafe.  She enjoyed that!

Clearly there is something to this meat pie business.  I don't want to totally dismiss the Australian version because we didn't really make an effort to find a high quality product, but I can say that when traveling to New Zealand you owe it to yourself to try a good meat pie!

Other Stuff

In addition to eating meat pies and looking at birds we biked, hiked, had yummy dinners with carefully measured glasses of wine followed by staggering amounts of good chocolate; all while enjoying the good companionship and AM&C.  Kim and I watched (humbled) from the car as Ann-Marie and Craig cruised up Banks Peninsula roads with grades that dwarf the road past Bash-Bish Falls.  For those of you expecting to keep up with them on bicycles when they return to the US, be afraid, be very afraid...