Eye to eye with the chimps in Hamilton and others

E and I had a lovely trip to Hamilton last week to visit my sister and her family. To the uninitiated, Hamilton is a pleasant smallish city in the fertile Waikato farming district about 150km south of Auckland. It has lots of the amenities of larger cities without the traffic problems. Sis and her family live on a block of land just outside the city, which is idyllically pretty but (she assures me) lots of hard work to upkeep. They keep chickens and a delightful duck who thinks she is a chicken, plus a handful of sheep to keep the grass down. I'd love to show you the view from her kitchen window but I have busted my data cap again and can't upload the thumping great photo that I took.

Sorry? What's that? Why don't I reduce the size of the photo file? Yes, well, I do know how to do that in Windows but the other big excitement of the week (apart from the fact that we'll be in Honolulu in THREE DAYS!!!)is that I have bought my first computer and it's a MacIntosh. A little cutie, a sweet white Macbook but the guy in the shop said that Windows users have to forget everything they know and relearn the Mac operating system. Anyway I've clicked every button and searched everywhere I can think of and I can't figure out how to reduce photo size in iphoto. So the pictures will have to wait until I figure that out. Why did I get a MacIntosh you ask? After a lifetime of Windows usage it felt like time for a change ... and Macs look so pretty... although I was terribly tempted by a raspberry pink Sony Vaio ...

Anyway, back to Hamilton. What have the chimps got to do with anything. Well, while we were there, my sis and I took our offspring (ages 10, 10 and 12) to Hamilton Zoo for an eye to eye encounter with the chimpanzees. They have a small family group of chimps there, who used to live at Auckland Zoo in a smaller enclosure. They moved down to Hamilton a couple of years ago now, and look like they are thriving in the larger enclosure. The main viewing area is from a bridge a few metres overhead so it works for zoo visitors as well.

Two keepers escorted us downstairs into the food preparation room (after appropriate disinfection procedures) and we distributed plastic milk bottles of Milo and of sago pudding in the dens, and scattered popcorn. Then the keepers opened the gates and after a moment or two the troupe wandered in. They wasted no time in unscrewing the bottle tops to get to the yummy drink inside, and just tore open the sago bottles with their jolly sharp teeth. Prehensile toes are very useful for holding your pudding bottle while you drink your Milo! When every last piece of popcorn had been eaten they hung out with us for a while, just to be social. One of the older females jumped up onto the wire so that she was eye level with me and nodded in greeting, which I thought was extremely gracious. When most of the others had gone back outside, we hand-fed bananas to one of the older females (hopefully the nodder). She was a real doll, and ate everything, skin, stalk, the lot.

There were builders in another part of the building and every now and then they would do something noisy like drill a hole. The young male took this as a direct challenge and responded by banging the metal doors, thumping the walls and shouting. Not in anger, just in a very blokey "oh yeah, you and whose army" sort of way.

I did take my camera to the 'encounter' but I was so interested in what we were doing that I didn't want to stop to fiddle around with the camera and maybe miss something. So no photos of that one.

Back in Auckland we are in winding down mode. The house is looking a bit bare - we have packed away a lot of stuff so that the housesitters will have somewhere to put their stuff. We've also given away quite a bit - the City Mission truck came yesterday and now we can fit both cars into the garage!! Our bags are all packed - I'm a bit concerned about mine - it's a bit fuller than I would like, bearing in mind that it will have to accommodate en route purchases. I might try to sneak some stuff into Em's bag ... The hand luggage is going to be heavy too - Al bought me 'Wicked' by Jilly Cooper to read on the plane but the darn thing weighs a ton, plus I've got to carry this Macbook as well now.

We're counting the hours rather than the days at this point. Al's in major organising mode, paying bills and organising money things etc and we are enjoying various social engagements with our friends. We are all excited. I've started waking up with butterflies in my tummy and I haven't done that for quite a few years now. It's good to know I can still get too excited to eat!!