When dad and Grayson went to go in the caves someone else on the same tour as them named Jake said that he really enjoyed this zip line tour. When Grayson came back, he said he really wanted to go on the zipline tour, so mom and dad got it arranged.
What we were going to do is about 6 different ziplines, and Mom agreed to do it! So the next day we drove to the zip line building and got our harnesses on, the tour guides names were Sam and Ash. After we got everything ready, we drove to the Mamaku Kaimai forest. On the way Sam asked to get everyone’s name and somethings about their hobbies and something they think they know more about then anyone else. When we were all done with that, we got out of the van and walked for about 10 minutes.
Sam and Ash explained some of the different plants and trees. We were going to be up in the tree canopy in tall trees called Rimu trees. They are 1200 years old and up to 50 meters high!
Then we went on a bridge, but it was not normal. It was wiggly and fun and like 17 m off the ground!
After going up a bunch of stairs we had to go through a safety check after that we went on the first zipline which Sam said was the slowest and shortest, we all really liked it - even mom!
The next one we went on was a little longer, but it was all about speed, so it went really fast, I loved it mom didn’t like it as much. My favorite was this one that you race someone else, you have to crunch up into a little cannonball, so you go faster I sadly lost to Grayson and need to do 30 pushups, but it was still really fun!
Grayson also loves the racing one, but dad likes the second one the fast one. Mom liked the one where it’s longer and there’s a beautiful view. There was also one more that I really liked where you would jump off backwards it was really fun, it was a little scary because the trees come so close to you like they are about to crash into you but that never happened.
The special thing about this forest is that all the trees were all original trees and really old and the Indigenous trees take a long time to grow, so if you were to come here like many years ago the whole island would be full of these trees. The old forest is rare because people were chopping them down to use the wood for timber so now there are not as many. But then they realized that they take such a long time to grow that they needed to protect them even more and stop chopping them down.
We also learned that in New Zealand there are not many mammals from New Zealand (only bats). But people brought different mammals to the islands like rabbits to eat and rats onboards ships and then mammels to kill the rabbits when there were too many. These became know as pests because they ate the kiwis (a type of bird from New Zealand that cannot fly so is easier to get and is an endangered bird). So, with all these pests it started to mess with the ecosystem. The ecologists tried to make traps for the different pests: 1st of the pests is a rat 2nd possum 3rd is a stoat. And the traps really worked. They got tons and tons of the pests, but the workers had to go out every day to take out the animals, so it got too expensive. So, they made a new trap that is automatic, and they don’t need to change it as often.
At the end of our hike, we saw these bright blue mushrooms that only grow if the forest is healthy and there are not very many possums. The mushroom is on the 50 dollar bill - it is also the only dollar bill in the world with a mushroom on it.
--Poppy
Comments