Feb 9: Ziplines and Traplines (free avo included)

aliceesor

Feb 9, 2024: Papamoa Beach (near Tauranga)

I’ve been waking up with no alarm, which is disconcertingly unlike me.

Our venture today was a forest canopy zipline tour in a rare piece of old growth forest that hasn’t been meddled with.

Or at least not by logging or development. The understory was taking a beating from rats eating the tree seeds, so they raised some money and started trapping.

They couldn’t keep up with re-setting the single use traps, so they invested in this style of multiple hit co2 canister powered traps. Yes, apparently rat #12 will clamber up on to a pile of 11 dead rats in order to have a taste of the bait.

They also use chew cards (coroplast squares full of peanut butter) to see where pest numbers are at, and so they can target high pest areas with more traps, and set traps specific to the pest species:

One of our three guides was part of the trapping project, so he was able to describe this really well, but I figured images would be helpful!

The ziplines were cool too – I’m lucky to see old and wild forests at home, but these are different.

Some of the trees (now unsure of this is rimu or tawa, or kauri, oops! … probably rimu??) were huge and formed the structure for platforms, etc.
It was really neat to look down on the tree ferns.
Tree fern fiddlehead!
There was some opportunity for zipline racing.
And a fair bit of this, whatever this is.
There were zero pee breaks
It was a very hot day, and it was noticeably cooler in the forest, even when we were in the upper canopy.
At the end, we were rapelled down the ropes behind us in this picture (some of us upside down!).

Having worked up an appetite, we had a tasty Mexican dinner out in Rotarua and then divvied up. I stayed with the group that explored on foot, and found some of the geothermal pools in the city park.

100°C… Signs advised against swimming, for some reason.
Prefect temperature!

Fun facts about avocados:
You can grow them here, buuut it takes 10 years before one will bear fruit. If you’re going to do that, you’ll learn that avocado flowers are female on day one and male on day two (type ‘A’), and vice versa for type ‘B’. Although having both type trees isn’t strictly necessary, it improves pollination.
Avocados don’t ripen on the tree, and can stay on-tree for up to 18 months. Once picked, ethylene (a gaseous plant hormone) starts the ripening.
If you’re trying to make avocado oil with your ripe avos, peel and de-pit them first. Then, mash the bejeesus out of it while heating it to 45-50°C (apparently this is called malaxing – new word for me!). Then get out your high-speed decanting centrifuge to leave the pulp behind, and put the gleaned liquid into your other “polishing” centrifuge to separate the oil from the water. Use the pulp for mulching your garden. Use your avo oil to make me dinner!

Dinner involved no avocados – which I was surprised by – avocados are one of the foods that is noticeably cheaper here. At home, it’s not unusual to pay $2-3/ avocado, but here at the moment, you can pick them up for $0.69!

Alice

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