Today we were in Tauranga, the unofficial kiwi fruit capital of New Zealand. You have to say kiwi fruit to distinguish from the kiwi bird and, of course, the slang term for New Zealanders. Tauranga has a very active port where we docked close to Mount Maunganui ("The Mount"). We had a tour this morning of the Elms House Mission, a former mission station for converting the Maoris. Unfortunately our guide was the most soft spoken gentleman so it was hard to hear him and with all the grass around, there were mosquitoes, a few of whom got me. No zika here I hope.
Then we went to a kiwi farm, which doesn't sound very exciting, but was actually very interesting. I didn't realize they grow on vines, and they have to truck in hundreds of thousands of honeybees for 8 days when the flowers of the male and the female trees are open for pollination. There is no nectar in the flowers so no insects will do the job. They feed the bees artificial nectar to keep them alive and doing their job. Then they send them back to the honeybee farms (?) to continue making the famous Manuka honey. Fortunately they don't have the colony collapse problem here. NZ is VERY careful about getting outside diseases. We can't bring any food at all off the ship and we had to step on a washing mat when we got off the bus at the kiwi fruit farm. They lost their whole crop of golden kiwi fruit trees in 2010 to a disease, but were able to start over again with a resistant variety and bring back the whole industry in a few years. They're picked from April through June, kept in cold storage and shipped all over the world until November. About 25,000 locals and imported labor work at NZ$16 an hour (minimum wage) for 3 months picking and packing. It's unskilled work, but physically demanding as the work goes 24/7 so there's lots of shift work.
Before returning to the ship we wandered around the little commercial district nearby where we got an ice cream, did a little souvenir shopping and Michael got a haircut. This is a lovely city of about 140,000 but it is pretty spread out so it doesn't feel crowded. Apparently it's quite popular with pensioners, but the average house price is around US$450,000 so I don't think we'll be looking at vacation homes here.
After dinner, we stopped at the piano bar for an adult beverage and our trivia friends, Rob and Laury, came along. Then the piano player started a music trivia game. New friends Brad and Pat joined us fortunately, since Brad knew most of the answers. We got a bottle of "champagne" for making the piano player laugh and agreed to share it over dinner tomorrow.
Tomorrow is Napier.
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