Post by Matthijs

The petrified forest is something that you hardly get to see. It is so special. There are logs underground and the sea pounds on the ground for years and years and then uncovers petrified logs! The logs were so amazing and old! I loved jumping from log to log and from stump to stump. There was a little river with lots of seaweed and purple rocks. The seaweed is everywhere here on the south coast. We have named the seaweed Mermaid Hair because it attaches to the rocks and looks just like really long hair floating in the water. But it stinks and does not make me want to go swimming in it! There were some waves that came while we were standing by the mermaid hair and it looked like a sea monster!
We went to see penguins one evening. It was so cool to see the penguins feeding their young. They are the most rare penguins in the world! The yellow-eyed penguin. It was so amazing. The day after that we also saw some seals, there were about 17 seal’s swimming in a pool!
We have also seen the Royal Albatross. One of it’s wings is the length of my dad’s arm and shoulder together. They are about 3 meters (10 feet) total wing span. They are huge! We got to see the babies nesting. They are already really big! They spend 85% of their life flying above the water. They can fly around 1,000 kilometers a day! After they learn to fly, for at least the first 5 years, they never even touch land. They just fly and sleep on the ocean. They fly all the way around the earth between Antarctica and the tip of South America and then nest in NZ. This little spot is the ONLY place in the world where they come on land to nest! So, it was really special to see them!
We went to a beach that had huge round rocks. Nobody knows why they are like that. But they were really cool and fun to climb on!
We also went to the steepest street in the world! It is in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was so steep that we could hardly walk up it! There was a car that went up it and hardly made it, then it came back down and was going so fast that the hood was flapping up and down. Can you figure out this picture?