s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

So, we are back from the Alpaca Association of New Zealand conference in Rotorua. A long, fun, informative and very tiring weekend. A few highlights:

Drove up Thursday night, taking SH1/the Desert Road. But as it was pitch black we could see nothing of the terrain we we driving through. Pity.

Friday we had all day classes. Tam was in a Camelid handling class taught be Marty McGee Bennet, who is THE person for llama/alpaca training and handling. She is also really nice and a fun person. I was in an Alpaca Selection course taught by one of the first US breeders, Mike Safely. Very educational, now we have to exchange notes.

Saturday was all-day lectures. They had two lecture tracks running, so again we split up. The opening speech was given by local politician Jim Anderton, who made very good points about the need for value-adding to products if the country is going to go forth and prosper. (A cubic meter of unmilled pine log is NZ$70, a cubic meter of cell phones is NZ$700,000- which is more likely to make your country prosperous?) He seemed like quite a rational fellow. Much of the virture of Saturday was networking durig the periodic tea-breaks. We have developed a breeding strategy for our herd, and with hordes of breeders large and small in attendance, we were schmoozing left and right trying to get leads on some good starter females. Hopefully we have some good ones in line, now we just have to finish the discussions via email. The evening was capped off by watching the All Blacks take down the Argentina Pumas. Though kudoes to Argentina for being plucky. Most of their success came from the simple approach. No fancy passing, just run up the middle really fast. Everybody expects something a bit more complicated than that- so it the simple way can acually work. And they managed to score a try against the ABs, something England could not manage in two games! That same night the English were getting pounded by the Aussies.

Sunday we had yet more seminars. A schedule-reading mistake led us to get up an hour early (urgggh), but that turned out well. We had breakfast with Marty McGee Bennet, and ended up chatting through the extra hour (animals, US politics, the state of the world, standard breakfast fare). One of the morning seminars was on the development of a herd-genetics-traking database, and Tam apparently showed insufficient reluctance (plus a bit of knowledge), and is now helping out a bit there. The final two seminars in the afternoon were quite boring (homeopathy and biodnamics, both of which I am okay with in moderation, but in this case they surpassed my grain-of-salt tolerance level), so we left early to drive back to Wellington (and were glad we did). Just outside of Rotorua we picked up two young women from Newcastle who were backpacking their way across country and took them with us down to Wellington (they needed to catch the ferry to the S.I.). They were not very chatty, but we did notice as they got tired their accents got thicker and thicker. Hee. We popped into town to drop them off at a backpackers (it was pouring rain, and leaving them anywhere else late on a Sunday night would ahve been cruel), and headed home for much-needed sleep. The drive home was made longer by the rain. By the time we got to the Wellington-region the rain was heavy enough that slips were becoming a concern, but we made it through without problems. At least by leaving early we go to see the Desert road by daylight this time. Wacky volcanic plateau. Have to go hiking up there some time.