Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Zorbing

We watched Bolt the other night. And as some of you may or may not know, there is a hamster, named Rhino, in one of those hamster balls that played a big part in the movie.
This led to a discussion of hamster balls and how fast a hamster could travel while in one. Having no idea, I googled "hamster ball" only to find that most of the top hits are for some video game. So I did the next best thing. YouTube. I think that I added "rodent" to the search mix and came up with several poor videos of hamsters in balls. But we answered our question. Those little guys can go surprisingly fast!
We kept on looking at various videos (it is so easy to get lost in YouTube land) and eventually we found Zorbing videos. Apparently it started in New Zealand.

Hamster ball for humans.

Who knew?

Seriously, click on the link.

There is nothing stranger than humans.

4 comments:

mira's papa said...

Zorbing? Never heard of it. But it could be fun. I think you'd need a LOT bigger hill than that namby pamby thing in the video. Put that sucker up in the Alps where it will roll for 15 minutes to get to the town in the valley and then you've got something. I'd give that a go. Might not be able to walk straight for a few minutes after, but it does look very enticing. Even for an old guy.

tanita✿davis said...

I saw a tourism video for NZ, and their weird/extreme sports are a huge part of the package. Zorbing, and the whole Maori running at you, screaming with tongues out thing, would just MAKE someone's vacation... not so much mine, though. I'd never recover from the dizziness.

David T. Macknet said...

Yeah - I've seen that whole thing before. It actually looked ... well, kinda cool, actually, if it's what I'm remembering, with the smaller ball inside the larger ball. You can totally walk on water, roll down hills, and bounce! Looked way fun!

KansasA said...

We've had a couple of hamsters and one of them would whip down the hall, through my laundry room, and then back up the other hallway in a flash! Fluffy was a mad hamster in his ball!