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Published: November 16th 2006
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Sunday 5th November Laura - We spent a few hours today wandering around the tiny city of Oamaru and looking at it's limestone buildings. We were pleasantly surprised to find some line dancers prancing around down some side alley. Is this normal?! Amused and confused we pottered on to the art gallery. It was very small, but entertaining enough, especially as a couple of strange woman were amazed at a set of portraits and bought a $50 dollar catalogue of it. Apparently it was the best thing they'd ever seen, and they "thoroughly enjoyed it", even though they spent less than 10 minutes in the place! Quite odd.
Anyway, as if the day wasn't exciting enough, it got very exciting in the evening. We drove to a nearby beach where the very rare yellow-eyed penguins have a colony. It was windy and cold, but we sat and waited patiently in the 'hide', which was located on the top of the cliff looking down on the beach. Eventually I spotted an odd looking bird splashing around in the water. Sure enough it was a penguin, and after a while it waddled its way up the beach to the sandy cliff,
where it disappeared from view. It was too far away to see clearly, but it did look cute. Pingu was soon joined by some more friends waddling in from the water but they all disappeared from sight at the bottom of the cliff.
We considered going back to the hostel, pleased with our distant sightings, but then all of a sudden two of the penguins appeared at the top of the cliff, right in front of the viewing deck! It was really cool to see them up close, waddling past us no more than a couple of metres away. They were making their way up to a nest in the bushes. One of them got kicked out of the nest, for being too old! Bless him. He looked very forlorn as he waddled back to find another nest! We had a running commentary of what was going on by some random local enthusiast who goes to watch them every night and guide the tourists about the best places to view them. What a lovely guy.
After that, we went back to the hostel for some dinner and hot chocolate, before dashing out again to take in some more
penguins! This time we went to a Blue Penguin colony. You have to pay 15 dollars for the pleasure of sitting in a purpose built stadium (yes, really!) to watch the penguins come ashore after a hard day at sea. It was really cool because over 200 penguins came ashore altogether, waddling in over the rocks in groups of around 50 at a time. You could hear them all quacking (yes, penguins quack) and crying their mating call. They come into shore mainly for nesting, so all the little chicks come out of the nests to greet them. It's very cute. It's such a bizarre set up though, with all these people crowded into the seats with instructions to "sit still and be quiet". It was like being back at school! Only slightly more interesting...
After the hoards had left we hung around to get a closer look and had lots of fun with the penguins. We found that if we stood still for long enough they got curious and came over to inspect us. They were literally sniffing our shoes! It felt quite special really, being the only people in the area, surrounded by hundreds of tiny penguins!
It wasn't quite so special when we realised that our car had been locked in the car park... Fortunately for us though there was a guy cleaning up in the restaurant who saved the day with a spare key to the lock. He was a cheeky Londoner who burst out laughing at us when we went to ask him for help and said "what do you expect me to do about it?", before eventually going to search for a key. I think Mark would get along well with him.
Monday 6th November Paul - Dunedin on the southern east coast is our destination today. Apparently it's very Scottish and amusingly we saw someone in slacks with a huge beard on arrival.
The drive down only took a couple of hours but we managed to fit in a rather lovely sight. On a random beach is a very mysterious collection of huge spherical rocks. They are called the 'Moeraki Boulders' and apparently they are made of very hard sandstone but they look like they've just dropped out of the sky. Laura and I played around like kids on them for a while before wondering whether they
are protected under some 'Greeny' protection law so we got off them.
After checking into our hostel in Dunedin we went for a stroll into town. I learnt on the way that the steepest street in the world is here so we'll definately be going there tomorrow. It's 38 degrees steep! Yikes!
The sights of Dunedin are few and far between but we had a good look around some grand old buildings (the railway, town hall and law courts) before heading over to the Otago Peninsular, a beautiful slice of countryside only ten minutes from the city. Had a fun drive over to Sandy Beach, a place where we would hopefully be seeing the rare NZ sea lion and also some yellow eyed penguins. We were going to do an overpriced tour until a kind girl in our hostel told us the beach to go to for free.
She also warned us that the path to the beach was basically a huge sand dune and after sliding down it for a good 50 metres we realised that getting back up wouldn't be so much fun. But that didn't matter at the moment as we could see some
huge sea lions on the beach. We wandered over, with Laura keeping a VERY safe distance, and had a good look. There were six on the beach altogether generally having a good sleep. We went to have a quick look at the penguins coming ashore but our attention soon turned to the sea lions who seemed to be all waking up. We crept closer for photos although Laura's heart was in her mouth when one shot up really quickly and looked at us!
It seemed to be feeding time as all the sea lions were waking up and charging into the water (well, I say charging, they were actually moving five metres, flopping down and then repeating that HIGHLY energetic process). It was great fun to watch them do this in the wild and we were virtually the only people on the beach to see it. Fabulous.
Tuesday 7th November Paul - Waved goodbye to Dunedin (not before paying a visit to the steepest street in the world - 38 degrees steep!) and headed across the country to Te Anau, the gateway to Milford Sound. As seems to be the norm in New Zealand, the
drive over was very scenic. Rolling green hills and as we pulled closer to Te Anau we could see snow capped mountains rising in the distance. Nice!
I take this opportunity to tell you that Laura has purchased a rather fetching hat and glove set and she is still complaining about the cold. She's never happy. When we get to Fiji I guarantee I'll be writing that she's too hot.
Checked into our hostel and went for a stroll along the lake and it's beautiful and obscenly scenic. I can't quite believe how beautiful New Zealand is. Strolled through the town but there's not much to it so spent the rest of the evening watching the sun go down over the mountain range. It was rather nice.
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