Wombats, Balloons and Penguins

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After staying with Paul and Joanne we stayed with Jason's friend 'Jon' and his family in the St Lucia area of Brisbane. This gave us more of an Australian city life experience and also some pool time! Jons girlfriends mother Helen very kindly took us up the Sunshine coast north of Brisbane. This is where we got to visit Steve Irwins Australia Zoo. This is a fantastic zoo and I got to stroke and cuddle wombats! We later went onto visit Caloundra where Helen lives and the Eumundi Markets. This is an excellent craft market where you can get miniature pancakes as well.

We spent Australia Day (Jan 26th) in Brisbane watching the fireworks along the river.

A few days later we flew off to Christchurch, New Zealand for the start of our three week tour of the North and South Islands. New Zealand is considerably cooler than Queensland and has a definite 'British' feel to it. Christchurch itself is not much to write about but it was a good starting point and also 'the' place to do hot air ballooning.

Hot air ballooning is a bit cheaper here to do than in the UK and the scenery is arguably the best in the world. It was a very early start (05:10AM) but was great fun and not scary at all, even at 8000 feet. We had great views over Canterbury and could see the alps and pacific ocean.

We hired a car from here and moved on to a small pace called Oamaru. Other than feeling a bit of a ghost town this is where you get to see the penguins. The yellow eyed ones are free to see in the wild and one of them comes right up to the fence. However the little blue ones have a centre built around their nesting place so visitors can be controlled and can pay to see them. This was really great as loads of them gradually wash onto the rocks, sit there and dry for a while before moving onto the nesting area to feed their chicks.

After Oamaru we moved on to Dunedin which is meant to be a Scottish type city/town place. Just outside of Dunedin is the Otago peninsula where there is a colony of Albatrosses. Unfortunately you have to do a tour to see the colony, which was a bit too pricey to see some big birds. But we got to see a few flying around. You definitely distinguish them from seagulls when they are flying as they look like gliders and are huge (and no they didn't S**t on Jason).

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Photos

Eager Jason helping blow up balloon
This hot air ballooning is a bit of a team effort as everyone has to help get it set up and pack it away even after its landed in a field of sheep sh*t.

The Mental Oriental
This is the crazy Japanese guy from our hot air balloon. He as very funny with his poses and we bumped into him again in Queenstown.

Yellow Eyed Penguin
This little fella came even closer.

Penguin road sign
We couldnt take pictures in the blue penguin centre so we've got one of the roadsign and my dopey sister doing a penguin walk.