A Day Trip to the Pennisula

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Hi all,
Another quick entry before I go to bed. I tend to write on here whenever I do something more interesting than classes, and that is the case again. One of my friends from the Arcadia group and I booked a day trip to the Otago Pennisula today with Elm Wildlife Tours. The pennisula is just outside of our city, Dunedin, about an hour's drive, but seeing as we don't have a car we had to book a tour. This was my first major purchase and soon, probably within the next week or two, we'll be making plans for our semester break so I will be spending the most money of probably the whole semester very shortly.

Traveling with a tour was different than traveling through Arcadia, like when we went to Queenstown. It was a small group, but within that group were travelers from Canada, England, France, Germany, and China. We got picked up in the city center and first drove out to the Royal Albatross Center. We were able to view several royal albatrosses soaring around, some right over our heads and very close. The center is at Tairoa Head and is the only place (in the world I think) where albatrosses have a mainland colony. Then we continued our drive and walked across some farmland down to a beach where we got to sea Hooker's sea lions, found only in New Zealand, and yellow-eyed penguins, the rarest penguins in the world and also only in NZ. I was pretty surprised at how close we could get to the wildlife without disturbing them. Of course, we were quiet and turned off the flash on our cameras. We got to see one of the penguins come out from the water and also saw a female sea lion, which according to our guide is somewhat rare because there are much fewer of them than the males. After that, we walked over to a rocky area to see a group of fur seals, mainly young pups who were just born a while ago. We watched them playing in the shallow pools of sea water and chasing each other around. On our way back to the bus we saw a whale far out at sea. Our guide thought it was probably an Orca.

All in all a great day for getting up close and personal with nature! A bit chilly but bright and sunny, which is a rarity here in Dunedin.

EDIT: I figured out how to add photos so if you check my past entries there should be a few. Couldn't add many because the Internet is slow and limited in my flat. Still having issues adding pictures to email so for right now this will be all of the pictures.

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Photos

Albatross
One of the best shots I got at Tairoa Head.

Tairoa Head
The lighthouse at Tairoa Head, where we saw the albatross colony.