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Published: January 9th 2009
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I left Christchurch and headed south and inland to Lake Takepo. It's a bright turquoise colored lake which gets its color from the volcanic particles suspended in water that reflect the sky above (according to the geophysicists at Lonely Planet.) Pretty cool, but not much else going on there, so I only spent the night, went for a run in the morning along the lake, and kept on truckin' to Oamaru. I had four days to zip down the east coast to meet my friend Valerie and her coworker Steve in Queenstown. So on to Oamaru- aka Penguintown! Spent the day just messin' around town, not exciting, but I did go down this one street that still had the old commercial buildings from the 1800's which was like jumping into a time machine. But the main event was at dusk, when all the little blue penguins come back from a day of fishing and waddle their way back to their nests. There is a viewing grandstand set up by wildlife conservation for which you pay 20 NZD to enter. And like clockwork, just after 9pm "rafts" of penguins started swimming ashore. These penguins are the smallest species of penguins, 30cm tall
and weighing in at 1 kilo. So we watched them climb up the rocky shore and scurry across a gravel path to their nesting ground on the other side. It was one of the cutest things I'd ever seen. The grandstand was far enough away (probably 20 feet) such that they weren't fazed by the audience, but we were also not allowed to take any pictures, flash or no flash. They were much more paranoid of what might come down the gravel path they had to cross. And sure enough when the first raft made it up, a brown bunny rabbit came tearing down the gravel path to greet them. They apparently get along just fine and a few bunny rabbits came out and made themselves at home in the penguins' backyards. Quite the party, all it needed was for Tigger to come bouncing out. Took almost 2 hours for all the penguins to come home, and the final count was 228! Most made their nests in the immediate area, but true to all the cautionary signs I saw, two appeared in my headlights on my out of the car park, a few more were making their way down the
driveway, and there was even one on the street behind where I was staying at least a mile away. I wanted to put him in my purse and take him home with me, but I think it'd be tricky getting him through customs... Then the next morning I was off to Dunedin, which is one of the bigger cities and was founded by the Scottish who named it the Gaelic translation for Edinburgh. There's a few gothic cathedrals in the center of town, and the hostel where I stayed used to be the bishop's house. It's pretty cool this huge old house way up on a hill next to St. Joseph's. For some reason the owners named it Hogwartz as in Harry Potter. Weird. It's cozy, more like a B&B than a hostel. The city is located on the Otago Peninsula which has really nice beaches and nature reserves. The roads are windy and high in the cliffs and in a matter of minutes you're out of the city hubbub which is really nice. So I spent the day exploring the area and went to Sandfly Beach where a huge seal came up to me, barked, but then let me
snap a picture. There is also a penguin viewing hide overlooking the end of the beach where yellow-eyed penguins can be seen but one has to be really really patient, which I was not. At the end of the Peninsula is the Royal Albatross Centre just above Pilot Beach where there is also a colony of those cute little blue penguins. So I waited 'til it got dark and spotted a few. It's not as big a production as in Oamaru and they don't light the place up so it got hard to see them. Then when I got back to my car, I found it covered in bird crap. Yeah, that's what happens when one parks in the Albatross Centre car park! Penguins, and seals, and albatross, oh my! The next day I drove back out to another beach, St. Clair, before heading to Queenstown. There's good surf here, but I didn't set up a surf lesson in time and it was more of a lazy, write-my-blog type of beach day before the 4+ hour drive to Queenstown.
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