A most amazing day
Ok, I’ll catch you all up on the last week in a minute. But first I must tell you about our afternoon on Thursday which has to be one of our cooler experiences so far.
We’d driven from Dunedin on the coast north to a little town called Omaru which is famous for it’s Blue Penquin Colony’s night march. First off though we stopped by where the very rare, yellow-eyed penquins nest in the hopes of seeing one. We’d been told they were very shy and odds of seeing them weren’t great. Imagine how excited we were when we not only saw 5 of them BUT one of them walked right up to where we were all standing and basically posed for about 15minutes! Just amazing as he did his mating calls and fluttering about.
Then it was time to head over to the blue penquins, also called fairy penquins since they’re really small. They have quite an amazing little community where they each have little homes, they generally mate for life and every single day one of the spouses goes out to sea to feed while the other attends the nest. At around sundown each night the penquins who had gone out that day come back in, walk up a little hill and go home to their mates. What is so amazing, as if that isn’t amazing enough, is that the spouse at home waits outside the nest and calls to the returning penquins. It was just so cool to watch them all walk up the hill from the beach and greet their spouse, some of them even doing a little happy dance upon getting back with their significant other. Then, in the middle of this, the full moon started to rise up over the Pacific ocean and was the most incredible bright orange. We’d never seen the moon rise from the sea like that before and was just the capper on a great experience.
So, before that… I think I left off in Queenstown. What a great town, we could certainly live there. We stayed 2 nights and then headed to the beach to Dunedin. Dunedin is about a population of 120,000 – quite a few of whom are students at the Otago University. It was unseasonably cold when we arrived….REALLY cold actually and with the windchill was around a high during the day of 42-43f. We bundled up and spent much of the first day wandering about town and then had tours of both the Cadbury candy factory (free chocolate! Oh yea), and the Speights brewery (and free beer! yea) Cadbury was fun, the smell of chocolate was almost too much though, I’ve got to say. I know, you never thought you’d hear me say it but I’m not sure I could work with that smell all day!
Speights was fun, interesting to see how they did their brewing and it’s pretty good beer. They don’t export at all so we hadn’t heard of them before but have certainly been drinking it for a few weeks now. After the tour a rather amazing thing happened… the tour guide said, “the taps are yours, you can taste all 6 or 6 tastes of one or whatever you want – and I dont’ really count how much you’re tasting”. Jim was in hog heaven! Free tastings all around.
The next day we headed out to the Otago Peninsula in an attempt to see the rare Royal North Albatross. They have a colony and they’re BIG birds… around 22 lbs with a 9ft wing span. Alas, no albatrosses were around but we did have an interesting tour of the old fort with some cool guns that dropped back into the ground…sorry, can’t think of what they’re called right now. After that we drove up to Omaru as I’d mentioned in the first part of the post.
After Omaru we headed back towards the mountains and up to Mt Cook National Park. We lucked out with a gorgeous, clear day and after having lunch in the village went for a hike for a couple of hours. This is a World Heritage area and you can see 22 of the 27 mountains in New Zealand that are over 2500m from the park. Much shorter overall than many places in the world but just seeing that really long mountain range all in a row is really amazing. We camped at the closest campsite to the mountain and actually used our camp chairs (it’s been too cold for most of the trip to really use them) to have a sundowner and watch the sun set over the mountain range.
Today, unfortunately, started out really windy and pretty darn cold. We were really lucky to have seen Mt Cook area yesterday when it was sunny and calm. We drove a short 1hr to Lake Tekapo where we’re spending tonight. It is one of the mountain lakes that is an amazing turqoise color due to some rock bottom glacier movements thousands of years before. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. The color is caused by some sort of sediment from the rocks rubbing which causes clouding and reflects the light. I don’t get the whole scientific explanation but it’s really gorgeous.
Tomorrow we start heading back towards the coast to eventually end up on Tuesday in Christchurch and drop off Betsy, the campervan. Although it’s been fantastic I must say I’m looking forward to 3 nights in a hotel room:) 6 more days and we’re off to Australia and warmer weather.
Cheers – Jim & Rhonda
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