Hunting the rare yellow eyed penguin

29-03-07

Weather report... As per Scotland, damp, drizzly with low cloud and mist.

Looked out of the window and promptly went back to bed for an hour hoping the weather might lift. No such luck, the drizzle was here to stay for the day.

We spent a couple of hours in the morning, checking out Dunedin itself. If you're passionately into dark forboding architecture then the other things that might draw you to Dunedin are the cafe and music culture going on here plus the shopping. Oddly enough this place seems to be better equipped with shops than Wellingburgh, To me the highlight of the town was the art gallery, for Deb it would have been the shops but she's spent all her spending money and is hanging on for her birthday ;o)

Dunedin is a big university town and it shows, everywhere you look there are students. Apparently there can be up to 18,000 of them, considering there's only 110,000 people in the whole town you can see why you see them all over the place. The consequences are lots of very cheap eating establishments, mostly oriental in nature, second-hand clothing stores and pubs/bars.

After lunch we took a drive up the coast to look at the Moeraki boulders. These are stones that have formed into almost perfect spheres after milions of years of mineral deposits, etc, then become exposed as the cliffs have been eroded by the sea. I took a few photos before a bus load of Japanese tourists desecended on the beach, then headed further up the coast to Oamaru.
Oamaru is famous for having two different colonies of penguin, the yellow eyed and the other being the blue penguin. The blue penguin only comes ashore later on in the afternoon/evening and given we were unlikely to see many as it is moulting season we decided to head off in search of the yellow eyed ones. And we found them, well at least 5/6 of them heading up the beach and then up onto the cliffs where they spend the night. Apparently you don't get to see many of these together as they're not particularly sociable, so we did well with the ones we saw here. Unfortunately, we were a good 100 metres from them due to the height of the cliffs. We were to have better luck later ;o)

On the way back to Dunedin, we decided to check out a place called "Shag point"! No really, that is the name!!! It was starting to get a little dark, but good penguin and seal country, we're becoming experts now! As luck would have it the cliffs were a lot lower here, only 5/10 metres in places and just as we arrived a fully moulted yellow eyed penguin came out of the see and waddled up the beach and sat directly below us. You could have almost reached out and touched it ;o)) We both managed to get a few good photos of the penguin and a few seals nearby before Deb had to head back to the car because of the cold. Did I mention is becoming a camera geek now? I caught her discussing her camera featues with another tourist yesterday.....;o0
A misty drive back to Dunedin after a successful days pengiuin hunting was finished off with a Morrocan themed bar.

Next stop the adventure capital of NZ, Queenstown........