Oamaru and Dunedin

A blog should never be quiet. At least that's what they say. But for all my moaning about having nothing to do here, I've been incredibly busy. The kids have two weeks off between terms and we have taken our first big excursion into New Zealand. We traveled south about 5 1/2 hours to the towns of Oamaru and Dunedin to see the penguins and the royal albatross for Ethan's birthday. For those of you who don't know him well, he is crazy about animals.

Oamaru was a booming town in the late eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen hundreds. Then development stalled and the town was over mortgaged. It hasn't really recovered. It has a large deposit of limestone in the area and the downtown is all built in a really regal fashion out of the beautiful white stone. It is very majestic and striking. Now a days the town is known as an arts town and known for the little blue penguin colony that has always been there, but they have protected and cultivated into an eco-tourism site.

The penguins come in from the sea at dusk, where they have spent the whole day diving for fish. So we had to wait till about 7:45 pm to see them. During the day, we drove inland to a place called Elephant Rocks, and outcropping of limestones once underground and underwater one of many of the stops on the Vanished World Fossil Trail. (The whole of the Otago region was once under water, as was all of NZ, I quess, so there are fossilized whales and dolphins and pleiosaurasus and other-a-sauras all over the place.) But much more interesting than this, Elephant Rocks was where the final battle scene of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was filmed. Pleiosaurasus phooey! That is cool.

So on toward dark we went to the Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony. They have a grandstand set up. There are orange lights which the penguins can't see, so they think it is dark. It was cold, but we wore hats and coats and wrapped up in a blanket and waited for the penguins to make an appearance. The penguins came in from the sea in groups or rafts, quacking like ducks. They were 30 cm high, which is about a foot tall and they were cute! They crawled out of the surf and onto the rocks where they preened for a few minutes pumping oil back onto their feathers from a gland just above their waddly little tushes. Then they did indeed waddle off to their nesting boxes across the road in the sanctuary. Well, most of them did. Some were, as we joked (if you know our family well you get the joke), ADHD penguins, and seemed to get distracted and had to do it their own way waddling off in odd directions and trying to get through the fence in spaces that didn't fit. Overall, in the course of an hour, 154 penguins were counted coming home.

The next day we spent the morning in the Oamaru Botanical Gardens before heading off to Dunedin. The Gardens deserve a mention because they were a spectacular place. Each separate little garden section was a surprise, popping out at you in an unexpected way with something new. The Wonderland, an english garden delight, designed to evoke Alice's journey made it feel like magic was possible. The aviary hidden in the trees behind the duck pond was like finding a hidden treasure with an errant roosters your guide pecking the way. The Japanese garden that sprung out of the NZ fern enclosue shocked you with it's pristine lines after you forged the wilds of the native bush. It was a masterpiece of planning. If you ever get to Oamaru, go to the Public Gardens.

Statue in The Wonderland - wish I had a better picture.

On our way to Dunedin, a city of Scottish origin, the name itself is the Gaelic way of saying Edinburgh, we stopped to see the Moeraki Boulders. I bought a pamphlet on the boulders and have read about them online. I am still a little iffy about the process. Here is what I know: Though it looks like the boulders were washed up onto shore by the sea, they were actually eroded out of the mudstone cliff (unpictured) and left on the shore. The stones were formed millions(?) of years ago through a process of concretion on the sea floor, then pushed up through the ground then exposed through erosion. A better explanation can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moeraki_Boulders

After that, we got to Dunedin through the ever larger rolling hills, covered with bright green grass and sheep. Dunedin is a great city. I think it is about 160,000 people. It has Otago University so there are about 20,000 students in it. It is clean, modern, cool, but also some old buildings. I forgot to take pictures. It has a very nice vibe.

In Dunedin we went to the Cadbury factory (no oompa loompas were spotted, but they did wear cute purple overalls), to Lanarch Castle, took an hour cruise to Tairoa Head to see the Royal Albatross, a bird with a three meter wing span (9 feet), and spent a day at the Otago museum. Gobs of chocolate was eaten (not by me for those readers who might be wondering), birds, fur seals and spotted shags were spotted. For the sailors who may be reading, we did reach the roaring 40's and were at the top of the southern ocean on a calm day (thank God) only 20 knot winds, 2 meter swells and a small amount of sea sickness by me and Ruby. Steve was, as some of you can image, delighted to be out on those particular high seas.

I think there is a fur seal in this picture, but it is hard to see.

Finally, one other quirky thing Dunedin has is the "steepest street in the world." According to the Guiness Book of Records, Baldwin Street has the steepest slope at a certain point. It is very steep, but as Steve said, I can only imagine there is a street in Nepal somewhere that is steeper. Anyway, vini, vidi, vici. Or however that is spelled. They didn't teach latin in public school in Florida.

So that was our four and a half days in Oamaru and Dunedin. We were supposed to stay out five days, but as my grandma, Nan Sarah, used to say: "It's good to go. It's good to come home." It was time to come home and have some regular life. At one point Sam said, "Traveling is good and all, but I'm tired."

Picture of Tairoa Head from the roaring 40's (40 degrees latitude)