A couple days in Dunedin

Tuesday
We packed this day so full I'm finding it hard to remember what we did this morning. Ok, so first we went to the Otego Settler's Museum. They did in fact start with the original Maori settlers, but they quickly moved on to the Europeans, or at least the history once the Europeans arrived. The one room they had was good, but I still feel like I need to know more about the Maori. I'll keep trying.



Then we went to tour the Cadbury factory. We didn't get to see the factory itself - health and safety you know - but we saw some of the tools and methods, and we ate a lot of chocolate. I always find it interesting what local candies any given country has. It's one of the more variable things when traveling and I don't know why. Here they like marshmallow at the center of their chocolate, which is not my favorite. But sadly the local factory is closing and the operations are moving to Melbourne. They are wondering what will happen to the traditional NZ candies because it won't be the same if they say made in Australia.

After that we were all on a crazy sugar rush so we went for lunch. Nancy picked out a local brewery and we ate in the ale house and sampled a flight of tasting beers with our meals. Mostly it confirmed that I don't like beer. But my tomato soup and big hunk of brown bread was lovely.

We rounded out the afternoon at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. A moderately sized museum with a decent permanent collection, and a temporary exhibit of Gordon Walters. I had never heard of him, and I'm not usually that into abstract stuff, but I liked his work a lot. And it covered the whole second floor. Bonus points to the museum for having a good kids play space. The gallery is only a block from the hotel, but Leah was having enough fun coloring and playing that we ended up all spending about 2 hours there.

We were all ready to crash after that so we went back to the hotel and put our feet up for an hour. But then we were off again for a drive out the peninsula to the Penguin Place to try to see yellow eyed penguins. They are very endangered, but the colony had about 20-24 adults this season. They had 8 nests that all hatched chicks, but all the chicks died young. Apparently they all got diphtheria at about a week old and their immune systems weren't up to it. That seems to be a common thing for them to get, it went through another colony as well, but after the chicks were about a month old so most of them survived. But that meant no one was guaranteed to come in to feed babies. We were out there for about an hour and saw one and counted ourselves very lucky. We had a good tour guide who told me all about the gay penguins who were fostering an egg this year. They were doing well with it before they all got sick. Sharing responsibilities, trading off at the right times, etc. There's a gender imbalance with this species so there's always extra males hanging about.

The gay penguins

A Yellow-eyed penguin walking up from the beach

A yellow-eyed penguin on the path

By the time we finished with the yellow penguins we were hungry, so we headed directly to the Royal Albatross Centre for supper at the cafe before catching their little blue penguin tour. The little blues don't seem to be endangered, at least no one said they are. And while the yellows tend to be kind of solitary, the blues, like most penguins, are very social. They are also really small. So they go out all day to fish and come back just after sunset (which is like 9:45 in the summer). They come to shore in groups, called rafts, that range in number from about 6 to 12. And they all come scurrying up the beach, and then up the path and into the underbrush. They were so cute. Of course, even with a bit of artificial light around it was pretty dark so I'm sure what I have is 100 or so really blurry photos. But I had a lot of fun taking them.

Sunset over Otego bay

Otego bay just after sunset

a raft of little blue penguins coming in

getting closer

almost there

a raft of penguins on the beach

sticking her head out of the nest

Very limited internet at this hotel so no pictures will get posted before we get to Queenstown. And honestly I haven't even looked at the Monday or Tuesday photos yet. We were too busy today to look at yesterday's and now it's after midnight and I just need to go to bed. Oh, but remind me to tell you about the drive out the peninsula. If you can do google street view on the drive from city center to 1260 Harington Point Road it should give a good sense. If you were a nervous driver you'd hate it.

Wednesday
We crammed much less into today than yesterday, but that's for the best. First off, I slept until 9, which was good after being up until about 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning. We thought about going to the Otego museum on our way out of the city this morning in the hopes that it would have a better exhibit on Maori history and culture, but there was no easy place to park, or even challenging parallel parking on the wrong side of the road spots, so we skipped it and went straight back out to the peninsula. Our first stop was Leah's pick of the day, a playground that we saw in Broad Bay. So we ran around and climbed on things for maybe an hour.

Broad Bay

Then we did some drive by birding around Hoopers Inlet and Papanui Inlet. We actually did that twice, before and after lunch. We saw a whole bunch of cool birds without ever actually leaving the car. And they were gravel roads. I found it so cool to be driving the back roads of New Zealand. And it was all hilly, and green, and low tide, and shrouded in fog. Just great views all around. (The complete bird list will come when I upload the pictures, but the highlights were the kingfisher which was very colorful, and the black swan, which wasn't colorful at all in a sense, but I didn't even know that was a real thing.)
[see the next post for the bird photos. This one is getting too big to load the page.]

Our last thing for the day was going back out to the point to see the royal albatross. And we did see 4 of them, so that was cool, but not as cool as I was hoping for because all 4 were sitting on nests and never moved. They have a 9 foot wing span that I was really looking forward to being impressed by. Also, there's a few dozen of them in the colony, but all on the far side of the bluff. And it wasn't windy enough for any of them to be flying.

Albatross. What makes them cool is their 9 foot sing span, but the 4 we saw never even stood up. Gotta keep that egg warm. They only lay one egg every other year, so it's important.

So tomorrow we get up early and head over to Queenstown to catch up with everyone else. The big day is on Friday.