Note To Future Self

Another weekend, another roadtrip. I have to say, the Southern hemisphere has been good for getting us off our collective butts. I feel quilty about that trip to Yosemite we never took.

Monday was Labo(u)r Day. As we heard from our Kiwi friends, Labour Day is well loved because it breaks the long winter drought of no public holidays from Queen’s Birthday waaay back in June. It’s also the first three-day weekend of spring.

We had made grand plans to do some bike touring, but weather and lack of preparation nipped those ambitions. Instead, destination: Otago!

Otago is the large-size region (political unit? state?) south of Canterbury, and covers basically the lower third of the east coast. Whereas Canterbury is flat and plain-y, Otago is rolling and hill-y.

(as always, er, mostly, click a pic to get a larger version)

Besides eating excessively and sightseeing, the primary purpose of our trip was to observe us some endangered animals. Aaron’s sub-goal was to demonstrate the need for an exorbitant telephoto lens for the digital camera. Both goals were achieved marvelously.

We kicked off our trip in Oamaru. We both rather enjoyed Oamaru, a small-ish town slowly becoming a tourist destination. It plays host to colonies of both blue and yellow-eyed penguins. The former, though more common, have been, ahem, commodified out of the reach of your average punter. The latter, we’ll get back to that.

Instead of natural splendor, we took a walk around Oamaru’s old downtown, now just becoming a bit of an arts-business district, featuring great quantities of the local limestone. We toured a cheese factory, and waited for the local whiskey distillery to open. The distillery never opened, so we bought cheese instead. Tasty!

Heading south we pulled off in the village/tourist trap of Moeraki. Moeraki the village is an out-of-the-way fishing harbor.

Moeraki the tourist trap consists of these spherical boulders which have come to rest in the surf:

(yes, yes, I know. exposure madness)

At first the whole thing seems overwhelmingly mundane, but after a bit of time in the sun, with the waves crashing around the boulders it’s easy to imagine them as some sort of immense horseshoe crab or alien spawn, crawling from a watery birth.

The site lacked any scientific explanation, but we gleaned that the boulders are the result of some far away geological event (duh), and they’re embedded in the relatively soft embankment above the beach. As the ocean wears at the cliffs, the boulders emerge

and carried into the surf by rather ugly dwarves.

Sometimes the rocks crack open, exposing their creamy nougat-y centers.

Crazy dwarves. Always loafing on the job.

From Moeraki, our next stop was Dunedin. Founded in 1848 by the Lay Church of Scotland, Dunedin is NZed’s “Scottish” town, it’s also South Island’s second largest city at around 115,000 noses [ed: News flash -- South Island population hits one million!], and site of Otago University, the third major University in the South (the others being Lincoln and Canterbury, both in/around Christchurch).

Like Oamaru, we also got a favorable impression of Dunedin. Whereas Christchurch is oppressively flat, Dunedin sprawls across the hills ringing its harbor (it also hosts the world’s steepest street, Baldwin Street). It has a tidy dowtown and a solid college-town feel — most of the housing stock in the city center looks, ahem, well used. As do most of the cars. But there is a plentiful supply of cafes, bars, restaurants and shops.

Dunedin is also the gateway to the Otago peninsula, a short 20-km spit which shelters the Dunedin harbor. The Otago peninsula plays hosts to another colony of yellow-eyed penguins, as well as a nesting colony of royal albatross. Like the blue penguins, the albatross have been screened from the unwashed public by barbed wire and a conservation society which will gladly give you a peep for for a quarter. Unlike the penguins, the albatross can fly anywhere the please, including over the car park to the albatross attraction.

Best guess is those are non-breeding birds, maybe juveniles, with a mere 2- to 2.5-meter wingspan.

For your eye-straining pleasure, here’s the first, but not last, fuzzy blow-up. Gosh, Anna, think how much easier this would be with a telephoto lens.

To my eye, (royal albratross) is to (gull) as (marathon runner) is to (me), with a kindof normal (though large) gull-like body, but that immense, high aspect ratio wing. Given their epic flightpatterns, that comparison might be pretty close to the truth.

A bit later we took a tootle around the Dunedin botanic garden and came across a fine example of NZ Pigeon.

It’s a beautiful bird, at least 50% larger than the common pigeon. And a horrible flier. It’s not uncommon to locate them in the woods by listening for the crashing noises.

We returned to the Otago peninsula to (finally!) stalk the yellow-eyed penguin. At this rather idyllic beach

the Department of Conservation has set up a hunter’s blind for those on the yellow-eyed penguin stakeout. Besides being quite rare, the yellow-eyed nest well-inshore among the shrubs and foliage, often up to a kilometer from the ocean. They feed during the day and return to their nests in the mid-afternoon. So, if you’re lucky enough to be in the blind at about three in the afternoon, you can hang out for a couple of hours and watch penguins commute home.

Unfortunately, the beach was guarded by quite a few fur seals

which were, er, rather huge. And sort of ill-tempered. And between us and the penguins. Sigh. We did actually see a penguin crossing the beach, about a kilometer away.

So we salved our wounds with a fine snack, and watched three more penguins appear on the beach directly in front of us. While the camera sat in the backpack elsewhere on the beach. Sigh.

Before we left Otago, we also caught this elusive creature on film. Not quite as rare as the others, of course (but quite tasty when medium-rare).

On the way back, we stopped at Oamaru again to take another chance at the yellow-eyed. Much like at Otago, DoC provides a blind overlooking the beach. So we waited.

And our patience was rewarded. What? No, really. There’s a penguin in the picture above.

We saw several penguins

Even saw a group go back out for a little playtime.

After a while we noticed a a few penguins well up on the cliff, apparently waiting for their mates to return.

What’s amazing is that this penguins (who we figure is guarding the nest while their mate feeds) is an easy hundred feet above the beach, up the brushy hillside you see in the picture. It would be a long waddle. I speculated that they could just fly up the hill, but didn’t get many takers for that hypothesis.

Awesome.

(full gallery here)