Dunedin

From Queenstown we drove over to Dunedin. When I say “we drove” I really mean “Lydia drove,” because that’s what she did, all week. The last time I drove was from Seattle to Portland almost a year ago; I would have been willing to try to drive on the wrong side of the road/car on this trip, seeing as how we were often the only car on the road anyway, but her car is a stick and I have a difficult relationship with the stick and in the end I thought it would be a little much to risk driving into a sheep pasture because I was having a hard time shifting with my left hand.

Lyds was a champ, though, and we had a great time on all our drives. The South Island in general is much more rural than the North (GIVE IT UP NORTH ISLAND!) and we drove through gorgeous rolling hills (many of which were, true to stereotype, full of sheep) while hawks soared overhead. We didn’t take any pictures of any of this, of course, because we were too busy eating snacks and talking as fast as we could at top volume on some of the following topics:

–Boys

–Sex

–Boys and sex

–Cheese

–Tube tops

–How awesome New Zealand is

–Candy (oh, okay, fine, “sweets” or “lollies”)

–Boys and candy

–Sex and candy

–Can you believe that our mutual friend is suffering from unrequited love for our other mutual friend? No, me neither. Well, wait till you hear this…

–It sure is cold down here

–What should we have for dinner?

–I feel a little carsick. Well, unbutton your pants and have a mint imperial then.

…among others.

We’d agreed earlier that we were quite keen to see some excellent wildlife on our trip so the morning after we arrived in Dunedin in the pouring down rain and had to go to bed wearing all of our clothes, we promptly headed for the albatross colony at Taiaroa Head.

It wasn’t breeding season so we mostly just saw the chicks, which are HUGE and at this time of year just kind of hang out waiting to be fed massive quantities of regurgitated fish slurry from their devoted parents.

The centre does a really nice job; it’s the only mainland albatross colony in the world (usually they do their thing on remote islands where people can’t get at them) and they’ve had to do a lot of exotic predator eradication, like pretty much every other sanctuary in New Zealand. Rangers go out and check and weigh the chicks every day and if one of the parents dies they’ll hand feed them, too, since each chick needs two parents working full time to feed it. We were interested to learn that after the chick is grown and takes its first flight, the parents are done with it—it has to learn what food looks like and how to catch and eat it by its damn self. It’s rough to be an albatross.

The colony does so well because tourists come to see it—our shorts-wearing-in-the-freezing-cold guide, Grahame, of whom we sadly did not take a picture, said that the government probably wouldn’t pay for the upkeep otherwise. The colony is relatively new, actually; it wasn’t until the late 20s or something that one solitary bird biologist dude started trying to help the birds out and eventually get the land declared as a sanctuary. We were impressed with how they’d balanced the needs of the birds with the tourist accoutrements. We were also impressed at how heavy this stuffed albatross chick was—it’s filled with weights to mimic the actual bird and as you can see, it’s taking both of us to hold it.

It was so gorgeous at Taiaroa Head that when we heard that we could possibly see some little blue penguins (which I’d seen in the Christchurch Antarctic Centre over the summer with my mom) coming up out of the water to their burrows in the cliffs, we decided to stay until sunset and try to see them.

We saw some shags (Californians, think cormorant; South Floridians, think anhinga) coming home to roost on the cliffs.

We’d just read, at the albatross center, about this big crazy North Pacific Gyre, which is basically just a huge patch of plastic garbage about twice the size of Texas floating in the ocean, and killing all the creatures that come into contact with it, and so when we got to the penguin beach we were saddened to see all the plastic crap strewn everywhere. We didn’t think it was litter from people coming to the beach, exactly, just that it had washed up from the sea, probably directly from the aforementioned gyre. Fortunately we had some extra grocery bags in the car and a little time to kill.

After about twenty minutes we had a big full bag of mostly plastic water bottle caps…and that was only after spending a tiny bit of time on a ten-meter stretch of beach. We could have picked up much much more than we did. At this point it was dark and freezing cold and that’s when we happened to notice a sign saying that it was sort of the wrong time of year for penguins and we might not see any. We put our bag of plastic bottle caps in the bin (but what if they just go back out to sea again somehow?) and headed back to the hostel, having seen no penguins, in what would become a trend for the next couple of days.

The next morning we stopped at the Cadbury’s chocolate plant for the factory tour, as you do. This was hilarious from beginning to end, not just because of the hairnets we had to wear, but also because Lydia is English, and she, like every other British person I have met over here, is adamant that the New Zealand Cadbury’s tastes different than the English and not in a good way. (I’ve tasted both and I can’t tell the difference—I prefer Whittaker’s 72%, myself, anyway–but don’t tell the English people that). They didn’t let us take pictures on the tour (proprietary!) but if they had I would be showing you one of this big crazy chocolate waterfall thing where the tour guide made us singsong I LOOOOOOOOVE CHOCOLAAAAAAATE, and there’s Lydia, going I LOOOOOOOOVE English CHOCOLATE made in Birminghaaaaaam under her breath.

We did get lots of free samples though (my favorite is the fruit and nut although we didn’t get any of those. Plenty of the hideous perky nanas though, which we traded with an eight-year old for some Moros), and of course I got to at least pose behind the wheel of a car and pretend like I wasn’t getting chauffered around by a beautiful blonde the whole week.

Hopped up on sugar and feeling slightly bloated, we got lost on the motorway for a while and then headed out for Oamaru.