Revision

Ok, well Dunedin may not be Edinburgh, but it's cute in its own way. On Sunday we enjoyed the free Dunedin Art Gallery, which included a haunting photography exhibition which focused on scenes in America that most people never see or hear about. Tons of nuclear waste giving off strange blue light from where it's stored in water. Inbred white tigers. Playboy magazine printed in Braille. The Body Farm. A very creepy look into what goes on in the US of A. Makes our country look just a little bit..off... But Kelly and I enjoyed it nonetheless.

We tried to take a tour of the Cadbury factory, but it turns out they don't produce chocolates on the weekends so we wouldn't have been able to see the actual machinery and production process. We were pretty bummed about that, but bought a bunch of chocolate in the gift shop anyway.

That evening, we took a tour of the Otago Peninsula, known for its diverse and rare wildlife. We found a little ad posted on a bulletin board at our hostel offering drives around the Dunedin area by a university student. That's how we met Kahwooi. He's Malaysian but has been in the Dunedin area for over 7 years. He was kind of a funny, dorky guy. Liked to make corny jokes.

We set out at around 7 in the evening and drove the length of the peninsula with a couple of stops for photos. If anywhere near Dunedin resembles Scotland - it's the Otago Peninsula. Steep hills and valleys covered in green grass and dark patches of trees and shrubs. New Zealands' only castle, Larnach Castle, is right in the middle of it. We drove out along the northern coast til we came to the end, about 40km out. At the end there's the only mainland Royal Albatross breeding colony in the Southern Hemisphere. We got out and walked a footpath right to the edge of some great cliffs dropping off to the sea. There were lots of gulls around, and after a few moments of waiting we saw what looked like a pterodactyl flying among them. Seriously, this thing made the gulls look like robins! I think their wingspan is something like 3 meters, and they're so large that they can't really support themselves by flapping but instead depend on the breezes to give them lift. They were huge! Eventually we saw about three gliding around, but couldn't see around the rocks to where their chicks were.

As the sun went down and it began to grow dark we made our way down to a small sheltered beach where a number of other people were waiting. The tip of the peninsula is also home to the worlds smallest penguin, the Little Blue Penguin. They make their nests in tunnels in the hillsides, often displacing rabbits to do so. Every morning the adults swim out to sea in a large group called a raft and gorge all day on small fish, squid, plankton, etc. When night falls they come back to shore and fill up their chicks with their surplus of partially digested fish matter. Yum.

We were among a group of about 30 people waiting silently and watching the water to spot the raft coming into shore. A volunteer from the Department of Conservation used his dim red flashlight to show me a half-grown chick standing just a couple of feet away, peering into the darkness like the rest of us, looking for his parents! He was about 8 inches high, dark blue-black on his back and white on his chest. He was still kind of fuzzy looking, but otherwise could've been an adult. He didn't seem disturbed by our coming within about 10 feet of him. I stepped back and gave Kelly a turn to see, and then we heard whispers behind us and found that the adults had started coming up on shore.

They're funny little things, and didn't seem put off by the presence of so many people scattered around the small beach they were crossing to reach their nests. We could hear the chicks behind us calling to their parents with high-pitched cooings and trills. The DOC volunteers had directed us to stand spaced out so as not to block the penguins paths, and they came in ones and twos winding their ways between us. They stand at about a 45 degree angle to the ground, kind of swaying around a little as they decide which way to go, and take slow, awkward steps over the sand and rocks with their little wings held out for balance. Very deliberate in their movements.

This whole operation only took about 20 minutes. We were all suspended in silence as the penguins made their way up to their nests. Then everyone just kind of drifted off, back to cars left parked up the road.

So Dunedin isn't really so bad, after all. :)