Otago peninsula

Day 32

Dunedin and Otago Peninsula

Unfortunaltey Erin didn't feel well and called Hamish and Debbie to ask to pick her up from the town where she was staying with her boyfriend. It meant just us and Sam were going to Otago peninsula and Hamish was explaining me the route.

While Juli was playing guitar hero with Debbie and Sam, of course, how could he miss it! :DD

We decide to see a bit of a city and found it pretty boring and small.


One hour was enough to visit City Hall, chruch, railway station and theatre.


We came back to the house, had lunch and together with Sam headed to the peninsula, with a hope to see some wild life.

First stop San Fly bay, where Hamish told us we can see sea lions and if we are very lucky, we can see unique species yeallo eyed penguins.

We arrived, parked the car and went to the beach. The way was going down the hill...which afterwards we would need to go up, oh my God! The wind was blowing and the temperature was a bit chilly.


Finally we have reached the beach and saw sea lions all over it, sleeping without any movement, they seemed to be big black bags rather then wild animals :-D



After taking some pictures with sea lions, we saw people siting on the beach waiting for something. Getting closer we saw a yellow eyed peinguin geting out of the water and going to sand dunes, where they were nesting.

Penguins were climbing up to their nests, while sea lions got more active and started to make some noises and even to fight.


Then a girl from Department of conservation has aproached us and told us to stay away from penguins, since we can scare them and they never will nest again on this beach. She said we have to keep at least 200 m from penguins and better if we go to the observation place, a woden house, where we can watch penguins and they can not see us. We went there, didn't see any penguins but saw lots of seals instead, chilling on the beach.


Ok, fist mission was succesfully acomplished and now we went to Taiaroa head, where we saw some albatros flying and next and the last stop was Pilot beach, where we were hoping to see blue penguins.


Llegaba We were told that penguins are coming at 21.30 every day. So we have arrived at 21.00 and saw about 10 people waiting on the beach for the penguins. At 21:25 we started to worry that penguins were not coming anymore, but exactly at 21.30 we saw many spashes on the water, they were coming! Penguins got out of the water, around 50 of them or more and started to climb the hill, where all the people were watching them and waiting to see them closer. Little animals were coming out of the bush and just walking between people with no problem. They were using rabbits holes as nests, and there were lots of rabbits around, we saw them when we arrived to the beach.

Small and clumsy they were everywhere among us, walking with small steps and making bird noises :-D


It looked like the day was succesfully finished, we saw everything :-D

We got back to the house and went to bed very soon, since next day it was an important match at 6.30 in the morning, Barça-Madrid! :D