We Done A Din

So who’s heard of Dunedin then? Hands up. Well neither had I before we started studying our route from Milford Sound to Christchurch. It turns out to be the second biggest city on the south island. And as per Invercargill there was a strong Scottish heritage there. We had made good progress that morning and arrived at Dunedin before lunch to have a stroll round the place. There were a number of different things to see, with no one outstanding place to visit. There is a large, ornate train station, which is still in use and had a number of other tourists milling around it. There were also a couple of people who had graduated from university, and they all looked very chilly in the morning breeze.

We saw The Octagon, which is a set of roads set out in an octagon with two main roads passing through the middle, and according to the guidebooks this was THE place to be. It was alright. Nothing spectacular, and I think that both me and James were expecting something a bit more from it, as it was a pretty small octagon in actuality. You could probably throw a haggis from one side to the other. Plus it was very overcast and grey so it all seemed a bit “Englandy” and miserable. The Chinese Gardens looked nice though……from the outside. We baulked at the $9 entrance fee and went back to the octagon. We found the Public Art Gallery and spent some time examining a collection of religious art, twenty upside-down radio alarm clocks with birds on them all going off simultaneously and a small car radio with tiny tv screen that had a looped video of a rock group on it and 3 rocks place on top (which I can only assume wouldn’t be “art” without the 3 rocks) amongst other things. We were nearly roped into a guided tour around one of the exhibitions but we managed to make our excuses (that we were short on time), get stuck in the lift and then exit through the giftshop.

James "enjoying" the art

And that was Dunedin. Not much else for us to do, so we headed back to the campervan to get out of the city and have lunch. We ended up parking outside someone’s house as we couldn’t find a good spot along the main road and we were both desperately hungry. It seemed like she didn’t mind though, as she returned from the shops, parked up behind us, looked into the van to see us eating our sandwiches and went inside her house without so much as a second glance. As we looked at the map and our destination of Oamaru, we noticed another place that may be of interest to us. Not too far down the coast was Shag Point, where apparently you could see seals and penguins. After our success the day before we decided that we should give it a go and see what could see there. We parked up and walked the short trail to the edge of the cliffs and saw almost straight away a couple of seals basking in the……drizzle. We snapped away and then looked around for any penguins. There weren’t any around but there was another short trail to get to the actual Shag Point and closer to where the penguins would be. As I got closer to the information boards at the end of the trail I noticed something nearby. It was a big fat seal, having a snooze right by the path. As I approached he looked up at me and then lowered his head back into the tufts of grass. He was not bothered in any way by my presence. James joined me shortly and we revelled at how close we could get to the sleeping giant. His mate was further down towards the water, but was more interested in finding a good spot for a lay down. When the big fella yawned and showed his teeth we knew not to get too close to him…just in case.

Out on the rocks there were a load of shags milling around, but not really doing much, so we left them to it and went in search of the penguins. Unfortunately we didn’t see any, but we weren’t too disheartened; the day had already been a success!

Look! A seal!

When we arrived at the Oamaru campsite, the young girl behind the counter advised me that there were two sets of penguins we could see just out of town. We had picked Oamaru because of this reason, but to see the blue penguins would cost us $25 each, so we opted for the yellow-eyed penguins which would cost us zip. I guess you get what you pay for. Half an hour stood on the side of a chilly cliff with about 30 other tourists/locals all keen to catch a glimpse of the little creatures, and nothing. The time was right, but they just weren’t coming ashore for some reason. So we headed back to the campsite, parked up, plugged in and blogged out.