Oct 27, Monday (Labor Day in N.Z.) To Dunedin

Awoke to sunshine in Timaru. Denise wanted to check out an eclectic café for breakfast, I wanted a brewery tour. Unfortunately, the town remained firmly asleep. Got to the closed café, saw it opened in ½ hour, walked the deserted nearby streets in the bright morning sun to pass the time.

Found the café to be one of the few places open on our return, but they were adding a 15% surcharge to compensate for being open on a holiday. Apparently common practice. The diner was all 70’s chic, but the food adequate. Not worth the $50 bucks.

Drove back up the street to find the brewery locked tight, barbed wire capped gates across the entrance. I guess it was not to be. Turned around and got back on the “highway” heading south.

More bikes making an appearance on this holiday weekend. Still not much faster on this main road than the accepted 110kph. But good to see fellow riders all the same.

Holiday traffic also was making itself known. Long lines, held up by one driver taking the scenic cruise, oblivious to those piling up behind him. The camper, while I’m impressed at it’s generally good road manners, simply doesn’t have to pickup to accelerate from 55 to 70 in the small gaps between oncoming traffic. I simply allow others to pass. Oh well, it’s a pretty drive.

Stopped to see Oamaru’s blue penguin colony, they have a pretty successful breeding program going on here, almost 500 birds. These tiny brilliant blue penguins nightly return to their carefully placed and crafted breeding boxes,

making for quite a spectacle as they all wobble ashore in the last two hours of daylight. They fish all day, covering up to 70kms, then return to incubate their young.

Since we’d arrived midmorning, there was no parade for us, but a guide took us on a boardwalk running through the colony, then into a quiet house, where breeding boxes has been built into the sides. They had viewing glass tops with an orange sodium light(invisible to penguins, apparently) so you could look directly down into the nest and see the parent keeping the eggs/hatchling warm. Tiny birds, even the adults are no bigger than both my fists.

The grandstand where the penguins come ashore…

Took the short cliffside walk, some interesting pillow lava in the sides, and some sparkly textbook conglomerate boulders….

Hopped back in the van, continued heading south. The Moeraki boulders were our next stop, huge round hollow rocks that look like they were tossed there in the middle of a sandy beach from space. They apparently are remnants of slow-rising lava tubes interacting with the mineral rich earth, creating porous crystalline centers around which the denser lava cooled. As the hillside wears away, these round spheres are exposed, just the right density to remain in the surf zone. Odd. There were supposedly many more, but the ones small enough to be lifted were stolen by souvenir hunters.

Reached Dunedin, the empty campsite a huge difference for the holiday campers the night before according to the manager. Pretty campsite, nestled against walking trails climbing the slopes of the small valley we were in, a little brook tumbling by just out the rear doors.

It’d been a long day of driving, the manager mentioned there were glowworms along the steep trailsides of the footpaths behind the camp if we were up for a walk in the dark.

Trying the low light camera setting….

Sorry, although we saw several of the little green points of light, the camera was unable to capture any on film.

Back to the van, tomorrow was to be a big day in Dunedin.