First off, I'm a lot less stressed than the last post. So far, everything is working out fine with the transportation. Dunedin (pronounced duh-need-in) turned out to be a really cool town. It used to be an important port town but when the panama canal opened it became significantly less important. Now it is mainly a university town with everyone there having something to do with the school.
Have to say that every chocolate tour i have been on has been somewhat of a let down. Its usually just what you expect it to be. A lot of metal things doing their magic hidden behind all of their panels...and not loads of free chocolate. But the Cadbury chocolate factory tour in dunedin has been the best one by far. First, you start off with free chocolate, then start the tour of the factory. Yeah, there are still heaps of machines and things you can't see, but they make it as fun as possible. It ends with a one ton chocolate fall, which serves no purpose at all but to look cool. That's the willy wonka style i'm looking for.
Later that day I went on the twilight penguin adventure tour. I'm not sure exactly why its called "twilight" because we left at three in the afternoon and the sun was still up when we got back to the hostel. Along the way it stops at a bird colony and we saw a few royal albatross flying around. I've never seen one before and i couldn't believe how big it was. It has a wingspan of 3 meters (10 feet!!) Imagine a seagull crossbred with a teradactyl...thats an albatross. Huge.
I had more fun at the penguin reserve than i would like to admit. The end goal was to see yellow eyed penguins, the rarest penguins in the world. Along the way there was a miniature shire made of little houses. Those are for the blue penguins; they're about 20 cm tall...little tiny guys that live in little tiny homes on the hillside. We saw one of them inside his home, and he stood there looking out at us. Something about penguins just makes you laugh. Then we went into bunkers that felt like they were straight out of wwII. That's were you can view the yellow eyed ones. From the boxes dug in the ground we were probably only a few feet away from them. They were cool, but didn't walk around at all. Thats the comedic part of penguins so i spent most of my time watching little duck chicks whizzing around a small pond as they learned how to swim. they were much more entertaining.
Since I'm saving the last two hours remaining on my bus pass, I decided to hitch from dunedin to omaru. I got a ride to a hitching spot from Dione, a girl from L.A. Along the way we stopped at "the world's steepest street." Its not like the one in san francisco that zigzags its way up to the top. This is just a hugely steep neighborhood road that goes straight up a mountain. It was difficult to capture it on camera, so you'll have to take my word for it.
After Dione dropped me off, I had a ride in under ten minutes with a semi-retired man named Lawrence. His job: a sheep shearing coach. yep, he coaches competitors to win the golden shears. We had some good talks about traveling and the sheep shearing competitions and in a few hours he dropped me off at omaru. Soon I'm going to go see a whole colony of little blue penguins, so i'm actually really excited. I hear their interactions with the seals are really funny.
Tomorrow I'm off to Timaru. I forgot what was there, but i'll be there for a night. Then its christchurch and surrounding areas until the 20 oct.
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