Where the Penguins Return at Sunset
There are rules to road / camping trip, even or maybe especially if you're in a foreign country.
1. Personal hygiene is not a priority. When you do shower, they charge extra for hot water and you're just going to be pulling on the same dirty jeans and well-worn polar fleece. As long as birds are not dropping dead around out of mid-air from the stench, we're all good.
2. You will wake up at dawn, you will go to sleep when it's dark. But because we were fairly far south right around their summer solstice, this is about an 18-20 hour period.
3. Only give the driver directions if he doesn't know where he's going. If he's seen the sign and knows which turn to take, you're nagging. And pointing out the little white crosses on the bad corners doesn't really help anyone.
The morning of the second day, we woke up to the sound of rain on the metal roof. And it's happy sound, a sample-me-for-a-disco-hit kind of sound, until you realize that you've got to go out into it. I wanted to get out and stretch my legs, so I backtracked us north to Geraldine and the Peel Forest Park Scenic Reserve (which the guidebooks told me was a good example of a podocarp forest). Dean admired how tidy the farms were through this region. The fences all beautifully maintained, each farm with a rock wall marking their driveways up to the main house, the macrocarpa (aka Monterey Cypress) hedges that were carefully trimmed into 20 foot high squared blocks for wind breaks. (I would have loved to have seen the trimming machine that topped and tailed those hedges.) Farms in the American West tend to be a little messy, a little makeshift. Haphazard fences, equipment lying about. But here they were beautiful from the road at least.
This was also our first introduction to the New Zealand domestic herds of deer. You pass a pasture of sheep, you pass a pasture of cows, you pass a pasture full of small reddish deer. And in the butcheries you find venison.
Closeups of crown ferns.
Dean standing, wet, cold and a bit grim, in front of Acland Falls in the middle of the stream / trail.
Our final destination for the evening was a town on the east side of the south island of New Zealand (just below the Waitaki River which divides the Canterbury and Otago regions) where the penguins come home at sunset. (It sounds so romantic, doesn't it?)
And not just one kind of penguin, but two of them — the blue penguin, the smallest penguin in the world, and the yellow eyed penguin, the rarest. So, even though we hadn't driven that far on good roads — the road between ChristChurch and Dunedin being the most main-highway-ish section of asphalt in the South Island, we ended up in Oamaru for the second night of the trip. Unfortunately to see the blue penguin, you have to pay money to the "Blue Penguin Colony Centre" and it promised to be the worst form of crowd control possible, but I let myself be talked into it because it was penguins. I've never seen penguins come in from the sea. We ended up on the package tour, on the bus with Bruce, that included a stop at the yellow-eyed penguin colony up the road at Bushy Beach. Now Bruce didn't instill a lot of confidence because every time he noticed me, he said, you're not on the right bus, you're with the Dutch tour, right? Which by the 4th time he asked it, I'm thinking... WTF? But even if we all suspected that Bruce was drunk, he had a good soul, acting as a free taxi service for the family with children that had hiked all the way out to the beach and were too tired to hike back. He took care of the lost and tired tourists as best as he could while juggling two slightly offset bus loads of paying customers.
Now, I didn't have much hope for the yellow-eyed penguin sighting. The guidebooks play it down, they're very rare. But we ended up with a naturalist that took us right down the cliff to where she had a crate set up that the penguins used for nesting. She had a penguin and its chick in a box for me.
There were more penguins up the cliff singing to each other and their mates out at sea. There were penguins rolling around in the surf.
You will notice however that there are no pictures of the blue penguin or their colony. One reason is that it was dark by the time the blue penguins come in en-mass. It was after sunset with a thick cloud cover, so you're not going to get a long reflective dusk. They come into land in large groups of 25-50 called "rafts" because they come in a tight bunch, like logs tied together as a raft, with just their heads sticking up, looking remarkably duck like. The penguins bunch up on the beach and then sprint across the road to their burrows in the bushes beyond. But the blue penguin organization sells about a 100-200 tickets a night, shoves you all in a big grandstand about 20 yards away and gives a young lady a microphone so that she can yell at you to be quiet and not take pictures because the click of the camera will upset the delicate penguins. Meanwhile about half the crowd doesn't speak English, so they're ignoring her and just talking away and other people are yelling at them to pay attention to her and shut the f--- up. Meanwhile the blue penguins only stand erect when they're massing on the beach trying to build up the courage to make a run up and over to their burrows. They run doubled over, with their upper flippers helping them scurry along. Unfortunately, looking very very rat like. A group of 50 rat-like things sprinting up at you... Not endearing.
There's a whole Wikipedia entry here if you want to see pictures. However, the pictures they have on that page are pictures of blue penguins in a zoo. We saw blue penguins later in ChristChurch in an aquarium and blue penguins in captivity were much much fatter than these penguins coming in from the wild.
