Up the East Coast

We spent the night in Dunedin, a beautiful little university city with a lot of British influence. Dunedin is the home of one of the South Island’s most tempting attractions: Cadbury’s Chocolate Factory. It was just like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory except instead of Oompa Loompas, they use Kiwis (also from a tiny island in the middle of nowhere). Below is a picture of the front of the factory (no cameras were allowed inside to protect top secret chocolate making techniques, we really should not even be talking about it)!

Before we went in, we had to cover our hair – all of it.
Sufficiently stuffed with chocolate, we continued north. We stopped at Shag Point to check out some more New Zealand Fur Seals.

From there, we headed up to Oamaru to spend Thursday night, a city whose main claim to fame are the hundreds of penguins that spend the night there (a la Phillip Island in Australia Valerie and Steve C.). We watched the little (10” tall) blue penguins swim ashore and (very tentatively) make their way up the beach and into the bushes. They do this every night, but weren’t very good at it. It took some of them about an hour to make the fifty-yard trip. We were not allowed to photograph the penguins coming ashore, but we snapped a shot of these little guys on the road on our way home. They were lost.

From Oamaru we drove to Christchurch on a very rainy Friday. We took the scenic route but could not see much because of the rain. This is what cancelled our plans to go to Mt. Cook. We saw it from the West Coast so we aren't too stressed. We will spend the weekend exploring Christchurch before heading north early Monday!