recap one: dunedin

Holy crap. Ok sorry for the lack of blogging. I had midterms at the end of March. Anyway, I've done a metric tonne of traveling in the past month, so bare with me.

DUNEDIN

Our closest kiwi friend, Hamish, lives in the beautiful city of Dunedin, which is about four hours south of Christchurch. So Me, him, Kathleen and Alex took a weekend trip to stay stay with him mum and search for some coastal wildlife.

side note: Hamish is a VERY popular name here. Scottish origin. It's pronounced hAmish, not Hamish like a ham. Kathleen and I didn't figure this one out til after a month of hanging out with him. He thought it was just our accent....

anyways, Here's us on the way down!

Our first stop was to the steepest street in the world, which was quite steep. We found a ton of super balls in the bushes on the way, which was fun. There was no way in hell our beautiful corona was going to make it to the top, but people actually live up and down the street. Hamish's mum told us that a few years back, two drunks boys took their wheel barrels to the top so they can race...which ended up fatal....but our superball race was a success!!!!

Here's me searching hard for super balls in the brush.
Ok! so next stop was Cad bury world!!!!! Since we went on a weekend, the factory was closed so nothing was in action. I was choking on my chewy banana bar for the half the tour...all and all it wasn't the chocolate lovers dream, but they did have one ton of chocolate pour down this tunnel in three seconds...neat.

ONWARDS!! We then twisted and turned our way around the Dunedin peninsula to the ALBATROSS AREA!!! THEY'RE HUGE!!! The view from the peninsula was gorgeous, and was infested with seals.

Side note: kiwis pronounce peninsula like penichula.

Hamish's dad is a well known entomologist/ecologist of New Zealand, so Hamish picked up a few field techniques which came in handy. He found a blue penguin nest that was in a ditch covered by brush. So one at a time, we all poked our head down into the brush to come 2 feet away from blue penguins. very cool. We then we're greeted by mister beautiful!!!!

We then made our way to sand fly dune on the peninsula in search of yellow penguins. We attempted to arrive at the dune at dusk to watch the yellow penguins come in from feeding. We ended up doing army crawls in order to spy on them!

Here's us in action. ooohhh do we look like scientist or what!

look at them heads!

We ended the day with a wonderful home cooked meal from Hamish's mum. It was soooooo nice to have good food for once.

The next day, we went to the Speight's, the largest brewery in New Zealand.

After this trip, I can honestly say Dunedin is my favorite place yet. It has alot more character than Christchurch with more Scottish heritage than English. AND! here's our Corona in front of the famous apartment from the kiwi movie, Scarfies.

Same house: http://www.nzfilm.co.nz/FilmCatalogue/Films/Scarfies.aspx