Blue Penguins

The weather today was miserable, with high winds and lots of rain. We knew it was coming - a cruise ship arrived in Dunedin yesterday, one day early due to the anticipated bad weather. If a ship won't sail in this weather, we sure aren't going outside either!

Luckily, the only thing on our schedule today was a different penguin tour at dusk. So we spent the first 2/3 of the day indoors, reading, napping, watching the New Zealand cooking show "Hunger for the Wild", and eating. Not a bad way to spend a day on vacation :)

The weather did finally start to clear around 5pm, so we made a break for it and rode 3km up the road to the Royal Albatross Center. Not too long after we arrived, it started raining again! But it stopped before we went on a tour to the royal albatross observation deck, where we could see albatross parents incubating their eggs and juveniles playing around, taking flight, soaring around and landing again (landing is not easy in high winds). From there, we continued to a tour of Fort Tairoa, which was originally built as a response to a threat from Russia in the late 1800s.

At 9:15pm (sunset is ~9:30pm) we headed down to the beach to wait for the little blue penguins, which are just 25cm tall and 1kg in weight, to come home from a day of fishing. Unlike the yellow-eyed penguins, the blue penguins travel in groups. We saw a few large groups of penguins reach the beach together, as well as a couple singletons who waited for their companions on the beach before scurrying up to their homes in a pack. They move surprisingly quickly!