Right after the lovely night at Mt. Cook camp site we head on to a city called Oamaru.
One special thing we saw on the way there was the "Elephant Rocks".
Oamaru has historical area which all the people there wears traditional clothing (how touristic...) and all the buildings there kept exactly as it was.
Oamaru's public gardens:
Oamaru offers lots of things to eat and taste :
An old whiskey factory that offers tastings (Sarit is still not a whiskey fan),
famous cheese factory that offers tastings (Sarit is still a cheese fan),
A traditional dutch bakery with a half Jewish baker that offers variety of pies and breads (Sarit has become a dutch bread & pie fan).
Oamaru also offers penguin observations.
First we went to see the yellow eye penguin colony.
We spent an hour there and eventually saw only
2 penguins (kissing, but still only 2).
After that we went to the blue penguin colony (to the free observation area of course, who wants to pay 40 dollars after seeing only 2 at the last place?).
We waited and waited, the sunset arrived, and finally few small images of penguins arrived from the sea.
We had more luck this time, we saw about 20 penguins from all ages, walking and talking to each other. It was really dark and penguins don't like camera's flash so we only have lousy pictures.
We must say, South America has much more to offer in the penguin market.
On the way to Dunedin we had few more stops :
The Moeraki boulders, a rounded shapes rocks located on one of New Zealand's coasts,
The rock can also function as morning exercise tool:
and a few more penguins & seals observations (again, after visiting South America, the sights were not very impressive).
Finally we arrived to Dunedin.
Well, Dunedin is a big city, with traffic, buses, streetlights and big supermarkets, cafes, restaurants and more.
Beside walking in the city streets and enjoying the noise we had 2 tours at different factories:
A chocolate factory - Cadbury, which was nice, but Sarit was very disappointed from the amount of the free chocolate for tasting (Sarit: "The other group we saw on the way got chocolate egg, and we didn't!").
The other factory is actually a beer brewery called Speight's, which is the most famous beer of the south island. The tour was nice but the real highlight of it was the last 30 minutes. "Drink all you can" of their 6 brands of beer! you even pour your own beer from the bar (Roi: "After the third glass, who remembers the stupid chocolate egg?"). We left the brewery drunk and happy.
The following day we arrived to a place called Middlemarch. This was our base camp for the bicycle trip we did the next day, from a town called Hyde to other town called Ranfurly.
The trip goes along an old train trail which was renovated (the rails were removed, which makes the trail a perfect mountain bikes track, mostly flat and wide).
We ride just 1 day out of the 5 days to complete the entire train trail.
The trip was great! that include riding over bridges and through a tunnel in the mountain, the weather was great and the views were lovely. We really enjoyed that 32km of riding.
In our next visit to New Zealand we'll do the whole 5 days trip.
What can be more relaxing and muscles pain killer after a long day of riding than spending the night in a car? If you ever wondered how 2 people can sleep in 1 car, laying down flat in 180 degrees here is a picture to emphasis that:
The next stop was the Otago peninsula to view Albert the Albatross. For those who doesn't know what Albatross is, it's a wide wing bird, very similar to other seabirds but much bigger. Like any other New Zealand animal attraction you sit / stand for an hour and eventually see 1 or 2 animals. That was the case with Albert. Luckily we didn't pay to enter the observation site but just stood near the surrounding fence. Here is a "Been there, done that" picture of the event:
Our next stop was the Catlins area, but that's for another blog post...
B.T.W. : Mom (Dalia), Happy birthday!!!
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