I hope that isn't why you came here.

It's been a few days since I've updated, due in no small part to both having things to do and internet costing money.

Josh and I left Queenstown on Sunday I think. We drove a few hours to Dunedin on the East coast. There were a few things drawing us there, not the least of which being the Otago Peninsula where you can see seals, sea lions, albatrosses, yellow eyed and blue penguins. Sunday night we toured around town a bit, but everything was closed pretty early. We found only a very few restaurants open past 7, and three of them were the same Thai chain - all with different prices! It was drizzling most of the night, but started raining fairly hard by the time we left.

Monday, the weather was still quite rainy, so we started the day off with a Cadbury Confectionaries Ltd. factory tour. It was billed as being almost Wonka-ish and having a two story chocolate waterfall. Overall, though, it was a fairly boring factory tour, and the chocolate waterfall was activated by button and lasted all of thirty seconds. Nothing was very Wonka-ish other than the purple theme throughout the factory. With the rain still falling pretty hard, Josh and I worried that Dunedin was just a very rainy city.

In hopes the weather would clear up, we prolonged Otago for a few hours to do some shopping in town. Josh needed a sweater and I was hoping to replace a book I lost - one I bought a day before I left on my trip specifically so I'd have something long to read. By the way, I'm down to my last book, part one of Maus, and I don't think it will last long. Josh found a sweater eventually, and I couldn't find my book. Books are expensive here, though. I think it cost me $7 in the States, and the same format of a different book by the same author was almost $30 here. It would be nice to have something to read, though.

The weather had done nothing but get worse. The rain was coming down pretty hard, but we needed to make Otago and didn't want to stay another night if we had to, especially since the weather forecast didn't look promising. On our way there, parts of the road were flooded, the bay looked very high, and some waves were almost breaking onto the road. The wind was pretty intense, and the bay was brown from all the water running off the mountain. Hopefully the pictures come out well. We got to the tip where the albatrosses are, and entrance to the Royal Albatross Center was about $35 and another $20 or so for the penguin center. We were hoping to be able to walk to them, but the weather was too bad and the centers were closing, so we had to take the long drive back the peninsula with no reward other than some weather shots.

Going home we had barely enough time to make dinner before we headed out again, this time to Speight's Brewery for their tour. That was much more interesting than the Cadbury tour. Our tour guide seemed a bit like an old country Scotsman - we even saw him drinking some before the tour. He was very informative and Speights seemed like an interesting place. I believe it's the only gravity brewery in the Southern Hemisphere and one of ten in the world. They had vats for fermentation I believe that are the only operating ones in the world, and one of two sets if the other brewery hadn't destroyed theirs yet. Also, they have fully copper kettles, which is pretty rare, but I don't remember how rare. I also learned that beer comes not jut in can, beer, and keg, but also in a tanker which is unpasteurized and has no added preservatives. Because of that, it has to be consumed quickly, and because it is a large volume, very few places have tanker beer. The bar below the brewery did, though, and I thought it tasted a little cleaner and crisper.

Tuesday, for some reason, as we were leaving Dunedin, the sun was shining and the skies were blue. Great weather for our trip through the Catlains. We stopped at Nugget Point, where there's an old lighthouse and great views. On the walk there is Roaring bay where seals, penguins and sea lions are supposed to rest, but we didn't see any. Next we stopped at Jack's Blowhole - a giant crevasse 200 meters from the ocean that is connected to the ocean by a cave network so the waves still crash through a hundred or so meters below the observation platform. I think there was another stop, but I can't remember what it was right now. We ended up in Curio Bay for the night. The backpacker there was just like an awesome, small beach house, and the owners were only there to pick up the money. It was just a girl from Belgium, Josh and me. Josh and I stopped at the petrified forest quick as we got there right at sunset when the yellow-eyed penguins come in. I got some pictures of one of the two we saw, but as it was really dark, I'm not entirely sure how the picture came out. There were blue penguins outside of the backpacker, but I could just hear them. By the time the fog rolled out and the moon was bright, they seemed to have left. Dolphins are also in the bay, but no sightings were made.

Wednesday, we left Curio Bay and made our way to Invercargill, supposedly the worst town in NZ, the basis of the Rolling Stones' Paint it Black, and, according to them, the "arsehole" of the world. We were just stopping for groceries, to book a backpacker on Stewart Island and to get food. Walking around downtown all we could find were cafes that were closing or had hardly any food left, Subway and Hell's Pizza - a good pizza chain in NZ. We ended up at Hell's before driving to Bluff, the port of call for Stewart Island. We got in at sunset and relaxed for the night.

Today we went to the info center to find some trails and the woman was going through the trails on a map and pointing out parts that had fallen into the ocean, effectively closing the tracks. When she was done, there was a solitary track left, and it sounded like it took about two hours at a pretty casual pace. We felt a bit disheartened about paying $100 for the boat to and from Stewart Island to just do a two hour hike, but we found a fairly cheap water taxi to Ulva Island which is in the inlet to Stewart Island and took a hike there for about three and a half hours. There are no mammals or natural predators there for the birds, so they are pretty accessible. The Waka are flightless and just meandered around Josh and me for a while at one stop. We also saw a few other species including the rare Saddleback/Tieke. I think I saw all of the following: Brown Creeper/Pipipi, Stewart Island Robin/Toutouwai, Rifleman/Titi pounamu, Grey Warbler/Riroriro, parakeets/Kakariki, Bellbird/Korimako, and the Fantail/Piwakawaka which is all but a few birds on the island. It's a little hard to tell as I wasn't trying to categorize them when I was there as I thought there were fewer species on the island, but looking back, I think I saw all of those.

Tonight looks to be some relaxing time, and tomorrow we take the only walk open on the island before ferrying back to Bluff and driving back to Queenstown.