Pinguin Roadtrip

We initially agreed with our winegrowing employer that we would stop working in the vineyard a week before the cherry season started. We used this week to do a road trip along the southern east coast of the South Island. As the name of the post suggests, our goal for the road trip was to see penguins. The best and probably most famous place for this is Oamaru.

So after the last day of work we drove to Oamaru (approx. 2.5 hours) and went straight to a beach where yellow-eyed penguins live. Yellow-eyed penguins are the rarest penguins in the world and are critically endangered. There are only a few thousand left in the world. They are very shy and come out of the water just before sunset. That's why beaches where yellow-eyed penguins live are closed to visitors from 3 p.m., but luckily there are viewing platforms. When we arrived at the viewing platform there was already a penguin on the beach and within an hour another 3 followed him. Afterwards we drove to another bay where you can see blue penguins. These are much smaller, less shy and only come out of the water after sunset. Here too we found what we were looking for and saw some blue penguins. Unfortunately there were a lot of other tourists there and we moved on straight away.

The next day we went to Dunedin and Otago Peninsula (peninsula for Dunedin). Here we looked at some beautiful bays/beaches. In our search for penguins, we came across sea lions on almost every beach. They are relatively large and also quite aggressive (they want to defend their territory on land). They are also said to be quite playful in the water. Of course, Tobi managed to get chased by one for a moment, but luckily they aren't that fast, so you can just run away from them. On our onward journey we stopped at Tunnel Beach in Dunedin and here we met sea lions again.

From Dunedin we then continued to the Catlins . The Catlins are the southern end of the South Island and have beautiful white beaches, lots of rainforest and some waterfalls. Unfortunately the weather wasn't so good, otherwise we would have definitely gone into the sea. But we were really lucky again with the penguins and were able to see two yellow-eyed penguins quite close again in another bay. Because of the bad weather we only looked at a few waterfalls and bays in the Catlins and then continued back towards Queenstown via Invercargill.

The Queenstown, Wanaka, Cromwell region is known for its good weather, which is why so much fruit is grown here. As soon as we were near Queenstown, the weather was good again and we camped at Lake Wakatipu (lake right near Queenstown). The next day we went to a ski resort and hiked to the glacial lake Lake Alta. In the afternoon we went back to Cromwell because training for our job on the cherry orchard started the next day.