South Island Day 15: Waiting For Nature

If you go to Oamaru you can either pay $20 to go watch some blue penguins or rock up to a DoC hide at Bushy Beach to watch the rare yellow eyed penguins for free from a distance. I've paid to see penguins before and Nat and Shane didn't want to part with cash so we drove over to Bushy Beach to wait for them. We were told the best time was between 6pm and 9pm but here's the thing about penguins; they don't wear watches. Its not like they hang around in the shallows and as soon as 6 o' clock rolls around they start wandering up the beach, stopping to pose for photographs on the way.

Rather You Than Me, Mate

Eventually they did start coming out of the water but the hide really is quite a way from the penguins. What you want to happen is for them to come onto the piece of beach closest to you wearing a red and white pinstripe jacket, do a little penguin dance to a barbershop quartet song and exit stage left waving a top hat and cane. Cleary that's not going to happen unless you stocked up on the shrooms before you got to Oamaru, they come out of the water and make a break for the cliffs leaving you with some photos dots on a beach. Fortunately there was a guy hanging around called Colin who was a self proclaimed "penguin obsessive" and had brought some spare binoculars for everyone to use. He'd also brought an egg to show everyone the size of them, I'm several times the size of a yellow eyed penguin and I wouldn't wanna squeeze that out of any part of me.

And If You Look Closely You Can See A Dot...

We spent a couple of hours there staring at the beach before heading back to town. Apparently, somewhere near the expensive tourist shit you can watch the blue penguins cross the road for free but we'd gotten over sitting around waiting for penguins so we carried on heading north. We'd decided to take a small detour towards Lake Tekapo just to check it out the following day instead of just missioning it to Christchurch because lets face it, you really don't need more than a couple of nights in Christchurch unless you really really like art galleries and museums and catherdrals.

Which we don't. The heathens we are.

written by

Koala Bear on February 17, 2009 from Oamaru, New Zealand

from the travel blog: Tiny Little NZ Road Trip

tagged RoadTrip, LovinIt and SouthIsland

Send a Compliment

comment on this...