Road Trip & Penguins

We set off at lunchtime towards Oamaru. To keep the child in Ben occupied for the journey, we played various games including 'I spy', 'Who am I' and, newly invented for the trip, 'Guess the Population'! The aim of the game was to (as you can probably guess) correctly guess the population of the small towns that we were driving through before checking the answer in a Lonely Planet guide. Some towns, however, were too small to be in the book!

We checked into our hostel (after Kate had successfully managed to do a 3-point turn in the smallest of spaces while we tried to park the car!)

That night we boarded the Penguin Express and went to see some rare Yellow Eyed Penguins. We paid extra and got taken on a 'close up' tour. We certainly weren't expecting how close we got! We were walking along a path and came across a family of penguins (2 adults and 2 juveniles). We stood there for about 20 minutes watching the penguins. They didn't seem bothered that we were watching them. They then walked off down the cliff. It was amazing that we managed to get so close to them!

We then walked up to the cliff and joined the rest of the bus who had only seen them from a distance.

We carried on the trip and drove to a spot to see some Little Blue Penguins. It was dark by the time we arrived at the spot and we had to sit on a wooden stand and wait for them to come in from the water, re-waterproof their feathers and walk up the cliff in front of us. It was funny to see them pause at the road before one or two brave ones would lead the walk across!

We went back to the hostel extremely happy that we'd been so close to the penguins!