Currently back home!
Today we dropped by the Moeraki Boulders on the way down to Dunedin. These spherical boulders on Koekohe beach were formed, according to scientists, around 60 million years ago from mudstone cementation and have been gradually exposed from coastal erosion. The larger boulders are believed to have taken 4 million years to grow.
Maori legends tell of a shipwrecked canoe, the Arai-te-uru, and the debris and contents of it washed ashore and became the boulders that we see today.
We stayed in Geraldine last night and then drove down to Oamaru, with a lunch stop at Timaru.
In the evening we went to the Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony to see some penguins coming ashore at dusk. These blue penguins are the smallest in the world, at around 30cm tall.
We weren’t allowed to take any photos because the clicking and flashing would scare them off. Also, they didn’t start coming ashore till it got dark, so it would have been very difficult to get some shots of them anyhow. We did however see some sea lions lounging around, right in the path of the penguins. Luckily this type of sea lion did not feed off the penguins so they were safe!
The penguins leave around 3AM in the morning and then return from around 9PM. They swim out to feed and travel a distance of around 50km.
When they return to the shore they meet up with other penguins and form a ‘raft’ – this is a new collective noun we learnt! Then they come in together in small groups – apparently this helps them to navigate their way back to their particular shoreline.
They have eggs or young chicks waiting for them in their nests – we heard the chicks calling impatiently for their parent – they were waiting for their regurgitated feast!
Exciting day today – for months now I have been looking forward to seeing my friend Rhiannon. We trained together in the UK and then she came out to visit my friend Jo and I when we worked in New Zealand 20 years ago and she’s stayed ever since!
She came and found us at the holiday park and navigated us to Sumner Beach. That area had been cut off during the 2011 earthquake. There are still some houses perched up on the cliff that look very precarious.
We had a lovely lunch at the cafe on the beach and shared a few hours catching up together. Last time we met up was when we were in Christchurch 6 years ago – Rhiannon says Sam hasn’t changed, just got taller, but Martha of course is so very different from her 11 month self!!
We’ll look forward to seeing Rhiannon again when we return to Christchurch at the end of the month.
We left Australia yesterday and flew to Christchurch in New Zealand.
We arrived in the early hours so caught up on some sleep this morning and then went in to Christchurch city centre in the afternoon.
We were last here in February 2014 and it was interesting to see how the city had changed. There was some building progress on the Cathedral, which was heavily damaged in the 2011 earthquake.
Around the corner from the Transitional Cathedral (made out of cardboard) was a temporary art installation called “185 Empty Chairs”, with each chair representing someone who had lost their life in the earthquake. It was very moving to see the chairs and the list of names there, especially as I knew one of them. I had the pleasure of meeting RB when he visited a friend of mine back in Skipton. May he rest in peace.
