Observation trenches.

We were greeted back to the ship by this fellow.

Hard to see him but he’s there, sitting on eggs.

Penguins private beach.

Sorry this is a little late.   Had a pretty full day yesterday and so went to bed early.    We are now cruising the Douglas Fjord  and the scenery is breathtaking.   We’ll post more later tonight or tomorrow.

Yesterday we docked at Port Chalmers and Jeff ventured alone into Dunedin, the second largest city on the South Island.   Dunedin (pronounced dun-E-done) is Gaelic for Edinburgh  and, as you might expect, was settled by the Scots and so has a very strong Scottish influence.  As soon as he got off the shuttlebus, he found the first of many bagpipers and then found a whole bunch of old buildings around the town square.  He then went down to the railway station -which looks like a gigantic gingerbread house – before finding chocoholic’s heaven – the site of the first ever Cadbury chocolate store and now the location of their very large factory.  After passing the largest chocolate rabbit in the whole world, he took a tour which made the visit even better.  To start the tour, the guide traded us a bag of candy for your admission ticket.  Then they offered candy as a reward for answering questions – such as “where are you from?” and “do you like dark chocolate or milk chocolate?”   After adding 2 or 3 pounds during that tour, he headed back to the shuttlebus only to see what seemed like the entire cast of Star Wars get off a bus that correctly identified itself as Special.

The afternoon was spent at the Penguin Preserve where we saw not only the very rare Yellow-Eyed Penguin (only 3000 in the wild) but also one Little Blue Penguin, which are quite common but hard to spot because they head to the ocean early in the morning to fish and only come back just before it gets dark. Yellow eyed penguins are very shy and very solitary so we knew we would not see gigantic colonies of penguins like we saw in Antarctica.   Seeing mass quantities is cool but seeing these very rare creatures is pretty awesome, too.  We have posted a picture of one from Carol’s iPad but it is hard to see the bird.  Jeff took some pictures with his zoom lens that show much better but you’ll have to wait to see those after we get back.

The penguin preserve does a great job of protecting these birds on their land.  They only have 22 breeding pairs and 6 resident juveniles on a fairly large piece of land (including a beach) where no one can build or even enter without permission.  They tag all the birds and have given them names.   We were lucky enough to visit the nests of Donna and Doug and Clive and Lyn.   Because the yellow eyes are so shy the sight of a human would scare them off, so the preserve has built miles of covered trenches so we were eyelevel with the critters should we happen to see one wondering around.  As far as the penguins are concerned, humans are only a foot tall and their heads kind of move on their own -which seems pretty scary to me.

We have now seen 6 of the 18 species of penguins.