One of many waterfalls.

Today we cruised the southwest coast of the South Island which is a massive national park – so big and so wild that parts of it have never been visited by humans.    We had hoped to see a lot of snowcapped mountains but most were capped by clouds.   Since it rains here for about 200 days a year and the annual rainfall is about 250 inches we were lucky to see what we did.  Still the sights were fantastic.   Mountains rising 4000 to 5000 feet straight out of the water on each of the three sounds we visited kept us straining our necks to see what was around the next bend.   And there were waterfalls everywhere.  Just unbelievable!  The pictures you see just don’t do justice to the experience.

We now say goodbye to New Zealand and in two days will be in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.    We have enjoyed our visit there with the Kiwis (both the birds and the people). I don’t think we have ever met such a happy, pleasant group of people anywhere in the world.

But we are looking forward to getting to Australia to meet our friends there, see a whole new group of strange animals, and, of course, to see the little guy who greets you each time you open this blog.

Probably won’t post a page tomorrow as we will be at sea for the whole day.

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.

Two intrepid jet boaters. The ride was better than any amusement park ride.

All the comforts of home towed behind four wheel drive tussock buggie.

Our jet boats.

A view from the stagecoach path.

Today we visited the South Island for the first time and it is a night and day difference from the North Island.    The two biggest differences are that there are very many fewer people there and that the mountains are much bigger.   The people are still very friendly but they also seem more laid back than those in the North.

We only did one shore excursion today and didn’t learn much new but we did have an awful lot of fun.  We went way back in the boonies today and caught a jetboat up a river (which I can’t remember its name).   We passed by other regular boaters and kayakers like they were standing still and the boat driver did a number of 360 degree turns in the middle of the river when he wasn’t jumping over rapids or hugging the cliffs along river’s edge.  The only thing missing from this ride was Maggie the huntaway dog in the other boat.  When Maggie is not herding sheep of cattle, she likes to ride the jetboats.

After about 20 minutes of excitement on the waters, we met some very strange 4 wheel drive buggies for a trip up and across an old 1840’s stagecoach path which then led to some goldmines on the west coast.  It was so steep that the driver told us that in sections the passengers on the stagecoach had to get out and walk behind the horses and the wagon until the crested some hill and they could all jump in again.   We didn’t get out and walk but in many places we did not want to look over the edges as there was not much of a shoulder and certainly no guardrails.  Along the way we saw a lot of black bark beeches which looked almost like the branches had been in a fire – but they had not.  But it was all worthwhile when we go to the top of the pass at about 3000 feet.  Unbelievable views from the summit!

We did learn that the sheep industry on the South Island is winding down and that there are now only 30 million sheep here as opposed to a peak of 70 million in the mid-1940’s.   I think we saw every one of the 30 million to day.

We saw a little bit of damage left over from the 2 devastating earthquakes centered on Christchurch, which was hit the worst.  Our guide said that it will take about 20 years for the city to rebuild after the last quake in 2011.

We also saw a lot of trees blown down by heavy winds that hit the Canterbury Plains only a few weeks ago.  The guide said they had straight winds of 100 mph.  He said he wondered how the trees fell but the sheep didn’t blow away

Tomorrow we go in search of the rarest penguin in the world – the yellow eyed penguin.