Dunedin & Wanaka (again) — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

You may remember I mentioned Dunedin in the last post, as one terminus of the Southern Scenic Route. Well, that was our next town to stay in, on the east coast. We weren’t sure how to pronounce it, and so we asked the taxi driver who took us to dinner the first night. He proceeded to give us a short history of the town.

The town was founded by Scots, and the “edin” is from Edinburgh. He pronounced that city as Ee-din-borough, explaining that it was a “borough” like a village, while “dun” is a fort, which is what Dunedin was originally. So he said the proper pronunciation is “Dun EE din”. Got it? :)

The first place we visited was Tunnel Beach. That’s it, in the picture above. Not much of a beach, huh? Nicely, the sun came out as we walked down…

… giving us better views of what we could explore.

The tunnel was not that large stone arch you saw in the previous picture, but an actual tunnel cut through the rock to allow you down to the beach -

Above, is the area that’s a beach at low tide, but when we were there, the sea was high and wild!

We enjoyed the varied colors along the coast…

… as well as the rock formations carved by wind and water -

I saw one girl surprised by a wave as she was concentrating on filming right on the edge -

Our other goal in this area was to see Blue Penguins. They are are the smallest penguins in the world, standing just over a foot tall and weighing about 2 pounds. They are found only in New Zealand and southern Australia.

(To watch the next video, be sure to open this email in your browser by clicking the link at the bottom of the post.) They come out of the sea at dusk, after fishing all day, to return to their burrows -

There is no audio on that video because people were talking all around me, and the wind was howling, like this -

We stood for an hour in the punishing wind, in the dark, and the rain really started coming in, as the penguins came out of the surf and waddled up the beach to our observation platform. Conditions were really poor for photography, especially given that we couldn’t use any flash. This is the best (only) picture I got in focus -

I want to include the sunset show we enjoyed while having dinner our first night in Dunedin -

Since that’s not enough to make a decent post, I’m going to combine the two towns. We headed back to Wanaka to stay another couple of nights, before making the long trek though the mountains over to the West Coast.

As we crossed the interior of the island, we passed verdant farmland…