But first, we stopped at the Moeraki Boulders. Thomas and me unfortunately miserably failed in the geological explanation of the boulders, we thought something volcanic, explosive, it turned out to be something sedimentary-like-ish. Great fun though.
In Dunedin we slept, per the Dutch intern’s recommendation, in Hogwartz Backpackers. I assume it had something to do with Harry Potter. The view was fabulous,
but the bed was too small, there were two annoying little doggies (one bit into Thomas’ shoe when he tried to shoo it away from our food) and one of the other inhabitants turned up in the kitchen in the morning wearing nothing but his tight underpants. Wow, too much naked 18-year old backpacker in the morning is never a good thing.Dunedin is a real city, unlike Oamaru, with a university and everything, but still pretty small. Besides more penguins I had another goal to achieve in Dunedin, and that was scoring as many cheap/second-hand books as I could. With the library transformed into city council offices and the second-hand bookstores destroyed in Chch, I was in desperate need of books. (although Sandra and Marlies brought a fair amount of books as well. If I would live in the NL, I am sure we would have to start a book-club together). I bought 7 books, of which 2 in Dutch. If you ever find yourself stuck in Dunedin without anything to read, head to Scribes. I also overheard a conversations between the shop-owner and an American PhD student about the lack of decent books on netball in the Pacific and in the US. As I said before, people may find my line of work strange (“dirt”), but doing a PhD on the journalistic evidence of the origin of netball isn’t going to save the world either.
Dunedin is nice. We viewed the train station (not really in use anymore unfortunately),
some churches, the shopping street, the botanic gardens. 
We went out for dinner, had cocktails, watched a movie in the smallest cinema (arguably) with just 8 seats. 
It was incredibly nice to be in a functioning city. A city with a city centre not in ruins, with happy people and with normal facilities.The second day we ventured onto the Otago Peninsula, arguably a very nice piece of “nature”. I was disappointed again because the lack of “real nature”, as in something else than exotic tree plantations and sheep paddocks, but we did do a nice walk, we saw seals, and another two yellow-eyed penguins.
The sheep all going somewhere in an amazingly well organized manner. Sheep are so intriguing.
spot the seals
spot the penguins
nothing particular to spot hereBefore we left Dunedin, we went shopping. We were going into another zone of NZ with no mobile reception, no supermarkets, no nothing except pristine sheep paddocks and more penguins. Because some of us had caught colds, we bought some kilos of apples. From this moment on, just like we started to see penguins everywhere, we also found apples everywhere.
