On to Oamaru

Our last morning in Christchurch began with another wonderful breakfast made for us by Bill. This time it included two whitebait fritters that I wasn’t brave enough to attempt to eat as I’m not much of a seafood person. Jacob, however, ate them both! In case you’re wondering, whitebait is a juvenile fish that is caught on the West Coast that is made into something that looks to me as a pancake full of small fish.

After we finished getting ready and said our goodbyes, we were on our way down south. Before we left I had wanted to see the large chess that used to sit in the city square. Bill, Corina and Patrick even led us to where it was located but all the pieces were locked away and we didn’t feel like taking the time to set them all up, so we got underway to Oamaru. The landscape along the way was mostly flat farmland through one small town after another, so we didn’t really stop to take a lot of photos. We did stop at some point to grab coffee and take a picture in front of a very large salmon along the side of the road.

Right before Oamaru there was an interesting and large rusted pipe that stated Oamaru was the steampunk capital of NZ. Apparently, Oamaru is very proud of its Victorian precinct and it has naturally drawn a lot of steampunk flair as well. We thought we’d check it out after we secured a late lunch. Since Oamaru isn’t very large, we didn’t have a lot of options that were open on a Sunday afternoon in the town center, so we chose a gourmet pizza place called Filadelfios. Jacob had a pizza called 48th st which I don’t remember all the ingredients but it did have cream cheese on it, which is a delicious pizza topping. I was really brave and had something called the Curious George. It had chicken, bacon, brie cheese and bananas. That’s right, bananas. I thought I would give it a try since even the writing on the wall (previous customer testaments and hellos) stated it was good. Well, it was good but I don’t know that I’d order it again.

Jacob secured a place for us to stay once we were done eating but we weren’t going to show up until later. Oamaru has a blue penguin colony that I wanted to see first. They apparently come in at around dusk so we had some time to kill first. We walked around the big block that was the Victorian precinct, but nothing was open. We decided we come back in the morning and made our way to the Blue Penguin Colony Visitor’s Centre. Turns out that they charge you $25 dollars per person to watch them come in and you can’t take any pictures, even without a flash. I understand the flash part but didn’t understand without flash. We decided not to stay for that so we just took a short self guided tour where we were able to see some of the penguins in nesting boxes.

Down the road a ways was a beach called Bushy’s Beach where a colony of yellow eyed penguins roosted for the evening. I was told that they come in from the water in ones and twos but I thought that might be something to see as well, so we drove down there and stayed for a half hour while little penguins came on shore. The interesting thing was that they actually climbed, or hopped maybe, up the steep hill to their nesting spots. They would then call to each other until a pair was together again. We were located above the cliff-like hill on a fenced walkway so not to disturb the birds but one penguin ended up being pretty close to us as it waited for its mate to appear.

When it got too dark to take any good pictures, we made our way to the motel where we were staying. We checked in, pet the resident kitty and grabbed a movie from the free collection in the office. We ate the rest of our pizza while we watched Columbiana. I had wanted to watch Boy but the disc was missing. I must say, it’s been nice having a kitchenette in all of our little motel rooms.