Commodore Dunedin

... br>Plant Biology<br>I will drop either soils or plant. Lectures begin Monday.<br><br>Last night was the International student welcome party at SOUTH Bar, a very chic bar in town with fireplaces, cool loungy atmosphere, music, dance floor, etc. Much nicer than any bar I have been to before. The University booked the bar privately for 1.5 hours for us and provided some food/drinks. <br><br>Today we went on the Taieri Gorge train trip, a scenic ride ...

... was by night. Of course we also went by the other buildings that we saw the night before and AGAIN Martijn spent far too long taking pictures of The First Church Of Otago :P. He's not even that religious... Now that the weather was on our side (on the last day we had in Dunedin of all things!) we decided to go back to the Otago Peninsula before we continued our journey. We only had to drive a few hours that day, so we felt we could spend the morning re-visiting the ...

... mouth of the Tahakopa river. Coastal Podocarp (pine type tree with needle-like leaves) forest fringed the sandy bay. Also there were many impressive tree ferns amongst the podocarp. Cathedral caves which rise to over 30 metres in height were our next stop and there is a good photo of Chris silhouetted near one of the entrances. We camped at Curio Bay camp site right next to the petrified forest - this is one of the world's most extensive example of a Jurassic fossilised ...

I spent another night in Dunedin and the next morning I went to Speight's Brewery. This is were they make New Zealand's no. 1 beer. In additional to their traditional Gold Medal Ale beer they make 5 other beers, from all we had a taste at the end of the tour in the brewery. Another interesting thing about this brewery is that they ...

... come ashore at dusk after a hard day of catching fish to return to their burrows. The site is also home to Royal Albatrosses and we saw several of these great birds take to the sky and circle around. It's their huge wingspan that makes them look so gracious in flight. In addition, the area is also home to some NZ fur seals - one was brave enough to cross over the dividing line between the "wildlife zone" and ...

... Elm Wildlife Tours group is the only company that is allowed out to the area. When we arrived we split into two groups. I was with Tom and the 2 French girls, the German guy and the girl from Amsterdam. We headed off to see the penguins whilst Sean took his group to see the Fur Seals. We had to walk quite a way down a steep hill to get to the beach. Just as we got to the path leading down to the beach a Yellow-Eyed Penguin come strolling out from the waves and across ...

... the course of the next hour in which we had a look in the visitor center we saw no more birds come in. This was our last evening with Mat and Lizzy and we were truly grateful of their great hospitality and exceptionally warm company. We were very sad to be leaving, thank you for a wonderful stay. Fortunately we left without stealing either of their gorgeous animals!

... our way to the albatross centre but didn't see any. There wasn't enough wind for them to come this close to shore. We had to wait for the French guy to have his tour of the centre, then made our way up to a farm. This is the only tour company that is allowed to come up here. We drove through a load of sheep, then parked up. We walked down one of the hills and onto some rocks. There were lots of fur seals basking on the rocks. They were quite cute and very noisy! There ...

... and there are lots of brick buildings rather than just the wooden types you usually see. It really is student central - scarfies, as they call them It allegedly has the steepest street in the world, which I didn't bother to go and see but here is a video of some riding one of those stand up wheely things up it It also has a Cadburys factory tour and a ...

... was really fun - they had a band on and it was a really good night - we ssaid our goodbyes at around 10ish and headed back to the hostel as we were both shattered.<br><br>13th<br><br>We didn't do a lot today - just planned our days in Dunedin and bought some tickets to do tours of the Speights Brewery and Cadbury World.<br><br>The only other thing I did today was to take my photos in for developing. We got an email from Peter (from Te Anau too telling us he arrived in ...