Penguins, Seals, and "Dinosaur eggs" on the beach

Our last travel day with the grandparents was a long one - over 8 hours in the car from Te Anua to Christchurch. We had planned to listen to Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban but couldn’t find the CD’s so assumed that we had left them in the other van. (Later we found them hidden in a suitcase compartment - Oh well.)  We had a good time listening and singing along to music, although whenever the adults tried to play their music there was a chorus of complaints from the children.

We wound our way from Te Anau toward the East coast of the south Island and the city of Dunedin.  It was a beautiful drive.  Most of the scenery was of green hillside with scattered sheep, cattle, elk and deer farms.  We kept searching for the perfect sheep hillside picture and pulling off to the side of the road, which also allowed for bathroom breaks.  

We also passed through red tussock conservation areas (not sure why they need to be conserved since there seem to be a lot of tussocks around).  But we did get some great shots of the tussocks, not to mention the people who photobombed them : )

After hitting the coastline, we turned north and made our first planned stop at the Moeraki boulders. These famously unusual beach rocks are located right off the main coastal highway, and then requires only a fifteen minute walk on the beach to find.  The boulders were formed out of mineral concretions that built up over 4.5 - 5 million years, were buried in the sand and slowly were exposed again by the ever changing tide.  

Some of the boulders are almost perfectly oval or round, but look like they are cracking like eggs, with this weird pattern on the rock surface.

 

Others had broken up to reveal pretty calcite crystals within. 

Little baby Moerakis litter the sand farther along the beach and if you look up at the cliff face it appears to be giving birth to more little boulders.  Part of the reason they look so odd is that they only occupy about 100 meters of a 8 km long beach, so it looks like some aliens just deposited them there on the shore.  We spent about 1/2 hour wandering around, taking photos and climbing up on top of them.  Luckily we had timed it at low tide, which is the best time to view them.  Here is a family shot or two.

The next destination was the endangered yellow eye penguins.  It was a little bit more of an endeavor then we had planned because the road out to the colony turned to gravel and then dirt but our awesome rental van handled it without problems.  Walking out to the birds was a bit more difficult and there was a little grumbling from the older folks in the group as the path was fairly rough and uneven.  The trail down to the penguin viewing blind was really steep and we make the trek all the down only to discover that there were no penguins to view!  Luckily we ran into some young German tourists (Germans, Germans everywhere) who told us to go back up and walk along the ridge farther to see them.  The colony is fenced so we just wandered along the fence until we finally spotted them- cute little  penguins with yellow eyes and stripes on their heads.  One of them was lying down on its stomach, one was ambling along the beach and two were hiding behind a bush.  Actually they really didn’t do anything that exciting but it was cool to see penguins-and uncommon penguins at that.  These yellow eyed penguins are very rare, limited to a few locations in New Zealand, and have a total population just over 4,000.  Here are a couple of their number.

And at the same beach, we saw New Zealand fur seals playing on the rocks and kelp beds. 

The drive along the coast back up to Christchurch was beautiful scenic coastline (Then again, what coastline in NZ is not scenic?)  We spent the night at the same holiday park we stayed at earlier and hoped that the Bloomers and Jeans would get some rest for their even bigger travel day the next day back to the States.  The morning began with a bang, literally. Gramps Jeans slipped on the stairs outside our room and fell sideways into the adjacent wall. He was OK luckily.  The wall did not fare as well - he made this huge hole with his apparently ample backside: )  Being NZ, they made no big deal of it - no paperwork, waivers or ambulance called :)  Someone just looked at the hole and said, "You all right? Yea, well, we'll take care of that hole. Have a good day." 

Good as gold.