Oamaru & Dunedin

We stop for lunch in Timaru, but there’s nothing too exciting there, so we head on to Oamaru where the ‘little blue eyes penguin sanctuary’ is.

We haven’t booked anywhere to stay, but the first place we come to stop at has vacancy. It’s a small guest house managed and owned by a very interesting character; Agra. She brings us in the her living room where her music is blaring and he dog ‘Laika’ is holding her tennis ball wanting us to play with her. Agra’s a middle-aged mum figure with her hair wildly stuffed on top of her head. We have a very surreal conversation with her about everything and nothing at once. She told her that we could remember her name by thinking Aga-vation, or Vi-agra. Interesting. There isn’t much in Oamaru other than the penguin sanctuary which we visit later in the evening. You sit quietly and watch all the little blue penguins coming home from a day’s fishing. They’re very cute, but noisy little things. No pictures were allowed, so I borrowed this from the internet.

We took a drive around Oamaru looking for anything else to do, but the only thing open was the video store. There was some impressive architecture though.

We got back to the hostel to find that Agra had let herself into our room to turn the lights on and fire up the electric blanket. She heard us coming in and she came out to greet us in her dressing gown to see if we wanted tea, coffee or hot chocolate. I’m sure if I asked her to tuck us in for the night she would have happily obliged. The next day we read some reviews about the place we had just stayed and there were virtually no comments about the hostel itself, it was all about the ‘hostel mum’. We got it.

The following morning we go to the farmer’s market. The big weekly event of the town.

On to Dunedin.

We booked something like five nights in the Dunedin hostel to tie us over until our reservation in Queenstown.

The new hostel was nice. We had a tv in our room which felt a little alien to begin with, we hadn’t watched any TV for about two months.

Dunedin was quite a nice city with loads of funky bars and restaurants  but we didn’t find much else to do other than pound the high streets and shopping malls for a few days. We went to the cinema to watch the hobbit, but we didn’t achieve a whole lot, other than our day trip out to the peninsular which was fantastic.