Today, we are in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Yesterday in port, Valerie had the foresight to book a Wellington Walks reverse walking tour of the city. The walk starts at the train station and ends near Te Papa, in the reverse direction of the normal Wellington Walks tour. This makes it easier to for cruise ship passengers to get to the start of the tour in time. However, since the reverse tour needs to be reserved in advance, very few people take it. Luckily for us, this resulted in a private tour for us, while the forward tours that we passed had about 10 tourists each. Our guide Gavin was excellent. He led us to see the standard landmarks: the “Beehive” parliament building, old St. Paul’s Cathedral, new St. Paul’s Cathedral. In addition, he led us to places that we probably wouldn’t have found on our own: the founding documents of New Zealand in the national archives, the pine cone shaped interior of the new supreme court building, the Olympic medal on display at Fergs Kayaks.

After the conclusion of our tour, we quickly walked around Te Papa (the national museum) for a while before sitting down for a bite to eat at the café. Quickly running out of time, we scrambled back to the ship, taking a brief detour to run through the Museum of Wellington City & Sea.

Today, the Oosterdam docked in the small town of Picton for the first time ever. Unfortunately, most of the stores in town were closed due to a local holiday. As far as we can tell, there isn’t much of cultural interest in Picton, but it has several nice hiking trails (aka tramping tracks in New Zealand, bushwalks in Australia). After we disembarked the ship and compulsory shuttle, we walked along the main street in town, stopping at a supermarket to buy a lunch of pies and a scone. (The pies were just terrible, which taught me a valuable lesson about buying meat pies at the supermarket.) After a quick stop at the library to log onto the free WiFi, we started our hike. We spent about half an hour walking to a small beach called Bob’s Bay where we planned to eat lunch until it started raining on us. After the rain stopped, we walked up to a harbourview lookout and then to a trailhead on the “snout”, a long forested peninsula. Because we were tired, we didn’t actually walk the hilly 1.5 hour trail to the end of the snout, but it seems like a good trail for people in better shape than us.

Due to the earthquakes in Christchurch a few years ago, cruise ships are anchoring in nearby Akaroa until the port of Christchurch is able to handle cruise ships again. The captain warned us that due to high winds, we might not be able to tender into Akaroa, but in the morning I guess things looked good enough for passengers to go ashore. Valerie booked us a tour yesterday via the Internet and after disembarking we had about an hour to burn before the tour started. We wandered around the main beachfront promenade and then to the library which was surrounded by cruise passengers, a sign of free WiFi. We checked our email before heading to the meeting place for the tour.

The tour bus drove us into the nearby hills surrounding Akaroa. The bus driver mentioned that the land and harbor around Akaroa were formed by an ancient volcano. He speculated that the rocky soil allowed it to withstand the earthquake much better than the sandy soil of Christchurch. Along the way, we stopped at a cheese factory, but didn’t buy any cheese.

After the tour, the winds picked up considerably. Valerie was worried that the weather would get worse, so we headed back to the ship early. She was right. When we returned, the captain had decided to stop passengers from disembarking. Other passengers returning later in the day reported that their tenders were pummeled by waves and flooded during the return trip. According to some reports, one of the tenders experienced some engine problem during a return voyage, stranding several passengers for hours.

Due to an unspecified medical emergency of a crew member, we arrived at Port Chalmers one day ahead of schedule as the captain raced the ship to port as quickly as possible. Since there were no shore excursions planned, the shuttle from Port Chalmers to Dunedin was free. (I think it usually costs money.)

Our plan for Friday was to rent a car and drive around the Otago Peninsula. Since we arrived early, we contacted the rental car company to pick up the car on Thursday instead. After arriving in Dunedin, we walked to Cadbury World where we bought various chocolate covered bars, but declined to take the tour. Around 3pm, we took a bus to pick up our rental car. On our drive into the Otago Peninsula, we took winding Highcliff Road through the hills. Our first stop was Penguin Place where we could view yellow-eyed penguins. Our tour guide (who was surprisingly buff for his age) led us through a series of covered trenches from which we could view the penguins without disturbing them. Apparently, if the penguins can only see your head, they don’t realize how big you actually are and don’t consider you a threat. We also visited the nearby albatross nesting grounds where we saw lots of gulls, some marine mammals, and a few albatrosses flying in the distance. On the way back to Port Chalmers, we drove along the less scary shore-side road.

On Saturday, we woke up early to drive north. Our first stop was a beach where we could view the Moeraki Boulders, which are surprisingly round boulders that formed around fossils. (One such fossil can be seen in the Otago Museum.) Next, we drove down to a lighthouse surrounded by a small cliffside wildlife preserve. We walked along the preserve path for a kilometer or two. We didn’t see any more penguins, but we did see some seals and gulls fighting for space on rocks. Our last tourist stop in the north was Shag Point, which has a tidal shelf that we couldn’t get to because it was high tide. Shag Point was also the first place we’ve been hailed upon during this journey. We drove back to Dunedin and stopped at the Olveston house, a 1910’s era historic home, for an hour long walking tour. Around 3pm, we returned the car, took the bus back to the Octogon and walked to the Otago Settlers Museum. The OSM is an excellent, free museum chronicling the history of the settlement of the area built in an old New Zealand Rail station.

On our last day in Dunedin, we took the Taieri Gorge train through the Taieri Gorge. The train stopped along the way for tourists to take photos. At the end of the line, some local women set up temporary shops to sell trinkets and snacks. The scenery was nice, but not particularly different from what we had seen during our last two days of driving. If we had not been trudging around the countryside the past few days, I think we would have been much more impressed by the train ride. After the train, we walked to the mostly free Otago Museum (different than the OSM and home of the fossil mentioned earlier). Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of time to walk through the museum due to ship departure, but what we did see was some interesting coverage of the natural history of the Otago area.