Christchurch to Fiordland

After three weeks of solo traveling I picked up a fellow adventurer in Christchurch:

Christchurch was... interesting to visit... the earthquake damage is pretty unbelievable and definitely shapes the whole experience of visiting.  Every other building in the city is in a pile of pieces of former building.  Luckily we stayed in a suburb called Sumner, which was a cute little beach town.  On the way to Sumner the road is being worked on following the damage, and you can see half houses on a hill that had partially fallen down.  Also on the night we stayed there we were woken up in the middle of the night by a 4.2 aftershock (pretty big!).  We learned that since the huge quake last year, they have had a pretty predictable pattern of small aftershocks and every once in a while a 6+ that causes even more damage (next one expected in March - don't think I'll be back down around Chch any time soon).

Thinking we only had 2 weeks to cover the whole South Island, we headed south the next day to Dunedin, which we walked around in finding a place to use the internet so we could look up where to go next, then headed on to camp at a smaller town a bit south.  On our way we stopped at the Moereke boulders, which are weird perfectly round rocks on the beach:

We continued South to the Otago Peninsula, where we went on a tour in these cool 8-wheel drive vehicles that took us over some pretty rough terrain:

I started out thinking it was too bad that it was a cloudy, drizzly day, but it turns out this is the best weather to see penguins!  The tour took us past a seal colony, where a ton of babies lived that had been born just a few months before so they were still pretty cute:

Then we went to a place where we could see beach but were still pretty far away so as not to scare away the yellow-eyed penguins.  Only a few thousand of them exist, and they are all in this one part of NZ, so it was pretty cool to be able to see them.  The places both where the seals and the penguins were are on protected land, so no humans have walked within their space in 12 years.  We saw a few penguins on the beach, and about 5 more up in the hills (too far away for a decent picture but it was cool to see them).  We also saw blue-nosed penguins, which are a lot smaller and hide in little holes in the sand, so we got to get pretty close to these guys:

Since the summer has been so cold in NZ this year, my start date for harvest got pushed off 2 weeks, so we had more time to explore!  We decided to go to Fiordland, supposedly one of the most scenic places in NZ.  It was cloudy, but still gorgeous: