Dunedin — 12 February 2001

Time for another hike! On this one, we saw two royal albatross soaring on the ocean wind currents. Large birds in flight are a sight to behold — we'd been amazed by giant eagles in Alaska, and albatross have even more impressive wingspans. Magnificent. Looking down from the cliff's edge, we saw seals sunning themselves on the beach below. We also saw several shags and almost had a confrontation with some bulls. Bulls dodged, we visited the shade house to check up on the seedlings of some native beach grasses being reintroduced to Long Beach. On the way back in to town, Sue stopped to pick up some groceries, where she ran into Fran and Fran's friend Sam. We dropped off Fran and Sam so they could walk home and we could make a quick stop to Long Beach to check on the plantings. We saw lots of very pretty mushrooms in the pine forest. Today was also our lichen day and we stopped many times to admire the multicolored growths.

Back at the house, we helped Fran make tea and had a fun chat with her. (We discovered more evidence of American pop culture's reach — Roswell, Dawson's Creek, Nickelodeon and other TV are all readily available here. Jen: Not all teens are NSYNC and Backstreet Boyz fans. I have hope for the future thanks to Fran and Kate.) Later, we did some web surfing for Sue who was at a meeting. (Having put the business on the web in the past year, Sue was hoping to get maximum use of the web to promote her ecotours and we investigated possible sites to link to and search engines to alert.)

Much later that night, we went out to Murder Beach to look for yellow-eyed penguins (hoiho). Right away, Sue smelled (yes, smelled) a penguin! Sure enough, we saw a little blue penguin scurry into the bush. Although we didn't see any yellow-eyed penguins, we did spot a couple of hedgehogs. Looking up from the ground, the night sky was spectacular. The absence of light (and other) pollution made the stars astonishingly vivid. Jen pointed out several shooting stars, the Milky Way was very clear (particularly Jupiter and Saturn). We could actually see Orion's Sword, Cassiopeia was fairly clear and (a thrill for us northern hemispherites) so was the Southern Cross. Afterwards, we trudged up the the railroad tracks and into the bush. There, we entered a creek for a terrific view of glow worms — some mere inches from our eyes. The creek was also filled with tiny lobsters, who scurried around our feet as we slowly made our way from rock to rock. It being well after midnight (and knowing we had a day full of kayaking and train travel ahead of us), we then headed back to catch some sleep.