A couple of nights in Dunedin and we visit the Royal Albatros Centre on the Otago Peninsula. We took the tour to the lookout where we got to see the chicks poking out from under their parents in the next. Just about visible in the pictures below
"Day Six restarted by dreams suddenly turning strange, waking to the crack and sizzle of high explosives ... there's a fireworks show for Chinese New Year in Dunedin - Gung Hay Fat Choy! - and it sounds like they're launching it from twenty feet away; can't see anything, but now I'm awake to the din of cat alarms ringing off into the night. Asleep again, eventually, when one particularly persistent alarm finally kills the battery a couple hours later. Day Seven begins with having slept in late from the exhausting ache of Six, and we pack up the explosion of our fresh laundry from the floor just in time for check out. I've misplaced my sunglasses, so a bit dazzled as we sit down at a vegetarian cafe and figure out some breakfast. A bit of futile searching for replacement sunglasses, then on to Suki Suzuki for a winding, blindingly bright ride out to the end of the Otago Peninsula. Beautiful coastline and lots of road works, but finally to the Royal Albatross Centre just in time for our pre-booked tour. A crowd of us up the hill and in to the observatory, and I finally get to see an albatross up close (albeit through binoculars) ... they're huge and delightfully ungainly on land, and we're lucky enough to see two partners exchanging time on a young chick, and the father double unfolding his unlikely wings and taking off into the wind over the bay - "... for I had killed the bird had made the breeze to flow" indeed. The tour ends the bulk of the guests depart, while we two are taken in to an old gun position carved into the headlands, apparently we were the only ones thought a little time underground was worth the extra five dollars. Some cool tunnels and old works and machinery, and an even closer view of a couple albatross nests through some filthy windows, and then down to see a disappearing gun and some bits of old history. It's late, and neither of us is up for another few hours of riding, so we book a hotel back in Dunedin and wind our way back along the shore. Parked and packed into the creaky old Leviathan, then over to Cadbury's Factory - too late unfortunately for the last full tour of the week, so we get a ridiculously chocolatey hot chocolate into which Jo refuses to dip her cookie. Back to the search for replacement sunglasses (we now know where the old ones are, but they've gotten bugged and scratched along the road), then over to the same Indian restaurant as last night for my old pair and another two-for-one curry. Home to the hotel for an early night, comfy in our comfy beds. I'm barely off to sleep when some drunk children in the room next door come bashing and screaming in the halls, and it takes a trip down to the manager and eventually some looming threats of bodily violence to finally get the place quiet enough to sleep" (MM)