Before heading to the 'penguin capital of the New Zealand' as claimed by the township of Oamaru, we stopped on route to see a "large group of rare spherical concertions" or a group of perfectly circular boulders to you and me. The Moeraki Boulders are an amazing sight and strangely quite moving as the sea swirls and licks the circular dimensions into, sadly, eventual destruction. You need a PHD in geology however to understand why they are as they are!
Arriving in Oamaru at dusk we caught sight of some yellow-eyed penguins on the beach, looking for all the world like miniature Zorro's with a yellow mask like strip across their eyes. Driving back through the pretty town, similar in architecture to Dunedin but executed in the whitestone typical of the Waitaki valley, we headed to the
blue penguin colony. In an unobtrusive wooden 'grandstand' we watched the smallest penguin in the world waddle from the sea up to the jetty, sidestep 2 fur seals who were asleep in their path and run to their nests where expectant partners rolled over to greet them. Rolled over quite literally as we watched a couple copulate under the orange lighting right in front of the stand. In fact it got so intense we felt we should look away to give the little humping penguins some privacy!
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