Dunedin Day 3 - Otago Peninsula Nature Tour

Another great day out around Dunedin, today we headed down to another Dunedin institution - The Cadbury Chocolate Factory! New Zealnad seems to have similar chocolate habits to England, and although the Cadbury's seems to taste slightly different here, it is nice to have a bit of Dairy Milk every once in a while! Our tour was fun and friendly and we got lots of free chocolate to gorge on! Cadbury's bought the main chocolate factory here about 60 years ago and their chocolate has been popular in NZ ever since. The factory is much more modern than the Speights Brewery, but not all that big even though they export choclate all over the world!

After a spot of lunch, we heading back into town to be pickd up for a trip out to the Otago Peninsula - renowned for someof the best wildlife in NZ. The peninsula is only a 20 min drive from the city, but again feels detatched from any civilisation. our first stop was the Royal Albatross Centre - home to the largest birds in the world. Unfortunately due to the time of year and prevailing weather conditions, we didn't spot any of the monsters in the sky (we were by no means guaranteesd to see any anyway) there are only a few living on this peninsula anyway! Next we headed round to a piece of farmland with private acces and headed down to the waterside to see some seals sunbathing on the rocks. From here we were also able to spot loads of other species of albatross circling the choppy waters out to sea. Next we headed over to another long secluded beach to the highlight of the trip... a chance to get up-close-and-personal with some sealions and yellow eyes penguins! The conditions were perfect, and just as the sun was setting we were surrounded by about 20 huge sealions playfighting on the beach. They were quite oblivious to our presence, but we had to make a dash for it when their 'playfighting' brought them over into our direction! As we carried on along the beach, we were able to spot half a dozen yellow eyed penguins (the second rarest species of penguin in the world) as they headed back from a full day at sea. These penguins only live in theis partof NZ and no where else in the world, so we were quite lucky to spot them. After a great day of nature spotting, we headed back towards Dunedin as the sun was setting.