I've just about run out of photos, but I'll go ahead for the sake of completeness with one last post. On Saturday, we took our last drive back to Christchurch for our final day. There wasn't much to do here, we saw the Botanical Gardens which were closed due to the hurricane on our previous visit, had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and lost some money at the casino. We decided against revisiting the George and stayed at the Park Royal, a very large hotel in the center of town that we'd almost always snub in favor of the boutique option. But in this case the big bland option won out, despite its atrium and wall to wall carpeting. On balance the George is the better hotel, but the room was just too depressing for our last day. Park Royal-(4) Room-4, Facilities-4, Service-3, Wow-0.

Oamaru is very famous for their penguins. I didn't want to disrupt the narrative flow of the last entry, but in reality after dinner we walked down to the coast for some penguin viewing, which is overrated. There a smallish species of penguin, and they're protected so you're not allowed anywhere near them. Basically about 100 people gather at dusk at the ranger's station, where a penguin fanatic named Jim takes you to a cliff far, far above the penguins. There are about 15 penguins in the colony, who dive into the ocean each morning and return here in the evening, so you spend several hours on this distant cliff waiting for the penguins to emerge from the water and waddle over to some place out of view. We only managed to see one penguin make the five second waddle in the 90 minutes we were there, but Jim was certainly excited as he boomed out "enjoy it, live it, experience it" at top volume over and over again.

The photos were taken from the observation point to give you an idea of how close you'll get to the experience, and the penguin is actually in the zoom photo if you want to exercise your "Where's Waldo?" skills. I'm sure post Happy Feet this excursion is even more popular, but I really didn't get it.

We checked into our hotel, the Pen Y Bryn Lodge, where as usual we were the only guests. It's an uber-Victorian home with all the trimmings, recently converted into a lodge. The owners, Roy and Bernice, were nice and quite fun to hang out with. There were about 5 bedrooms, a bit too chintzy but overall it's quite a pretty property. Unlike the other lodges, though, this lodge is all about the house, as they have a small plot of land and it's located in something of a suburban neighborhood. Judging by their occupancy rate, the suburbs of Oamaru may be a bit of a hard sell. We had a great dinner with our hosts, my favorite of the trip, then played some pool in their period billiard room before calling it a night. Pen Y Bryn Lodge (7) Room-7, Facilities-6, Service-7, Wow-0.

We then continued north to Oamaru, another gold rush boomtown famous for its stone, which was used for most of the grand buildings in the South Island. (This is now the fourth gold rush boomtown we've seen in the South Island. I think the tourism authorities may be overplaying this story a bit, as the whole island seems to be portrayed as a gold rush). We had lunch at the Bridge Cafe, which serves huge portions to huge customers. We then walked around the city for a couple of hours. I think we were the only tourists, but it's actually a semi-interesting town, with a real (albeit only a century old) historic center.

56. Oamaru

On Friday we started our return trip north. Made a brief stop at Moeraki, to see the Moeraki boulders, large perfect spheres imbedded in the beach. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for the phenomenon, but to my ignorant mind it's pretty freaky.

We walked back through the University of Otago's pretty campus. It was final exam time, but students didn't seem particularly stressed. We then had lunch at a packed outdoor cafe near campus called Ordellos, then walked into the CBD via George Street, the main shopping street. After revisiting the gym, we had a drink at the surprisingly trendy looking (but empty) hotel bar, then went to dinner at Abalone, a similarly trendy looking restaurant with an industrial feel to it. Very cool, good looking wait staff, which was a first for NZ, but menu had a total of ten items, of which five were unavailable. The few remaining items were pretty good, but then again they should be as the kitchen has plenty of practice making them. Went back for a late night gamble where Somchai lost his previous night's winnings, so looks like I'm back to being a wage slave.

We then walked a bit out of town to hang out at the Botanical Gardens. I have a lot more pics than words about this, so here goes...

On Thursday, we walked around Dunedin in beautiful weather, and found the city very likeable. It's got a real city core that feels very urban (that's a good thing) with lots of impressive Victorian architecture and some trendy shops and restaurants as well. The morning started with a great breakfast at Tangente, a hip slackers' cafe. We then walked to the Octagon, the city's focal point with major churches and government buildings, then to the Victorian train station.

55. Dunedin

We got to Dunedin around 4 pm, which felt like a pretty big city and, at first impression, pretty ugly. We checked into our hotel, the Southern Cross, which I thought would be horrible but was actually OK. It's a big modern hotel in the city center, although it does have a nice older section as well. The lobby is quite stylish and the rooms are pretty big, but very bland and weirdly configured. We went to their crummy gym, had dinner at Etrusco's, a large atmospheric restaurant serving good Italian food, and returned to the hotel to play in their ornate casino, restored from the original hotel. Somchai won about $75, so I quit my job and we're living off his winnings. Southern Cross (3) Room-3, Facilities-3, Service-2, Wow-1 (a thriving casino was a quite a surprise)

54. Clyde

On Wednesday, we checked out of the hotel and headed to Dunedin, a large (for New Zealand) city located at the bottom of the South Island. We were planning on taking a long scenic route along the coast, but the locals insisted it wasn't very scenic, so we took a shortcut inland, which still took about five hours. We stopped for lunch at Oliver's in Clyde. Clyde is a small village that was once a large gold mining town. It's now very sleepy and quaint, and has some interesting old buildings from the boom times. The restaurant was a nice old stone building where we were the only customers, and Somchai thought this was the best food of the whole vacation.

The whole point of Queenstown is to engage in bungee jumping and related activities, so again, if you're not really an adventure sportsperson, you may not get the allure of Queenstown. We did watch a couple of bungee jumps, but that was the extent of our participation. The big thing to do here though is buy a combination ticket, where you bungee jump and parasail and white water raft and a couple other things one after another.

It rained most of Tuesday, which may account for the fact that we were pretty unimpressed with Queenstown. It's a nice enough place I guess, but not very pretty and really just full of hotels and fast food restaurants. We did a bit of shopping, took a very boring gondola ride up (and quickly down) a nearby mountain, and played half a mini-golf game before we were rained out. We had lunch at a decent Thai restaurant, then called it a day and went back to the hotel.

On Monday we had a trip lowpoint, at least for Somchai. We drove to the tiny town of Glenorky, at the far end of the lake, and hung around there for hours. We then boarded this jetboat thing at 1 pm, which took us on a daredevil tour of the Dart River, which feeds into the lake. The boat zips along at amazing speeds and can turn on a dime, which it does frequently. The scenery was nice, but we had already seen it from the more spectacular vantage point of a helicopter, so that was a bit repetitive, so most of the entertainment came from the twists and turns of the boat. When the boat broke down (what is it with us and boats?) that came to a halt as well. It was also pretty cold to be blasting around the river, and Somchai was overall pretty grumpy. We did, however, come out of this with one of our recurring punch lines, which is Lady Fanny of Omaha, which never fails to get us laughing hysterically. I know it's somehow related to one of the passengers on the boat, but that's as close as I can get to an explanation.

In shades of Naked Gun, after we toured most of New Zealand and had our picnic, we got back to the hotel and Somchai saddled up and went horseback riding with the resident cowboy, Murray, and Leo his horse. I couldn't bear wearing the safety hat, so I skipped the horses and just hung around the lodge.

The trip ended with a picnic (that word again!) atop the mountains along the shore of a lake. It's quite a stunning backdrop for a romantic lunch for three. And we got to see global warming at work, as a big chunk of mountain ice crashed into the lake while we were eating.

The coast along the Tasman is similar to the more famous coasts of Alaska and Norway, deep coves cut through the mountains leaving a jagged, picturesque coastline. This is Milford Sound, the most famous sight in the area and quite a stunning place to buzz through, although the more usual way of visiting via a boat cruise would be beautiful as well.

On the far side of the mountains we hit the Tasman Sea, the stretch of ocean between New Zealand and Australia. If you like secluded beaches, this is about as secluded as it gets. But if you like sandy beaches and warm water, you may want to skip this one.

We spent most of the trip flying around Fjordland National Park, an enormous national park that occupies most of the southwestern part of the South Island. It's definitely bigger than some US states, yet has no roads, and the only way around is in the air.

First stop on our tour was an aerial view of Lake Wakatipu. Our ultimate destination was Milford Sound, but en route we pretty much just pointed at some nice spot and landed, which was pretty cool.

I woke up early Sunday and went for a run, then negated the effort by eating an enormous breakfast. (I've noticed that pretty much every day's journal entry begins with my eating an enormous breakfast, usually overusing those exact words. I'm going to skip that news from now on). We then set off for a trip highlight, a private helicopter tour of the mountains and Milford Sound. The tour was much better than the glacier tour because it was just us and we could go wherever we wanted for the day.