After a fun-packed week on the mountainous west coast of the South Island, we began a quick trip over to the east coast. We started in Dunedin, where we saw albatrosses and penguins; zoomed up to Christchurch, the largest city on the South Island; and then drove past the beautiful cliffs of Kaikora to Blenheim, the center of the Marlborough wine district.

Since there was a little town called Gore, and another nearby called Clinton, someone in the highway department decided to have some fun.

We marked the southernmost point on the earth we'd ever been.

This company has eye-catching displays. We saw many Dominator trucks driving around.

We drove out to the end of the Otago Peninsula just south of Dunedin. Ever since the New Zealand military cleared a particular area there and built little pathways, a colony of albatrosses decided it was a good place to set up a breeding ground. Albatrosses don't spend any time on land except to breed: they spend most of their time flying in a circle around Antarctica, landing on the water to feed or rest.

They're huge birds, with a twelve-foot wingspan.

A male has finished feeding his chick, and has walked up a path getting ready to take off for another day of flying. He spent a long time waiting for the wind to be just right to take off, and hadn't taken off by when it was time for us to leave.

The military also has a little museum next to the albatross reserve. This is an impressive cannon that would suddenly lift up out of the ground and fire.

A model showing the action of the cannon.

A few kilometers away was a reserve of yellow-eyed penguins, who had set up a colony on a farm. The farmer built a bunch of "hides" that tourists could see the penguins without appearing to them to be large animals.

March is in their moulting season. Many of the penguins we saw were covered with old feathers being pushed out by new ones. This guy has only a few of his old ones left.

Before they moult, they just gorge themselves on fish and get really really fat. While moulting, they just stand in one place for a few weeks. This penguin has just begun to shed his old feathers.

The penguins aren't social. The one on the right had just finished swimming and walked right past the other without any interaction at all.

Dunedin has a large Cadbury factory.

It also has a festively decorated train station.

A mosaic on the floor of the station.

A detail on a stained-glass window in the station.

An art-deco building in Dunedin. It looked like it had been a theater, but is now a museum (it was closed that day.)

One of a series of popular beer billboards. They actually would change the text from time to time while leaving the picture intact. ("ute" is short for "sport utility vehicle", of course...)

There's an interesting spot on the coast north of Dunedin called the Moeraki Boulders. It appeared as though the cliff has several large almost perfectly spherical rocks in it which have remained on the beach as the rest of it was eaten away.

The little town of Oamaru had many dramatically imposing buildings. There's a blue penguin colony there, but at that time of day, the penguins were all swimming and not due back until after dark.

In Timaru, a small museum had a plane made by Richard Pearse, a contemporary of the Wright brothers. There was speculation that he might have made a short flight even before they did. We had a pretty hard time believing this propeller would generate enough speed to lift the machine off the ground.

The Millenium Monument in Christchurch.

An old neighborhood in downtown Christchurch, seen from the inside of the new modern art museum.

The outside of the museum.

A vineyard in the Marlborough wine region.

The birds would eat all the grapes if not for the netting.

The "amuse-bouches" at Herzog's, a very fancy restaurant and winery near Blenheim. The winery had moved to New Zealand from Austria. The food was great, but we regretted having only their wines with it -- most of the other wines we'd tasted earlier in the day were much better.

On to Wellington and Napier