Arrowtown, New Zealand - 9 - 15 May, 2006

Tonight is our last here at our Arrowtown house exchange, wrapping up another interesting week in which we explored some more of the Otago region of the South Island. To get a better sense of how the sheep “industry” works here, we took an old steam ship across the lake from Queenstown to a “High Country” sheep farm. When we got there we had a nice lunch in an old Victorian home, watched a sheep dog herding sheep up and down the mountain, by merely watching them and running circles around them in response to whistle commands, and finally a sheep shearing demonstration that was very interesting. The way back on the boat was fun with a sing along of old songs with a bunch of Aussies (“Waltzing Matilda” and many others).

On another day we spent most of the day with a friend of our hostess, Shirley, who was nice enough to arrange a very informative tour with demonstrations at an old gold mine (we tried to do some panning but struck out). After that we had a lovely lunch and an unusual presentation about wineries in the area with wine tasting and “nose training” to help us identify the aromas in the various wines, so we can talk about them like we really knew what we were talking about. It was most enjoyable. We wrapped up the day with a visit to the old Cromwell town which was literally moved to a new location after its old space was flooded by a new dam.

We then headed to the east coast to Duniden, the seat of the first University here for a two night trip and stayed a Victorian B&B. The highlight of the trip was seeing the wild life on the Otago Peninsula. This is a rather isolated area and has a Royal Albatross colony. These birds are huge and have wing spans of almost ten feet. From a boat we got to see nesting chicks (which are as large as the adults!) and adult birds soaring overhead; It was a marvelous and exciting sight. To top off the day we took a special twilight tour through “Nature’s Wonders” in an eight wheel drive vehicle down some steep slopes to “blinds” overlooking an isolated beach with at least a dozen yellow eyed penguins waddling in and out of the water. In addition we got within a few feet of a large group of baby seals. The place was teaming with all sorts of other wild birds including cormorants, ducks and black swans, all nesting in large colonies on the mountainside.
We got some rain and on the way back we had some wonderful view of mountains recently coated with deep snow and some magnificent sunsets.

After a very enjoyable two weeks here we are leaving tomorrow to head north to see more sights, and hopefully have some warmer weather.