Bimbling around Otago

We left Blenheim and were sucked straight into another winery in the next county.  I was driving so I had to make do with poncy Organic cola and lunch. Chan selflessly tried enough for both of us, though.

On the drive we happened across a fur seal colony.  They were a bit of a timesink to be honest. You'd think you'd seen them all then then you'd notice that the boulders nearby were another dozen of them. Also, their barks sound like the wailing of the damned, which really harshes my vibe.

So the next stop was Oamaru – a town with far too many vowels given that they are the Kiwis’ natural enemy. It is a town that is big on vintage.  Neo-classical buildings abound and antique shops are aplenty.

What was a big draw for Chan though was the presence of the nearby penguin colonies.  There are two main colonies: one of Blue Penguins and one of Yellow-eyed Penguins.  If penguins gonna represent, they gotta wear their colours, you dig?



As we have seen the definitive colony of Blue penguins on a previous trip to Phillip Island in Australia, Chan tasked us with getting up at Oh-my-sweet-baby-Jesus O’clock to try and see one or two of the 15 yellow-eyed penguins who live on Bushy Beach.  Last year was hard on the local Yellow-eyes, as disease and other unfortunatenesses had depleted their numbers – hence the only remaining 7 breeding pairs plus change. That, combined with their natural disinclination toward people, means you have to spot them from a hide on the hill.  They get up at sunrise and go fishing for the day, before coming ashore at some point in the evening and hiding in their burrows, meaning you have to catch them on the way out. I was pessimistic about our chances -especially as this was rearing season so half the penguins would be home watching the kids- and Chan was going to throw a right tantrum if we didn’t see anything, even though this was her idea.  Thankfully, we caught a couple of the late risers.  Blurry, unprepared penguin action shots ahoy:

 

Apparently the water was as cold as it looked, if this guy’s reaction is anything to go by:

One rather different place that Oamaru has is the Steampunk HQ  - a museum/installation filled with various artefacts done in the ‘Steampunk’ style.  For the uninitiated, Steampunk is a genre of fiction, art or dress-up (sorry, Cosplay) which is best described as science-fiction from a Victorian perspective.  So airships, trains, flamboyant vacuum-tube electrical devices and steam power feature heavily. So Jules Verne and HG Wells would give you the right idea.

We saw some weird shit.

On the drive from Oamaru to Dunedin, we stopped to look at the Moeraki Boulders, which I artfully managed to photograph while keeping the legions of dickheads doing yoga poses on the rocks out of shot.

That's no moon

Dunedin (which is Edinburgh in Gaelic, by the way) is good for some ridiculously photogenic landscape.   We took a drive up to the Otago Peninsula, on which it resides.

Mind you, nothing was open again for dinner, so we ended up cooking for ourselves before my hungrygrump hit critical.

Since this post is more pretty pictures than substance, I'll mention the following day when we were driving to Milford Sound.  We pulled into the sensibly named Nugget Point, home of a prominent and still-active lighthouse which looks down on the rocks which were historically a significant hazard to small vessels to and from the nearby Clutha river.  It makes for some good photos:

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben Pinguine und Robben gesehen.  Wir besucht auch eine seltsame Museum.

Appeasing Bacchus in Blenheim

Another area that you’ll be familiar with if you haunt the aisles of the New World Wine at Tesco, you tragic example of middle-class binge drinking, is Marlborough.  The biggest town in the area is Blenheim, which was where we parked ourselves next.



I’m not going to lie to you: we didn’t do a great deal here other than taste wine.  To be fair - there isn’t a lot to do other than taste wine.  There was a museum we went to, but that was largely focused on wine.  So we joined a tour of ten being ferried around a selection of wineries by a local expert from Hop’n’Grape tours.  My pictures get worse as we went along for no reason that comes to mind.

Pictured: a reason

It was pissing down, but this proved no real inconvenience as outside was not where the action was. The first stop was an auspicious start, as our guide had a key to the otherwise deserted cellar door (wineries call their tasting rooms Cellar Doors, btw.  I didn’t know) which was closed up for the holidays.  Once he let us in, he took us through the facilities and up on top of the storage tanks.

 

He then popped open a 45,000 litre vessel of raw (prior to filtering and bottling) Sauvignon Blanc and scooped out a jugfull for our tasting.  It was rather moreish.

 

We tried a few of the wines from here.  Most of them actually.



We moved to the next place and tried these ten. They were OK too.

We stopped for lunch at the next place, as it had a decent restaurant on site, after trying these three:



The food was both necessary at this point and rather excellent.

  

Let's go to the judges for the half-time analysis:



Then we went to another winery, this time named Nautilus - after the cephalopod. Apparently the shell of said beastie forms one of the finest forms of natural logarithmic spirals.  I honestly cannot fathom what this has to do with making booze from grape juice but I’m sure it’s something really deep and nuanced. Chan says they did say, but I think I was reading the back of a bottle or something.

Fuck only knows

Anyhow, we drank these five:

 

The photos are starting to feel my influence. The 2010 Pinot Noir ‘Four Barriques’ that you can’t quite make out on the top-left is actually quite sought after and totally wasted on the likes of me. I only drink Pinot Noir because I’ve seen Sideways.

  

The last place we visited was one of those worthy, organic places.  Chan assures me we drank (lets not pretend we were ‘tasting’ anymore)  at least another three on top of those shown. The ‘Tangle’ one was a bit of a cacophony – Pinot Gris, Riesling and Gewürztraminer. It was chaos in a glass, to be honest.  You can buy it in Waitrose, if you can even read the labels after your lunchtime gin, you glorious disaster.

And that was enough, I think. Fun.  Let’s ask the judges for their final analysis:



Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben viele, viele Weine versucht. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, dass Ich Gewürztraminer mag aber ich freue mich, kann ich es aussprechen.