Here's a Penguin, There's a Penguin, Everywhere a Penguin, Penguin.

Katelyn, Illona and I started out our trip  uberly early in the morning- I am definitely starting to perfect the art of rolling out of bed and being ready to go.

Illona is definitely prepared with her coffee and backpack baby

We took the nakedbus from Christchurch to Oamaru- about a 3 1/2 hour bus ride. We're spending the night in the Empire Backpackers hotel- aka hostel. This cute little hostel is downtown, and filled with victorian age pictures, and randomly patterned carpets. It's managed by a cute little elder women and her  much spoiled cat Tigger. It definitely has character, but it's clean and everyone(including Tigger) is super nice. 

The Empire Hotel door greeter, aka Tigger

After finding our room and settling in, we walked down the road to the cheese factory for lunch. Unfortunately, they don't serve lunch anymore(or the cheesecake we kept hearing about, drat) but we decided to share a sample cheese board between the three of us. The board had six different kinds of cheese arranged from mildest(brie) to strongest(their world famous, award winning Windsor Blue). From the first bite of brie I was gone. Every single piece of cheese just kept geting better and better until the end when I bit into their Windsor Blue, which tasted like heaven. 

Heaven

After the cheese factory we decided to go visit the penguins. But first, since we had a little bit of time left until the penguins returned to shore, we wandered through the historic(Victorian era) Oamaru. The 3-4 story tall stone buildings certainly made it feel like the era along with the young boys riding around on penny farthing bicycles. Yes, you heard right Penny Farthing bicycles. You know, those ones with the giant front wheel and the tiny one behind? Intrigued, we wandered over to the shop they had come from. Inside we met an extremely enthusiastic older man, dressed in period clothing, who told us all about these strange bikes. He insisted we tour the entire building, part of which contained a board of wacky beards. It was only after the man had exhausted his tour that we were able to leave.

We left the flat part of town to go up a super steep road-still on our quest to find penguins. We made it to the top of the road, only to take a quick detour to the town's over-look for some pictures.

After snapping much to many pictures, we were off again- only this time over some slightly less steep terrain. We followed the road past sheep paddock after sheep paddock until the surround hillside gave way to hills that just rolled right into the ocean, well hills covered in sheep of course. 

We finally reached the reserve, but sadly the beach was already closed off in anticipation for the penguins to start their daily journey home. This just meant we had to hike to the overlook to start our penguin hunting adventure. At the overlook we met the daily penguin counter, who told us that it would be about 1-1 1/2 more hours before the birds would be on the cliffs. With nothing else to do, we huddled together in front of the wall to wait. 

Not quite a penguin, but still cute!

Eventually there was an outcry of "Penguin!" as the first bird waddled out of the waves. Slowly, more and more penguins approached  and then disappeared into the surrounding bush/cliff side back to their nests.

Mr. Yellow eyed penguin in his finest!

All in all, we waited 2 hours until one of the birds finally came up to it's nest. At this point we were absolutely freezing, and Illona wan't feeling very good, so we started the long, cold, and now rainy, hike back. 

Katelyn and I finished the night next to a fire watching America's Funniest Home Video's of all things...