Yellow eyed penguins and steam punk

We've slowed down the last couple of days. I think it was because the weather turned for the worse. On Monday we had such a beautiful day with warm dry winds blowing in from the north. Yesterday the weather changed to blustery, cold and wet weather coming in from the south. Which is strange to me, like many other things. The days are getting longer, the sun tracks in the northern part of the sky from right to left, cold weather comes from the south, and I'm driving on the left. All opposite from what to expect in Canada.

Oamaru has an impressive Main Street with large imposing white limestone buildings on a broad avenue. Some of the buildings are very beautiful with Corinthian columns and ornate facades, all built in the late 1800's when this place was booming with profits from a gold rush and other businesses. Now the town is much smaller, and I found it strange to find so few people on the street, which was built at a time when the future seemed brighter. I am told that while other towns were pulling down some of these old but impressive buildings in the 60's and 70's, Oamaru was so bankrupt that they didn't have the money to do so. Good thing, because now days the buildings have great heritage value. Also, the 60's and 70's were not a great time for architecture, in my view, with its minimalist rectangle shaped buildings in vogue.

The town of Oamaru is now one sleepy place. We learned this soon enough after trying unsuccessfully to find a café that was open after 4:00 p.m. Just about every attraction runs between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. I suppose we have only ourselves to blame for only seeing one attraction per day, since we're getting up so late.

Yesterday we visited a Steam Punk museum in Oamaru, which was a blast. I didn't know anything about this science fiction sub-genre until I saw it. It's supposed to combine steam powered machines, sometimes from the Victorian era, in a fantasy alternate future. We saw imaginations gone wild with locomotives turned into flying machines, a crazy oversized chopper motorcycle made out of farm machines and other parts, and other bizarre machines made from mixing parts. My favourite exhibit was a glass room where the hanging lights turned different colours as the music played, transporting us to another dimension. Every direction we looked was saw copies of ourselves out to infinity. Very freaky.

Today was John's 13th birthday so he decided what to do. We ended up at a park next to the shore where a white sandstone sculpture competition was going on. The kids enjoyed the play structures next to the sculptures, especially the zip-line and a large wooden hamster wheelchair which we could get spinning very fast when we walked and then ran in it. The trick was trying to stop it. Usually one of us would fall first and slide along while the others kept running. It was a hoot!

Later we had lunch in a café with nice views of the shore. It reminded me of Nova Scotia on this cool, cloudy day with a view of the sandy and rocky shore, with a variety of fishing boats moored in the harbour. Later in the afternoon we went to see the movie Everest in 3D. True to the Kiwi theme of this leg of our trip, some of the characters in the movie were from New Zealand. The movie was pretty good by the way.

In the evening we went for sushi at a local Japanese restaurant and then later went to see some yellow-eyed penguins waddle on shore at dusk looking to find their nests for the night. They are a bit shy so we were lucky to see them. I understand they are endangered so hopefully they are not disturbed and allowed to flourish.

Here's John about to blow out the candles.