10/25/18: PENGUINS

First up, thank you very much to those who have sent nice notes or commented here. I always keep a personal diary when I travel but this is the first time I’ve ever shared any of those writings—why would anyone want to read my horse-poo travel diary?! However, it turns out it’s been kind of fun to think about which stories to include here and if you’re enjoying them I’m glad. That said, today’s diary entry is lengthy, all about animals, and potentially depressing so the salient points are these: trip continues to be great, New Zealand continues to be amazing, I am researching sheep farmer courses, today it rained* so I did laundry, loafed around Dunedin, and read a book (The Witch Elm—not my favorite Tana French book, by a long shot). Tomorrow, better weather and back out on the bike. 😊

Once upon a time, about a million and a half years ago, when I was a teenager, I went on a week-long whale watching expedition (remember this, Amy?!). That trip came to mind Tuesday night, as I sat shivering in silence, having been cautioned repeatedly not to make any noise or movement, and certainly under no circumstances to try to take pictures, waiting for ages for little blue penguins to return home from a day at sea.

My stepsister and I shared a tiny cabin on the whale-watching boat, and I have a vague memory that the shower and the toilet were the same thing and a pump of some kind was involved. I feel like there was a lady crew member who was both terrifying and compelling—did she smoke a pipe? I think we played a lot of cards on that trip, and that it was always cold and windy. But I absolutely remember distinctly spending the first two days hanging over the side of the boat, scanning the waves endlessly, certain at any moment I would spot a flipper or a puff from a blowhole. I also remember getting photos developed from that trip and finding picture after picture of the ocean, in which a determined eye might possibly be able to maybe discern something that might have been a part of a whale.

By the end of the week, whales were playing with our boat—two of them, swimming under and coming up on the other side, the spray from their blowholes in our faces, the striation of their sides and the barnacles on them just feet away from us. I have maybe two pictures from that day, not because the thrill of the whale had worn off—have you been eye-to-eye with a whale? I would NEVER tire of that—but because the need to document the experience had. Those first few days I took pictures of everything, thinking THAT was going to be my experience, and if I didn’t capture it I wouldn’t have anything to remember the trip by. But of course I was wrong: I still have that picture of the whale’s great eye, the water streaming down its head, the startling texture of its skin, scarred and wrinkled, and that picture doesn’t live on film.  

Which is all to say I don’t think I’ll sign up for another evening spent freezing in the mist off the ocean while a stern-eyed ranger watches for a hint of movement or the glow of a cell phone, but by god that one night was wonderful. I wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm: here’s what the place looked like at 7:29, right before the doors opened at 7:30.

Little blue penguins are exactly that: little (under a foot tall!) and blue. They swim as far as 50 kilometers in a day (your guess is as good as mine but it sure sounds far), and then every evening around dusk they come home and head back to their nests for, presumably, two fingers of scotch and a good night’s sleep. (Some of them have children to feed and I believe that involves regurgitation so we’ll pass over that.) The colony of little blue penguins I visited has chosen their locale rather poorly, in my estimation: sure, the nesting area looks like a cozy hobbit town, but the road home is a daunting one and involves being deposited on this rocky shore by crashing waves.

These penguins come ashore in “rafts” and the term is perfect—suddenly a group of little heads and bodies, all bunched together, appears from the mists and comes swiftly toward the land. They do get dashed against the rocks, and I saw more than one penguin get sucked back into the ocean only to be flung up again and scramble to find its feet out of reach of the waves. Once ashore, each raft of penguins (anywhere from 10-20 penguins in a raft the night I was there) followed almost exactly the same path. They all regrouped on a flat rock just above the tide and stood there for a while. Then they started hopping (they have no knees!) up the rocks and paused just below this big fat fur seal that was lolling around on a ledge. At some point, they started up and ran past him, heads low and forward, flippers out, looking for all the world like they were desperately chanting “you can’t see me, you can’t see me,” under their little penguin breath. They’d pause again, past the fur seal, and stand around with their flippers held straight out as if to say “Holy shit! We made it!” After a few minutes of that, it was one more hopscotch up the last section of rocks to the stretch of lawn they’d waddle-run across, in that wonderfully comedic penguin way, and end up under the boardwalk where they’d pause again before eventually making their ways to their nests and home. This is the fur seal, in the classic butt-scratching pose.

There were two guides around, one of whom was raft-spotting and charged with counting each penguin that arrived, and the other who had a microphone and provided us with penguin facts in between rafts. The counter guide would whisper the count of each raft to the microphone guide, and I was unexpectedly charmed when, each time, she would announce to us, “That’s another 11 little blue penguins who have made it safely home.”

What they don’t tell you, when you buy a ticket, is that the penguins get home when they well and truly feel like it, which means you can be shivering in the increasingly frigid mist for hours if you’d like, waiting for raft after raft of little blue penguins. What they do tell you is that your imagined story about the penguin’s journey is way more dramatic than the reality of the situation. For example, penguins pause and hold their flippers out because they need to reduce their body temperature from a hard day’s swimming. Fur seals don’t generally eat penguins, so the circumstances of their interaction were not life or death. The penguins take their time getting up the rocks because they’re cooling down, not because they’re exhausted. They shit everywhere, and they are quite noisy. But still, like that long-ago week on a whale-watching trip, there was something unbelievable magical about seeing these little creatures going about their daily routines.

In the end, I was glad of the ban on photography, because I wouldn’t have been able to choose the right moment—I couldn’t have found the place where distant fins became enormous, fully present animals. Instead, the memory I will keep closest is that, after two hours and 91 little penguins safely home, I tiptoed away along the boardwalk, little blue penguins waddling around their hobbit town all around me, keening and cooing and chirping to each other, and the occasional chicks standing around their doorways, calling out for their parents to come home, to a cozy nest, some regurgitated food, two fingers of scotch, and a good night’s rest.    

Wednesday morning I bopped around a bit (tried to go to the Elephant Rocks, but the last 5km of road there was gravel and, she said primly, my rental agreement forbids travel on gravel roads**), then scooted down to Dunedin in time to make a 3pm tour reservation. I had no idea this was a SIX HOUR tour until about 30 minutes before, so I just had time to stuff water bottles and some snack mix into my backpack before I ran up to the Octagon to meet the tour. (A side note: I’d been SO COLD in Oamaru the night before that, upon realizing the tour was 6 hours long and involved several hours of walking outside, I decided to wear the warmest clothes I had, which is how I came to be tromping around in full motorcycle leathers. Everyone else was in hiking gear, and then me a walking advertisement for Rev’It. The worst was that no one commented on my outfit so I had no chance to explain that I was traveling for six weeks out of two panniers and a dry bag and choices had to be made.)

Donna, our tour guide, confirmed my hunch that New Zealand is run by determined ladies of a certain age (cf Lynda, Vanessa, and now Donna). Like Lynda, Donna can’t have been over 5 feet tall, but she was the boss of everything, including some 600-pound sea lions. Here’s Donna with her sea-lion stick: she had us walking right up to within 10 feet of them, protected by nothing more than this 90-pound grandmother and her pole.

As per usual, I hadn’t read the tour description all that closely because once I saw “penguins” I was in. Turns out the penguins were just *part* of the experience, and the main point was to introduce us to a variety of wildlife on the Otaga Peninsula, including a protected colony of albatross and some non-protected, real-life, seals, sea lions, and…penguins. (Thousands of sheep along the way were, as per, a bonus.)

We started off at the albatross colony and holy shit those are some big damn birds. We were fortunate to be buzzed by a couple of them, and I even managed a lousy picture or two (in my defense, they were *flying*). There were also a bajillion red-billed gulls, which Donna spoke of with rancor. I assumed they were nuisance birds but it turns out they are considered “vulnerable” but everyone hates them anyway because they too are noisy and shit everywhere.

Post-albatross area, we took some genuinely terrifying gravel roads (one track, sheer cliffs, etc.) over the top of the peninsula and to the other side. Our first stop was to observe a colony of seals, and at first it was great—lots of seal action, with wrestling seals and diving seals and seals hopping around the rocks on their flippers with their great dumb whiskery faces pointed at us. Then, the nature red in tooth and claw part: I couldn’t help but notice there were a few dozen seal pups around, some of whom looked awfully small and of those wee ones, were either curled up like little dogs or dragging themselves along, crying. No-nonsense Donna crisply informed me that only one-third of seal pups survive; the rest simply don’t get strong enough before their mothers leave them to go back to sea to fatten themselves up before they have another pup so they (the mothers) have a chance to survive—by the time the mothers return, the pups who live will be fending for themselves, and the ones who don’t live will be...gone. (There were plenty of adult males hanging about, but their responsibilities had apparently ended.)

There were one or two female seals still ashore, but Donna, again, informed me brusquely that they won’t feed any pups but their own, and while it’s a “bit of a shame,” the pups that die will be eaten by somebody else and hakuna matata the circle of life, etc.

I mean, I get it. But wow I was not ready to stand around on a cliff and look at a bunch of little tiny dying seals. There were plenty of healthy-looking pups, as well, bouncing around and watching the bigger seals play-fight; the ones who likely wouldn’t make it were obvious because their heads were bigger than their back ends, as Donna explained, and the sight of those little guys, either curled up in a ball on the rocks (asleep? dead?) or dragging themselves the wrong direction from food, away from the sea, crying, was really just a bit too much for me. Donna helpfully suggested that some of them might also be dying because their mothers had gone to get food and never come back—apparently there are sharks about—but that didn’t really make my overly-emotional anthropomorphizing any better. The little blue penguins had already done a bit of a number on me, and even the sight of some many fat, gallivanting little lambs wasn’t totally helping. The sheep tried their best, posing handsomely atop ridges, but still. Dying baby seals.

Fortunately, the last animals of the day were the perfect antidote to the dying baby seals. There were the sea lions, who are nocturnal hunters, so in the morning they just haul themselves up on the beach as far as they feel like going and then pass out, and then there were the yellow-eyed penguins. The sea lions are clearly a no-fucks-given kind of animal—we watched one big guy headed out to the ocean for the night and he would lumber (they look remarkably ursine in movement) a few paces toward the tide then flop down and wait for the waves to come to him before lumbering forward a bit more and repeating his performance. If I wasn’t swearing off anthropomorphizing, I’d say he looked exactly like a guy hitting the snooze button 11 times and really not looking forward to a day at work. (He's the guy on the left, here rising up to bellow at those damn kids to get off his beachlawn.)

And then these boys, all in a pile. 

The yellow-eyed penguins, it turns out, are very unlike their little blue brethren. They are almost double in size, and they are very much NOT social creatures. In fact, they are anti-social, and they are often eaten by sea lions, so watching each bird come ashore (elegantly—no rocks here) and then calculate his route around the dozing lions was somehow more interesting than raft after raft of little blues. 

These birds were doing their own thing, and they weren’t waiting around for the rest of the group to organize or move together. Yes, of course, I related—these are my spirit penguins! One key difference: I would make a terrible yellow-eyed penguin, because these masochists make their nests as far as 1 km (doesn’t sound that far but imagine you have to HOP the whole way) from shore and have to scale a bit of a hill to get there. Why not just nest at the bottom, guys? That is SO much hopping.

In conclusion, I (still, always) have a lot of feelings about animals. New Zealand is so constantly gorgeous it runs the risk of becoming routine—but just when I think I’ve seen the most picturesque hillside possible, a curve in the road reveals an entirely new and unexpected view. It is a rare privilege to get to experience this place, and doing so on a motorcycle is—I haven’t the words. All the sights and sounds are amplified, of course, as this isn’t exactly the kind of terrain to put on the cruise control and zone out, and yesterday it hit me—New Zealand even SMELLS good. Also, it has black swans and black ducks, so I feel sartorially a little more at home.

*There are two kinds of rain: a sporadic misting rain that is fine for riding in and then a type of downpour that makes riding not a good idea. 
**I HATE riding on gravel roads. HATE it.