Living in New Zealand: What is There to Do in Oamaru?
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We arrived in Oamaru on a Wednesday evening and it was pretty quiet, with few locals in the street. They were outnumbered by a coachload of Asian tourists who were drifting around. The most obvious attraction in Oamaru is the little blue penguin colony at the end of Friendly Bay (see my earlier post).
Here are some of the other things to do in Oamaru:
1. Spot trains.
2. Walk around the independent shops in the Victorian precinct. There was a building boom between 1875 and 1883 when Oamaru was a busy port, making a lot of money from wool & grain exports and using the local limestone to put up some pretty impressive buildings.
3. Dress up like a Victorian (there was a festival the weekend after we were there in November).
4. Get into the steampunk
5. Drink beer. You can go to the oldest pub in town, The Criterion, which has Emerson beers on tap. Or you can go to Fat Sally’s, which seems to be a Speights Alehouse in disguise, but had cheap beer and a quiz on a Wednesday. Or you can go to our favourite, which was the Scotts Brewery. This was in an old railway shed. The owners had wanted to put the brewery in one of the old Victorian buildings, but they couldn't get insurance for an old stone building.
6. Drink some whiskey. There is an award-winning whiskey company in the old town.
7. Walk along the esplanade and see lots of shags (cormorants) and seals.
8. Walk near the beaches at night and see penguins or you can go and see them at the covered area. They have given the penguins nesting boxes here and they even have their own gardener.
9. Go secondhand shopping, although the op shops are so much more expensive than in Christchurch. There is, however, a really good secondhand store that has well-organised old tools and bric-a-brac, etc, with very fair prices (unlike the very expensive but beautifully organised Hampden store just down the road from Oamaru).
10. Check out the small, but lovely Forrester Gallery, which has some Colin Wheeler paintings as well as other artwork from Oamaru and around.
11. Go to the farmers market on a Sunday morning.
12. Head out to the Waitaki Valley where there are wineries and the famous Whitestone Cheese Company.
13. Enjoy being in a quiet, friendly town.
Living in New Zealand: Little Blue (Don't Call Them Fairy) Penguins
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The biggest tourist attraction in Oamaru is the little blue penguin colony at the end of Friendly Bay, but you find little penguins all around New Zealand. NZ has three types of penguin. The yellow-eyed penguin/hoiho (endangered, with numbers crashing, possibly due to fishing activities), the Fiordland crested penguin/tawaki and this little penguin/kororā.
I used to volunteer as a penguin guide at the breakwater in St Kilda when I lived in Melbourne, so I saw plenty of little penguins there too. I still have a scar on my lip as a souvenir of an up close and personal encounter (when I was holding a penguin for the penguin researchers to measure). So I wasn't prepared to pay to go and see the penguins in Oamaru, but since I knew the type of place penguins like to nest, I walked to the beach in the evening and found plenty wandering around.
Reasons to Be Cheerful - First Broad Beans of the Season
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The boyf and I love broad beans, but he likes to do that double peeling thing. That makes them expensive to buy and this is the first year we have grown our own, yay!
Illustrated Epistle Extract: Things That Will Kill You in New Zealand
Since we have been back in Lyttleton, we've had a few small tremors (3-ish on the Richter scale) and a larger jolt (4-ish) and I'm glad our house is timber and that the chimneys were taken down after the two big Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. We live on a hill and there are some large rocks above us, but there are also large trees and buildings in between us and those rocks, so having those rocks come tumbling down in an earthquake is less of a worry than in some other places. A 7.8 earthquake in Kaikoura in 2016 caused massive landslips that closed Highway 1 (Yes the major road connecting New Zealand's north to its south) for over a year, so being protected from slips and rockfalls is a something you have to consider.
At least being on a hill there is less risk of tsunami. In 1868, a tsunami drained Lyttelton Harbour and then ran up 3 metres above sea level, causing damage to wharves, jetties and boats, inundating paddocks and drowning sheep. It was due to an 8.5-9.0 earthquake that happened in what was then Peru (see Te Ara entry). Our house is about 40 metres above sea level, which puts us at low risk of tsunami damage, unless we are down at the pub on London Street, though even there it would have to be massive.
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This is an extract of my Illustrated Epistle, which goes out in the middle of the month. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a cartoonist (specifically, mine). I'd love it if you signed up at the bottom of this page, or here:
http://eepurl.com/cCOOeD
