Boxing Day

Another early morning. I would sell my mother for another 2 hours sleep. We drift through the empty city to the bus stop and load our gear onto the bus to Dunedin, and proceed through alternating tropic and arctic temperatures through the morning. (The driver is cold. He turns on the heating. When it reaches 35 degrees he gets hot. He turns off the heating. When it reaches 15 degrees he gets cold. He turns on the heating. And so on.) The country is flat, fenced and utterly tame. The only things that stand out from the landscape are huge box hedges grown along the sides of the fields as windbreaks. Marcin says Ahh... the land of the long green tree, and we laugh halfway to Dunedin. I don't feel a moment's regret for not riding on this road: the traffic is heavy, the wind howls, and the cultivation is relentless.


From Dunedin we ride up to Sawyers Bay along the harbour rimmed with petrol storage tanks and industrial buildings emitting a questionable smell. My friend Ange and her partner Renee have just bought a house up there, with a soft green lawn and a spectacular vegetable patch which sends me into the first of several pastoral reveries. We sleep in their guest room in the most beautiful bed in the world. I tell Marcin that we should consider acquiring this sort of linen for our guests and he says We should have it for ourselves, you show off pony.

We graze their Christmas leftovers for several hours and then they take us down the peninsula to see the penguins. The sun doesn't set until about 10:00 at this time of year so we have plenty of time. They show us a sheep farm where you can go and choose a sheep to produce you a custom made jumper. You pick the colour and the type of wool and they send you the jumper and pictures of the naked sheep as proof of its provenance. At the end of the peninsula there is a car park perched on windy cliffs, with an albatross colony (the only mainland one in the world) on the outcrop above and the sea beating on the rocks below. We see some albatross and smell some seals (they stink like an old can of tuna which has been left in the fridge for a week). Renee knows everything about the plants and animals in the area- she is a marine biologist working for the Dunedin City Council, and tells us that young female sea lions often turn up on the beaches around Dunedin where they go to escape rape by romantically inclined males.


Then we settle down to wait for the penguins. As sunset approaches a small crowd gathers, including a pair of Americans who cannot shut up and commentate every vacuous thought that goes through their heads. We are waiting to see the disturbance of the water which marks the approach of the penguins as they come ashore in a 'raft'- it is a windy evening and every ruffle on the water is discussed extensively by the Americans. The penguins (more cautious than David Attenborough would have us believe) wait until the sun has set to come ashore. They waddle hesitantly out of the scrub, freezing every time a flash goes off or somebody shifts and mutters. It takes them over an hour to be convinced it's safe enough to come out of the bushes. They move slowly up to their burrows and we start to hear the happy sounds of homecoming.

Anyway, the whole process was very long for someone who has watched too many nature documentaries and expects penguins to leap out of the water and race heedlessly for home. More like the 'making of ' extra, where you see how long it really takes to film five beautiful minutes of animal activity (eg three years in a row of failed snow leopard expeditions to the Himalaya before getting any footage at all.)