The Otago Peninsula

On Sunday 13. October Marcell, Rachel, Jenna, Nate and I headed out to visit some new sights on the Otago Peninsula. We started quite early in the morning because we had a lot of different attractions in mind. Our first stop was Larnach Castle, the only castle Dunedin has to offer.

The castle was built by the well-known Larnach family in the late 19th century and its estimated worth runs up to an impressive worth of $900 million  according to Wikipedia.

One of the heaps of pretentious living rooms the castle offers its residents.

View from one of the sleeping rooms down to the rambling gardens and the entry driveway.

Standing on top of the castle you can not only see the whole Otago peninsula on the right side but also the mainland on the left side of the picture and as well as the Pacific ocean and Dunedin´s harbour.

Every castle needs at least one tower, so does Larnach Castle. Unfortunately there was no way of climbing up to the top of the tower and replacing the kiwi flag with the much more gorgeous Austrian flag ;)

In the ostentatious Ball Room of the castle you can either wine and dine or just relax in front of one of the numerous chimneys and sip a cup of excellent English tea.

The lush vegetation of the castle´s gardens has a lot to offer, so we spent at least a full hour strolling around in the gardens exploring the beauty of nature.

By then we were getting quite hungry and it was obviously time to leave this stunning location behind us and get some lunch. After eating some delicious sandwiches in a restaurant nearby we drove further out the peninsula until we reached the very end of it.

The tip of the peninsula does not only afford the highly noticed Albatross Center but you also encounter myriads of seagulls there.

Here I was reminiscing of my childhood when my brother and me were trying to catch some pigeons or seagulls when we were on a vacation in Sienna, Italy. As a kid I was pretty sure that it would get a lot easier to actually catch one once I´d be grown up... Well, today I think that I had far better chances as a kid....

Group picture in front of the lighthouse that marks the tip of the Otago Peninsula.

The peninsula is a paradise for all sorts of animals: from albatrosses and seagulls to seals and penguins that inhabit the numerous stunning beaches.

We decided that it was time for a little hike so we drove back to the starting point of our tramping tour and walked up into the terrific, bucolic hills of the peninsula.

Jenna, Marcell and me somewhere en route to the top. You can see a lot of sheep and their lambs in the background of the picture. September is the main season for lambing and a lot of tramping paths are actually closed due to lambing. So we were quite lucky to find a path that wasn´t closed!

Dusk was already approaching so we decided to visit one more place today: Tunnel Beach. The diligent readers among you will now realize that I´ve already been at Tunnel Beach, but most of the others of our group haven´t and it´s such a breath-taking place that I didn´t mind to come back and visit it again. I only took that one picture this time but if you want to see more pictures of this stunning place, which is definitely one of the Top 10 places in New Zealand you can go to, just go back to my post from July :)


One week later on Sunday 20th September we came back to the peninsula to explore Allans Beach to (hopefully) finally encounter some seals and penguins. And indeed we found some!

Marcell bandying looks with a youngster-seal.

 Don´t get too close Marcell! :P    Seals can get quite aggressive if someone´s getting too close to them!

 Two other seals are relaxing further down at the beach.

 This doozy was so massive that we didn´t even try to get any closer than 5 or 6 meters to it!

Astonishing ambience at dusk at Allans beach. This is supposedly the best time to see the "little blue penguins", the worlds smallest penguins and a very rare species, but unfortunately we didn´t find any.... So we might have to come back to this mind-blowing beach at some point to finally see some penguins!