Punks and Penguins

Punks and Penguins
Oamaru, New Zealand

Oamaru, New Zealand

After Christchurch we headed to Timaru, but this is a town so un-noteworthy we stayed the night, did nothing and saw nothing so it was a major relief the next day to arrive in Oamaru. Little did we know that this was going to be one of our favourite tiny towns in NZ.

Oamaru is the largest town in North Otago with a population of just 13,600. If you ask Wikipedia, there are all sorts of interesting places to see and of course Captain James Cook was here with the Endeavour at some point, but for us Oamaru won us over for 2 different reasons. Firstly it is the home to a fairly robust population of little blue penguins, so robust that they even camp out on our campsite so at about 11pm we were treated to a parade of penguins right past Blondini, secondly it is the home to Steampunk HQ making it the Steampunk capital of NZ. I know that I said it won us over for 2 reasons but I just remembered a third, it is the home to Whitstone Cheese which offers the most delicious cheese board lunches for just $20.

So first up the Little Blue penguins, we last saw these guys in Oz, when we were freezing out butts off in Tazmania, and seeing them here was equally as nippy, the first night we headed out at sunset and 3 hours later we still hadn’t seen a glimpse of the little buggers so we gave up and headed back to the warmth of Blondini. Just randomly at about 11pm I nipped out to the loo just as three penguins started to make their way through the campsite. I love these little feathered monkeys, they are so cute as they put their head down and make a run for their nest. For the next hour all we could hear was squawks from the babies demanding their dinner, so cute.

The main high street in Oamaru is really quite quaint, like you have stepped into the Victorian age, the huge limestone buildings tower above you and contain all sorts of eclectic art spaces and quirky shops. We found one particularly cool gallery just filled with strange paintings of huge heads. It was a spooky as it was cool and whilst it is not the sort of art I would want to live with visiting the gallery was great.

Steampunk HQ was just plain crazy, seriously some mad mad stuff has been created out of any old metal that can be found. The absolute highlight of a visit to the Steampunk HQ is a trip inside the Infinity Portal. When you arrive the crazy man on reception gives you a token for the portal and invites you to go back as many times as you want, needless to say we made at least 6 trips back to him. The Infinity Portal is a completely mirrored room with a platform to stand on and lights hanging down from the ceiling. The portal decends into darkness, crazy music starts playing and the lights perform a mesmerising sequence of flashing and colour changing. It was mind blowing, I want one of these in my house, if I ever have a house again!

Totally embracing the Steampunk madness of the town we found a lady that offers photo shoots, the vast majority of them are old Victorian style but she does have a few Steampunk accessories so we could not resist. Any excuse to dress up and act like a fool and we are there. She was so awesome in picking out the best clothes she had and getting us looking like true Victorian time travellers with an industrial edge. We headed over the Steampunk HQ confusing tourists and locals alike and we lazered them with our plastic guns and had so many laughs posing on the old train tracks and with the old rusted trains. We could only justify buying one photo, but I think it was a pretty good one, I could get used to dressing like a loon and living here!

Sadly we need to keep moving, inland we go to Lake Tekapo and Twizel.