17th October – Invercargill

After a day of chores, there were still a few more fun things that we wanted to do in Invercargill and so first stop was the Museum and Art Gallery where the Tuatara lived.

We’d heard that Tuatara are the closest thing do dinosaurs still on earth and the museum proclaimed them to ‘the last representatives of a lineage stretching back 225 million years’. We have to admit that we were expecting something a little bit more substantial than the almost duplicate lizards that we saw. Apparently, even though they do look like lizards, they are a totally distinct species of Sphenodonians that roamed all over the earth many millions of years ago. About 60ish million years ago, along with the dinosaurs, they became extinct in everywhere but NZ.

The art gallery section housed some very life-like pastels, some great photography and some community art. There was a project where teenagers made sculptures from tins of food that would later be donated to the Salvation Army and a room dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues.

My favourite bit was the museum though. They had lots of exhibits and information but we spent the most time looking at the section of shipwrecks and the people who had (sometimes) survived them.  There were some amazing stories and examples of how resourceful the people had been. There were castaway huts containing provisions on some of the islands, just in case people were shipwrecked, but they could not always be found, were sometimes already empty and did not contain very much in general. One bunch survived 7 years but many were not so lucky.

Less than unlucky were the thousands and thousands of poor whales, penguins and seals that were plundered for their resources for  a number of years. There were charts of how the numbers had dwindled, to nothing in some areas, and pictures of how prolific they had been during earlier times.  There was even an example of a dreadful machine, a ‘steam digester’,  used to process penguins and produce oil. Four machines like that destroyed 3,500 per day (plus an additional 500 birds to help fuel the boiler).

Further on in the exhibition, more gigantic stuffed albatross made us seriously consider driving all the way back to Dunedin to go to the reserve. We made more enquiries and there was no guarantee of seeing them because they were nesting so I reluctantly decided it wasn’t worth the distance, time and money. Guess that means we’ll also have to come to New Zealand again too!

Next stop was Invercargill Micro-Brewery, where they had a fill-you-own pump shop and where we were treated to a taste of all of their creations. They were all so lovely that it was hard to narrow them down but we eventually walked away with a bottle of nice apply cider and some pale ale.

We drove Garry to Oreti Beach where he could actually go on the sand himself. Oreti Beach is where Burt Munroe (The World’s Fastest Indian) used to practice beating the land speed record and so Matt had a play while I went for a good jog. I’d really missed my Oz beach exercise and it was a bit of a contrast to do it next to a grey sea and in wet and windy weather but I enjoyed it anyway.