Chocolate, Beer, & Nature

The past few days, we've spent some time in the lame college town of Dunedin. There is not much to do after the sun goes down so all of our experiences have been daytime experiences. We first started off by visiting the Cadbury chocolate factory. When you are pretty much within a kilometer of the building, you can simply close your eyes and use your nose to guide you to the chocolate factory. It's great, all nearby smells drowned out by chocolate. Once in the factory, we got ready for the tour like an operation room. We had to remove all jewelry and had to wear hair nets. I, the only one with the little facial hair that I have, had to wear a snood, which just covered the bottom part of my face and itched a lot. Very ridiculous and I disliked the tour guide a little more for making me put it on. We then commenced the tour and everyone got a bag with a chocolate bar. Along the way, we then learned about how the stuff was made and in different rooms, gained more samples of their many chocolate bars. Cadbury is definately superior to Hershey's!!! After we learned everything and got filled up on chocolate, and seeing their chocolate fountain, that actually serves no purpose, we headed to the gift store where I purchased more candy bars!!

After the chocolate tour, we headed a few blocks away to the Speights Brewery. Here, we had an awesome tour guided that had definately been doing it for far too long. But, he made the whole tour very fun and interesting and we learned about the history of beer, their beer and company, and saw where everything went down. After the tour, we then headed to their bar, where we sampled 6 of their 7 beers, including a chocolate ale, with chocolate from the Cadbury place. It was all good beer and a good time and I would also recommend trying it if you ever see it in any stores.

The next day, we took it pretty easy and later in the day, decided to take a little hike to see some wildlife like penguins and sealions and anything else. It was only about a 30 minute walk downhill in the sand to the beach. We managed to fill our shoes with plenty of sand! We then walked along the beach were we then came up to about 20 sealions that were all just chilling around and we got within probably 2 meters of them and they didn't seem to care. Then, we turned around to the water, where we saw one coming out from the water up to the beach. We walked up close to her and all of a sudden, she got angry or something and started to charge me. I screamed like a little girl, having a huge animal charging at me and turned and ran. Luckily, I'm faster than them wadleing at me, so I taunted her 2 more times. Then, one of the males from the group started flopping towards her and started doing some weird things. He kept acted like he was gonna take a chunk out of her head but it was probably some sort of mating thing. Strangely enough, we watched a bit more as they wrestled or whatever and then caught sight of a yellow-eyed penguin. We then ran to it. It was pretty neat seeing the penguin and it climbed up a hill for no apparent reason and then just stood on the side for a long time. We probably got within about 10 meters of that little guy. After pictures and watching a bit more, we headed back to our RV, where we had to run past the sealions that had spread out more across the beach and were making loud huffing noises. We then realized that the huge hill that I jumped down, was to be climbed now and that was not fun. That is why the lady said 30 minutes there and 40 minutes back! It's one thing to walk up a rocky hill, but another to hike up sand. Much like climbing around the badlands if you've done so. Out of breath though, we finally all made it back to the camper where we emptied out our shoes and headed back to town.