It was a very foggy morning so we didn't really see where we had spent the night. After breakfast we took the road as far away from Milford Sound as possible and drove to Dunedin. The only interesting thing on this four-hour trip was that they'd named the road linking the towns of Gore and Clinton the Presidential Highway. We stopped at a scenic spot for our picnic and arrived in Dunedin at about 2pm. We checked into the hostel which was comfy but smelled of cat-wee, and then had a look at the map and decided to go and see a castle and some penguins.

Dunedin is quite a nice place and some of the houses are made of bricks, not wood. Even more remarkable is that some of the houses have more than one storey! Incredible. It's a hilly town, it has a big harbour and a curvy bay. Further out of town, along a peninsula, are an albatros colony, some penguins and a castle. We had directions and a map, and a suggestion for the best beach for penguin-spotting, so off we went.

The sun was slowly setting as we reached the peninsula, so we knew that we wouldn't make the albatrosses tonight. We made our way up to New Zealand's only castle, though, and spent a while walking round the grounds. It wasn't exactly a castle, more a big old house with battlements, but it had great views and nice gardens and was worth seeing. The hostel lady suggested that the nest time to see penguins was at dusk, about 3.30, and it was already past that time, so we drove to the other side of the peninsula and found the beach.

Yellow-eyed penguins come out of the sea in the evening all round this area. They are the rarest of all the penguins and there are only about three thousand of them in the world. Many signs along the path to the hide said that they wouldn't come out of the sea if they can see people there, so please stay out of sight. And don't molest the sealions as they are big and can get grumpy. So off we went, across the sand and down an enourmous dune that would be horrible to climb back up. Going down was great, just like walking on the moon (as we all know) because you could just leap about five feet on each step and land softly. Once on the beach, it wasn't just time for the penguins to come ashore. A number of massive sea lions were shuffling in on their outsized flippers. It was amazing to watch them in their natural habitat, being here cos they wanted to be rather than because they had nowhere else to go. We walked past a couple of tree trunks washed up on the beach, and as we came close they grunted and we realised that they were sleeping sealions. We were supposed to keep about 15ft distance (legal minimum) but there wasn't that much room between them and the water, so we kept what we hoped was a safe I-can-outrun-them-from-here distance instead. I didn't know that they could actually reach speeds of 15mph over short distances. We didn't need to find out though, as they just rolled over and got comfy again and went back to sleep.

We finally found the hide built into the sand dunes so that the penguins wouldn't be disturbed by us watching them. There were quite a few people squeezed in, including some English people, one of whom uttered the immortal words, 'Oh, we heard about you on the radio,' when we said we'd spent a few extra days in Milford Sound. Wonderful.

Gradually, as it got really dark, the penguins washed themselves out of the sea on the waves and waddled up onto the rocks. After we'd seen about half a dozen and were completely frozen, we walked back to the car. Mikey refused to carry me up the giant sand dune, which was totally unfair. I was not impressed.

Back in Dunedin we made supper and headed out to the cinema. We finally saw Spiderman because we'd seen everything else that didn't have teenage American girls in it, and I actually really enjoyed it. I didn't like the first one at all, but this was much better. Back at the hostel we decided to stay another day in Dunedin because we still wanted to see albatrosses and do a bit of shopping, and then we went to sleep.