Because we'd now have less time in Christchurch than we'd planned, I wanted to do a quick bit of shopping in Dunedin, before going to the Cadbury chocolate factory. We'd booked the albatross tour for later, so we wandered round Dunedin town for a bit. It isn't very big, but it does have those amazing-sounding traffic lights that they have in Auckland, so I was happy crossing all the roads I could. They also have a slightly-funky shopping area called the Octagon, and that's about it. Nice place, not much of it.

Once at Cadbury's, we had to reorganise our date with the albatrosses as the next factory tour wasn't for almost an hour. We waited patiently, and I complained about the state of New Zealand chocolate. Of course, being Kiwis, they all felt their Cadbury's chocolate was the best, but they did explain why there was such a difference in taste: our cocoa beans come from Ghana, where they have a richer flavour, rather than Malaysia; their chocolate has more sugar; our milk had more fat (cos our cows eat more grain - the kiwi cows only eat grass), and they refine their chocolate more.

The factory tour was very short as it was a Sunday and no-one was working, but they did take us to the famous chocolate waterfall, where they pour a ton of melted chocolate about 20 feet, which smelled nice. After lunch we drove all the way out to see the albatros colony. Normally, albatrosses don't nest near people, but these have been happy here since the 1930s, and they have about 150 birds here. At this time of year they just have the chicks, who are massive and almost ready to fly - the parents are off catching food to feed their 20-pound babies. We watched a video and then went up to the observatory were we could see four chicks. They are almost six months old, and will be flying in the next few weeks. It was incredible but difficult to see the scale of the birds - they have a nine-foot wingspan and are about three feet tall. We'll definitely be returning one summer to see the adult birds.

The rest of our group were a bunch of Japanese guys doing their infamous 'ticking' tours - seen this, been here, done that. They spent longer watching the black and white video feed of the birds than looking out of the windows at the animals themselves. On the way back, I asked our guide where the best place to see penguins was, and he told Mikey and I about his secret store of blue penguins (the smallest penguins in the world) and took us round the back of the building to show us their nests in the fork-lift holes of a giant metal container. They made a lot noise when we approached, and we could just see some silhouettes in the back.

At dusk we went down to the suggested penguin beach and waited in the cold. A weird ecologist lady started talking to us, and said that the penguins wouldn't be around until after dark, so we waited in the car for a bit. Then we waited, and froze, on the beach for a bit until we could see a black raft of small birds leaving the sea and heading up the sand. Because they are so small they tend to stick in groups for protection, and while not too scared by noise, they are intimidated by our height. The best way to see them is to lie on the beach along the path they will take and let them waddle past. And they did - a whole whatever the collective noun for penguins is. It was another incredible sight, these tiny creatures deciding we weren't a threat and walking past our noses, stopping for a stare at us every now and then. A second group came ashore a few minutes later, and then, when a few more penguins had retreated down the beach and I thought they might have been disturbed by us, Mikey and I started walking back to the car so that everyone else on the beach would follow and leave the birds alone, which they did. On the way up the road in the dark we could hear them all calling to one another, a strange trilling squeak, which seemed to surround us. As we were somehow leading the bunch of Japanese tourists up the road, everytime we saw a penguin looking all scared and too close to people, we took a deliberately wide path round, which the group also took. And at the car we searched under the wheels before driving off, because I was terrified of running one of them over. It was amazing to have been able to see these little creatures in the wild.

In Dunedin we went to an internet cafe to update the website (finally!) and check mail. There was a guy there having a net meeting in Maori which was quite cool to listen to. We made supper and tried to watch television but there were too many people there, so we went to bed and read instead.