[update: added dam info and panorama]
Spent the night in Otago at a holiday park and then in the morning went to the Royal Albatross colony at the end of the Otago Penisula. It was interesting to hear all about the alabatross. They’re huge, for starters — their wing span is about 10 feet across. They mate for life, hatch a chick and then the chick gets fed and kept warm for many months and then flies to sea alone. The birds stay at sea, sleeping and eating and will stay at sea for about 5 YEARS. Then they return to breed. The colony is (of course) on a high windblown cliff side. 
Unfortunately we only got to see an adult one when it was fairly far out at sea, but it was really big and obviously an albatross — they have big wings that barely flap at all and they fly so low they are practically skimming the waves. In this picture at left is a shag colony (sort of a cormorant kind of bird) and the little smudge of white in the lower right is an albatross chick. Really.
This is a shot off the albatross colony cliff. At the bottom is bull kelp, a massive seaweed that washes up on the beaches. We encountered some dried kelp on the first Pacific beach a few days ago (the one with the black pebbles) and that dried kelp is strong as steel.
And then we hit the open road. The next destination was to be Queenstown and the pass west through the mountains to the west coast. As we headed west and slowly gained altitude, we chanced upon the Roxburgh Power Station — billed as “the greatest engineering feat in NZ”, at least in the mid 1950’s when it was completed. That’s Lake Roxburgh (manmade, obviously) piling up to the left there, and that lake stretches back upstream for 20 miles.
We finally encountered a living hedgehog (albeit one-eyed) on the highway! 
Up until now they’ve all been mashed by cars. As we left the dam (not another soul in sight, by the way), Chris spotted it in the road. We got up close to it and it peeped once and just sat there even after we tried to shoo it out of the road. Darwin at work.
We spent the night in Cromwell about an hour outside of Queenstown. 
Cromwell is a former gold mining town from the late 1800’s. It’s now been built up a bit with new construction and looks like a Las Vegas ghost town crossed with the weird barrenness of Westworld. To Chris it felt like the subdivision in Poltergeist (“you only moved the tombstones!”). Its current claim to fame is its orchards, apparently (see photo). More fish and chips for dinner.
Potpourri:
Chris is obsessed with the hedgerows that rise with military precision between fields of sheep and/or crops to act as windbreaks. He will taunt his dad with many pictures of them when he gets home.
More funny names: Muttontown, Remarkable Peak, Mount Damfool, Mount Inaccessible.
Gambling on horse and dog racing is legal in NZ, as is prostitution.
We crossed “the longest bridge in New Zealand” somewhere south of Christchurch. The folks here have a very generous definition of “bridge”. A causeway 10 feet above the ground is not a bridge, mates.
The houses here are charmingly small and often have well-tended gardens of roses and dahlias in the front yard. There are also many conifers and eucalyptus; very similar to the coasts of California. We’ve passed lots of orchards down in the south island; plums, cherries, apricots, apples, olives.
Us!
On to Queenstown …