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During our stopover in Japan, Vicki and I headed to the Shingon Buddhist temple in Narita city.

According to Wikipedia:

This temple is one of the most well known in the Kant region of Japan and is only surpassed in visitors during the O-shogatsu period (lit: New year period) by the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. The temple grounds are composed of a main gate, a steep stairwell and the main buildings (including a couple of five-story pagodas), and a garden area with large pond. A very small zoo is also within the temple grounds.

One of the many temples at the Shingon Buddhist temple.

Cute turtle. There were hundreds of these all over the place.

Garden area at the Shingon Buddhist temple

Statues at the Shingon Buddhist temple

Nice view from behind one of the temples

Vicki Argyle and I experienced this awesome sunset while in Leiden in the Netherlands.

Ya know how in the movies the cows in Germany have bells on them? Well apparently those crazy Germans actually do attach bells to the poor cows! I have no idea why they do this. Imagine how insane you would go if some dork attached a bell around your neck! Every time you moved you would hear an irritating bell sound.

I took the photos in the Black Forest in south western Germany.

Continuing my trend of writing blog posts totally out of sync, here are some photos from a recent trip to the Otago Peninsula. I acted as tour guide for visiting student Meghan Dunn during her visit here. My previous attempts to find penguins for tourists has always failed. I usually the find the pesky little birds when I least expect it, but never when I’m trying to! So to avoid that frustration we headed to Penguin Place, a little sanctuary about 30 mins drive from my place.

Penguin Place is on a small piece of land on the coast. If you zoom in, you can see the constructions in the sand hills designed for tourists to watch the birds.

The birds aren’t caged, they’re allowed to come and go as they please, but are provided with warm, man made shelters which they seem to quite like living in. Before heading down to the main Yellow Eyed penguin area, we stopped to see some Baby Blue penguins which also lived there, you can see one sitting in it’s little hut in the photo below.

We watched the birds surfing in on the waves after a hard days work catching fish. This little dude took his time and sat out in the waves enjoying the scenery for a while.

But he eventually waddled his way out of the surf … 

and then met up with his little buddy who waddled back over the sandhill with him … 

but his friend treated it as a race … 

So he decided to lean back and have a stretch instead. All that fishing must have taken it’s toll!

He even posed for me

Our uber awesome, wonderful and truly incredible professional ice hockey coach Jenel Bode is leaving Hopefully she’ll be back next year though

Rhyan McMillan and our uber awesome coach Jenel Bode

For her goodbye bash, she organised a goodbye party in a cave at Longbeach. It sounded boring, getting stuck in a cave all evening on a cold, wet, rainy day Luckilly Sarah was heading out to take Jane so I hitched a ride along so I could make an appearance and bail home early with Sarah. Darn glad I went though, coz it was totally awesome. The cave was wicked, the fire kept us all cosy warm, everyone had fun and there was loads of entertainment provided by my teammates who provided firebreathing, guitar and flame throwing demonstrations for us all. There were even baby blue penguins in the back of the cave hanging out with us!

Neil Dudley and Rob Owens demonstrating how much effort it takes to burn human skin … Read more

I was dressed in a Yellow Eyed Penguin suit as the mascot for the World Friendship Ice Hockey Games. There were teams from USA, Canada, Australia, Korea and New Zealand. The suit was ridiculously hot inside and skating became more of a sliding waddle The kids seemed to enjoy it though and none of them kicked me in the balls I wore a cup just in case though

The games were actually in May this year, but I didn’t get these photos till just now. Thanks for the photos Daria

Vicky Argyle, Tasha Munro, Lisa McClintock and I all ventured south from Hobart to visit the Hastings Caves. The caves are truly spectacular and you can get some wonderful pictures inside. There’s a sign outside saying you aren’t allowed to use a tripod, but the guide told me it was okay as long as I didn’t hold the tour up There were all sorts of creepy crawlies inside, although getting pictures of them was difficult as I wasn’t allowed to use a flash and they usually moved before I could get my tripod setup.

Below is what the Hastings Caves look like if yer spinning round in circles – I dropped my camera

The bush outside the caves was very dense and full of wildlife including Wallabies, possums and the occasional Tasha and Lisa.

Aside from the occasional near miss with wallabies and possums scampering across the road in front of our car we (me, Lisa and Vicky) also visited a wildlife sanctuary between Port Arthur and Hobart.

My series of photos of strange looking but probably quite common birds continues. Is this a duck or what? I shot this photo in a little town just north of Hobart in Tasmania.

Mark Hareb, my flatmate Daria and myself went tramping on the Silverpeaks route, just out of Dunedin. Things started badly when my giant three liter bottle of water split only half an hour into the tramp. I carried it in for another hour and ditched at the turnoff where we would be arriving back to later in the day.

The route is quite old and hasn’t been maintained in a long time so picking out where you’re supposed to go was tricky. We didn’t get lost though However, later in the day the wind picked up incredibly strong. We were getting knocked off our feet all the time and we started to run out of water!

After much cursing from Daria and me getting quite dehydrated, we eventually made our way off the ridges, hence away from the wind and back to the water bottle I ditched earlier in the day.

All up it took us just over 13 hours to complete the tramp. En route I twisted my ankle a few times which I didn’t think was a major drama, however a week later was when I twisted the same ankle again and broke my leg