The Otago Museum in Dunedin – Day 174

Today it is raining as hell so there is nothing better to do than hide ourselves in the Otago Museum.

It’s not a little bit of rain that’s gonna stop us to enjoy 365 activities during our awesome gap year so today despite the rain we are heading to the awesome Otago Museum. It’s a really fun hands-on museum where there is heaps to do for big and small kids like us.

In the midst of all the stuff to play with there is one thing that grabs my attention it’s a massive pipe with gas in side which which responds to music and basically visualise the sound-waves it’s really awesome and i only know one song that will fit best.

That’s a pretty epic attraction for a museum isn’t it? We are now moving onto the Discover World Tropical Forest which is my personal favourite part of the Otago Museum and if you arrive here at 11am you actually get to see the release of the first flights from butterflies which have newly emerged from their pupa stage. And when the butterflies get released they basically want to cling onto the nearest thing they can find which is me in this instance. But this actually gives us a really awesome perspective of the butterflies super close up and there’s so many arrays of beautiful colours.

This whole room is filled with hot air making it feel like an artificial tropical environment and I certainly do not want to leave today it is super warm in here.

But apart from all the beautiful butterflies around and the amazing colours there is also a really awesome waterfall halfway through the gardens and lots of different viewing platforms as well where we can watch the butterflies feeding.

At the bottom of the tropical garden there is something really awesome it’s a breeding room. this is where we get to see the butterflies coming out of their chrysalis and becoming well a butterfly. It’s really awesome and it’s something that i’ve never personally seen in my life. it’s a really cool thing to add to a tropical garden. And because you need to create in any garden kind of an ecosystem there is also a few birds roaming around. After all we’re in New Zealand, aren’t we?

After the tropical garden Laura and I move onto a guided tour of the rest of the museum collections. During this Treasures of the Museum tour we’re gonna be going over every single one of the collections of the museum and seeing some of their highlights and get a little bit of an insight from our tour guide it’s a really awesome way to tour the museum without having to spend about seven hours going through everything.

the tour starts in the Pacific Cultures gallery which is a really fascinating gallery about how these isolated islands have become populated with such rich cultures we see all sorts of different artifacts from the islands and really interesting ways that they use currencies on the islands as well.

Of course there are a few exhibitions a bit closer to New Zealand home called the Tangata Whenua exhibition showing how the southern iwis lived in New Zealand compared to to those in the North Island.

We then move onto Animal Attic which displays animals in accordance to the Victorian theory of evolution which is going from simple to more complex animals.

And then we move onto the maritime exhibition of the Otago Museum.

Really? Really?

We then move onto the next exhibition which has a massive fossil of a plesiosour this is actually New Zealand’s largest fossil and was found in Shag Point which is in the Catlins where we were only a few days ago.

The next part of the museum includes a really hairy goat as well as a stuffed royal albatross. This is because Dunedin is home to the largest mainland colony of royal albatross which is in Taiaroa Head where we’re gonna be going in only a few days when we visit the Albatross Centre. It’s time for us to head out brave the elements and head back toward the Hogwartz hostel.

There’s an elephant in the room. Or more specifically, a whale in the room because in the middle of the room there is [laughing] in the middle of the room there’s this huge skeleton of a fin whale and this is only a baby it’s 17m long and again it’s another animal you don’t really appreciate the size of until you get this close to it’s body parts. Em…