Dunedin & Around

Dunedin is located about 360km south of Christchurch on the eastern coast of the South Island. It’s called New Zealand’s Scottish city, due to the fact that in the early 1840’s Scot’s came to settle. Dunedin is the Gaelic for Edinburgh. A great number of the street names are the same as in Edinburgh and Stella had great delight going “there’s Princes Street” etc. I can even tell you that Dunedin is some 18,000km from Edinburgh (they had a sign).

Before we went into Dunedin, Stella and I went onto the Otago Peninsula, which is a 35km long crooked finger of land running northeast from Dunedin. It’s a totally amazing area as is the only place in the world where the Royal Albatross breeds on the mainland. We paid our $30 each and went to a viewing hut and saw a 5 week old albatross and even saw it being fed (which is quite rare), we where also entertained to an amazing fly pass for about 10 minutes of an adult bird. They are so huge. A 4 month old baby weights 9kg (that’s the weight of a fire extinguisher as I told Stella) and their adult weight is not much more. They have a wing span of 3m !!!!

We then went to New Zealand’s only castle – Larnach Castle, completed in 1871. I would say that in the UK it more of a Manor House. It has been lovingly restored and the gardens are gorgeous. I nearly had haggis in the café which is located in the ballroom, but settled for a cup of tea instead.

The following day Stella & I made our way into Dunedin, had a nosey round and decided that it is a rather cute place, then we went to the rugby – yeah!!! Got amazing tickets on the half way line and right by the tunnel, and as it was a much smaller stadium than Wellington (but bigger than Newcastle), we could almost touch the player. Stella very much wanted to touch No 18, she even waved at him (a Ben Fogel moment again, Mam you’ll know what I mean!!). The game was the local Highlanders playing the Hurricanes. We supported the Hurricanes, only because we’d seen them play and supported them in Wellington. Jen was arriving that night and managed to sneak in for the last 10 minutes of the game. This mean that we didn’t need to rush off and Stella got No 18’s autograph.

The next day we went on the Taieri Gorge Railway. Our train went all the way to up the valley to Pukerangi. We where in the refurbished 1920s wooden cars, which rattled all the way but was really good fun. The railway is just a tourist run now but used to be the only way to access the high country of Otago. The scenery was stunning but hasn’t come out as well on the photos. The whole thing had to be constructed by hand and they could not blast as there was the fear of landslips/landslides and even rock avalanches. It was amazing and the trains where only inches away from the walls as we went through numerous tunnels.

We even managed to squeeze in a wee trip to Cadbury’s World. Unfortunately to us but not our hips, the factory part was closed so we couldn’t see & smell the chocolate bars being made :o(