Nearly Dunedin Roamin'

The penultimate stop on our NZ tour is Dunedin, a city of Scottish influences and NZ's largest university.

The old station

 
The highlight is possibly its art gallery - like many NZ galleries it is willfully eclectic - 17th century portraits mingle with more contemporary works on bold, brightly-coloured walls. It had an excellent photography exhibit called An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar by Taryn Simon - photos of interesting places and objects such as the beachhouse at Cape Canaveral where astronauts spend their last hours before a launch, and cryogenics chambers. You can also enjoy pushing a pink supermarket trolley around on a bubblewrap carpet in an exhibit called Sweet As.

We did a tour of Cadbury World - quite interesting in that they take you through a working factory (I had to wear a hairnet and a beard net) and explain, for example, how they use centrifugal force to make hollow easter eggs. They have three large silo towers which are no longer needed, so one of them is used for a 'chocolate fall' - every time a tour passes they drop a large amount of liquid chocolate down the centre of a spiral staircase. Hopefully this will be of interest to my dad, who used to work for Cadbury, and my sister, who loves chocolate.

Dunedin has a few nice gothic buildings - the station is particularly good, and doubles as the home of a more-interesting-than-expected hall of fame for NZ sport.  It's is also home to Baldwin Street, the world's steepest street (according to Guinness).

It also has a few fun bars - the Mou Very bar is one of the smallest I've ever seen but still managed to put on live music. Still, the place as a whole was a bit quieter than we expected.

We made a couple of stops on the road to Christchurch. First at the Moeraki boulders - these have formed, like rocky pearls, around bits of sediment or fossil into improbably spherical boulders about four feet in diameter and erosion around them has left them on a beach. A few have been split open by watery deposits in cracks. They're an odd but worthwhile sight.

 They almost look like giant eggs...

We stopped for lunch in Oamaru, a small town with a penchant for limestone buildings (including a church steeple, which looks strange).

Its harbourfront area is full of well-preserved examples, and also a couple of large warehouses that have been converted into art spaces.

We enjoyed lunch at the Criterion Hotel, which features a snug and dining rooms that feel like a step into an affluent Victorian house.

From here it's an uneventful drive to Christchurch and our last few nights here...