Not quite Willy Wonka, but...

    We left Central Otago, still trying to shake the images of Chinese Hobbits (those Chinese miners were very short) and Gollum-like gold-diggers out of my mind, in spite of the lakes and rivers, vineyards and beautiful landscapes. The city folk from Christchurch and Dunedin travel to Cromwell and other towns in Central Otago every summer - Christmas holidays, for them! - so you can see that where we were is actually like "cottage country" for North Americans, a much-loved vacation destination. 

    We cruised through picturesque stacks of rocks that begged for photographs, like naturally occurring inukshuks with sheep wandering around them. 

    Once in Dunedin, we found "the steepest street in the world", Baldwin Street - which we had to do because my friend Don Davies told us to - and a neighbouring street called Dalmeny (which might be even steeper) took us up Signal Hill Road to Lookout Point, where we had a spectacular orientation view of the city. We drove on a street on a small town in California which I think was steeper, but shorter...gave Deborah "fart hailure"...but we actually drove up and down that one, and we could only walk on this one. The street is packed with overseas visitors, and the sidewalks are so steep they have to be constructed as steps. 

    Half a dozen times each winter the roads freeze over, and the city has to shut down - can you imagine backing out onto one of those streets on an icy morning? It'd be a toboggan run straight down for a kilometre, caroming off parked cars all the way to the bottom. Which brings me to an interesting observation: Dunedin was the city of the Scots, while Christchurch was the city of the English. Ignoring for a moment the wisdom of the English in building their city on a silt plane with obvious tectonic features (but I guess they didn't really understand earthquake science much in those days), the Scots had their own peculiarity. Take this with a grain of salt, but I have it second-hand that city designers decided that since Edinburgh was the perfect city, they'd just duplicate Edinburgh's city plan right here...ignoring completely the steep hills and valleys, so unlike Edinburgh's relatively flat area. The result? Many streets that compete for the title of "steepest street", and a circuitous design that presents a "nagivational challenge" for Deborah, with intersections of five streets like a medieval market town and a maze of "lanes" and "terraces". 

    I should hasten to add, however, that the up-and-down hilly nature of the town is part of its charm, and we really did like Dunedin. So, we spent our first afternoon on Baldwin Hill and at Lookout Point, then toured the lovely and very famous Edwardian train station, quite a piece of art in itself; and also enjoyed a short tour of the Cadbury's factory. 

    We enjoyed all their samples for dessert last night with Juliet, our host in Dunedin, for whom we also made ling cod with rice and Deb's tomato salsa salad for "tea". On Thursday Juliet leaves to go "tramping". That's what all Kiwis call serious long distance hiking...but she, having recently returned from ten months in Central and South America, is aware that tramping is something we might expect from ladies of easy virtue, so she's careful to say "going hiking" around us...! 

    Juliet has a lovely home in a high-end neighbourhood called Maori Hill, with a view of the city below. I've been surprised and impressed by the response of couch-surfing hosts down here - we've been invited to more homes than we could possibly have time to visit. Juliet invited us to stay on here for a third night, and we had three other hosts in Dunedin who lined up to offer us a "couch" (feast or famine!), but we're going to see a few sights and meet a few more hosts up the coast, and make it to Christchurch before the weekend to see the annual flower show, which is a very big deal, apparently. 

    While writing the blog, I'm sitting in The Octagon, the city's heart, where you can find St. Paul's Anglican cathedral, the public art gallery, a lovely central fountain and a statue of Robert Burns...how Scottish is that? Every street name is Scottish, too. 

    I'm having a "long black" coffee in an open-air café with free wifi provided by the city, probably just steps from where Uncle Ken's hobby shop used to be. 

    This is an important university town - probably 40% of inhabitants are university and post-secondary students, and I'm told you can fire cannons up and down the streets during school holidays and not hit anyone. But they have free wifi here and in north Dunedin, where the university sits. The huge clock tower bell over the City Council building rings out the hours, and the quarters and halves. It's a lovely place to sit on a sunny day. 

    We enjoyed an exhibition of spectacular quilts, and toured the art gallery - a bright, airy, well-designed collection, very interesting. That's one thing about art galleries: no matter where you are, you're guaranteed to see many attractive pieces you've never seen before. We cemented our impressions of "Southland" at an exhibit which celebrates the cultures, history, geology, animals and botany of the region all in one place at the Otago Museum.

    Juliet made a lovely dinner of roast chicken and invited her friend Kay, who also brought Ivy the Jack Russel. We bought a chocolate cake with a layer of fresh whipped cream in the middle, and I reduced a package of frozen mixed berries with some Pinot Noir and half a cup of brown sugar to make a delicious "coulis" to pour over the top - and in the process, learned that new word from Deborah that sounds like a Quebec swear word, but isn't. 

    On Wednesday we had planned to drive through the Otago Peninsula, where there are Royal Albatross, Yellow Eyed Penguins (the rarest in the world, only 2000 nesting pairs left) and New Zealand's only castle, Larnach Castle. However, Dunedin's famous weather predominated - it was gray, foggy and raining when we awoke, so we decided to skip the peninsula (we wouldn't have been able to see much through the fog anyway) and spent a quiet morning doing internet and gradually getting ready to drive up the coast to Timaru. 

    Juliet had come off shift at 7 a.m., so we said our good-byes first thing in the morning, and slipped out as quietly as we could by around ten-thirty while she slept.

    Here is our Dunedin photo album.

Next post: Moeraki and Timaru