Shadrack, Meshack and to Bendigo

    Dad would say, 'round about bedtime: "Shadrack, Meshack and To Bed We Go"... 

    On Sunday we hiked through history, the sluicing gold mines of Bannockburn, and then looked at some deep shaft mining in Bendigo, in Central Otago. In an area once wooded, where Maori hunted the giant moa only four hundred years ago, nothing grows now but thistle, wild thyme and wild rabbits by the hundreds. 

    We saw holes that rabbits sleep in, and holes that the gold-diggers gouged out for themselves to sleep in. So who lives in holes in the ground? Hobbits and "runny babbits", as Deborah calls them - she being the spoonerism addict who stumbles into them by accident and then laughs at what she's just said. 

     And the "babbits" were certainly running all over the place at Bannockburn. It was a beautiful, warm day, and I took a deep dive into gold and quartz geology as well as the history of the area. There's way too much to explain without boring a reader, but I sure enjoyed learning it. 

    Early tomorrow morning we drive to Dunedin.  The weather looks good for travel and for sightseeing. And for those who wonder, given what I've said about limited and expensive wifi access in Cromwell: I'm sitting outdoors at midnight-thirty with my back to the fence on the edge of the "accommodation park", and have located some free, unsecured wifi signal somewhere on the other side of this fence, identified only as "Guest1", and I'm helping myself.  It's so inconsistent; some small towns in New Zealand have free wifi for the entire town, and then there's Cromwell...but given how quickly wifi is sweeping the world, if I come back here next year this remote town may have it too.

Next post: arriving in Dunedin