Sort of rejuvenated after our day off, we left Dunedin, heading north to Christchurch. But before leaving Dunedin we stopped at Baldwin Street, the world’s steepest street. We were thinking that it couldn’t possibly be the world’s steepest street as the streets of San Francisco are steep, some of them having steep cut into the pavement. But the sign says it’s the world’s steepest street according to the Guinness Book of Records, so we guess they must have done some thorough checking! We walked to the top of Baldwin Street and we can confirm that it is indeed steep! After marching ourselves to the top of the hill, we marched ourselves down again and collected our free certificate (free as we’d picked up a leaflet for Baldwin Street) from the nearby souvenir shop to say we’d successfully walked up the hill. We then headed out of Dunedin towards Christchurch.

We made a couple of stops along the road to Christchurch. The first was at Shag Point. There used to be a coal mine here and the tunnels extended quite far out under the sea bed. Now the place is a good excuse to do exactly what the name Shag Point suggests – point at the sea lions that have made their home on the rocks (what else would you do there...?!). It was very windy there so we didn’t hang around. The second stop we made was at a place we can’t remember with some boulders on the beach. The boulders had apparently been eroded, rather than being washed up on the beach. The boulders are on a very nice beach and our guide book suggested you sit there and contemplate how old the boulders are, but unfortunately it was blowing a gale and raining so we got a couple of quick photos before retreating back to the van.

The road to Christchurch was straight for miles, with a spectacular view of the Southern Alps on our left. We think we worked out which one was Mount Cook, but the tops were covered in cloud. We reached Christchurch late evening and checked in to the Top 10 campsite there. We wandered to the local shopping mall, which was lovely and cool as the air con turned up, but it was really busy being so close to Christmas; we’d got used to not having crowds so suddenly being confronted by hoards of people was a bit of a shock!