On our final leg we headed to Timaru, on the east coast, to look at some rocks a bit like the Giants Causeway basalt columns (not as impressive). We stayed one night and then headed up to Christchurch via a nice little town called Geraldine which has yet another car museum but more interestingly a replica of the Bayeux tapestry including the missing panels believed to show the coronation of William. It is made from masking tape covered in tiny pieces of steel o...

After 5 days we left Dunedin. This is the longest we have stayed anywhere and if I had to choose somewhere to live in NZ this would be it. Peter might not agree as the pub situation has not been good. In fact I don't think we found one that was open or decent. We drove north to visit the Moeraki Boulders. Not just any old boulders but some rather spectacular ones sitting on a beach. It was freezing cold and blowing a gale but we braved it after a cuppa in the c...

Once again James Cook was in Dunedin (well the area of Dunedin) in early 1770. Much later in 1848 The Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland founded Dunedin (with the help of Thomas Burns, Robert Burns's nephew) as the principal town of its Scottish settlement (after the 1843 split of the Scottish church). The name of 'Dunedin' originates from the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh—Dùn Èideann. Charles Kettle, Dunedin's surveyor, was instr...

You can't come to NZ without visiting Milford Sound (located in Fiordland NP), so here we are. It has been all go geologically here for the last 400 million years. Firstly the grinding together of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates pushed up a lot of sediment creating all the mountains of the Southern Alps right down to Milford Sound, with added help from volcanos. Then the mountains at the southern end of the Alps dropped back down under the sea, where t...