13/8/9 Dunedin

Today we are on a mini trip called the bottom bus and we jumped on a smaller bus with just 6 of us to travel to Dunedin, Invercargill, Te Anau and Milford Sound over the next four days. We had a small mini bus and our driver is an Australian called Skip !! Firstly we passed through Cromwell which is NZs fruit growing area. we then went ot Clyde dam NZs 2nd largest dam and the reservoir holds 33 billion fishbowls of water !!!! It was built on a fault line which seems a little dodgy in the east even though it is allegedly protected against 2 meters of movement in all directions...how???? The small historical town of Clyde sits just beyond the dam and would be devastated if it did burst. We then joined the highway through the rocky ranges which were rolling hills, heathland, valleys and farmlands. There were fruit trees all along the route near the town of Roxburgh and plenty of sheep farms too. We stopped at the gateway to central Otago, Lawrence, for a comfort break which was the first place where gold was found in 1861 and sparked the gold rush in NZ. Our next town was Miilton which has two famous features. The first is a kink in the main road caused by the two ends of a road building project not meeting and a kink being created to join the ends. The main street has a chicane now and its quite a funny story except for the poor engineer who got the blame and the sack. The second is the towns jail nicknamed the milton hilton as the facilities for prisoners are so good!!! Shortly after that we passed by the sign for Dunedins city limits which are in the middle of farmland 50 kms outside the city centre on three sides and at the coast on the other ! It is the 5th biggest city in the world by area despite a population of only 120,000 !! The area was populated by the Scots in 1849 and Dunedin is gaelic for Edinburgh. It has NZ oldest university founded 1871 and a long harbour formed from a huge volcanic eruption. We visited one of Dunedins famous landmarks, Baldwin Street, which is the Guiness book of records Steepest road in the world which we all walked up. It was super steep with a 1:2.68 gradient!!!!! As a university town it has loads of students and Skip took us to see the main student housing areas which were really rough with burn marks in all the streets from sofas being set alight by drunken students .Apparently the students have a cold lounge competition each year and last years winners were 4 degrees in their lounge which sums up the quality of student housing there. Then he took us to see Dunedins lovely Victorian railway station which the townsfolk saved from demolition by selling bricks to raise money. The bricks are carved with the names of donors and are laid in the gardens at the front of the restored station. It is an iconic Dunedin building and on all the postcards of the town so is obviously the only decent building there. We dropped our bags at the hostel and took a walk through the town which has a central octogan shaped middle. We were going on a tour of Speights brewery and grabbed a delicious curry before it. On the tour we were shown the history of the brewery and the processes of brewing before being let loose with a free tasting room for 45 minutes....happy days!!! We went top the Speights pub next door and watched an Otago vs North Harbour(Auckland) rugby match after which we sloped off to bed.