Up early and on the bikes. Pete and I decided to do a 6km detour to visit another gold mining village. It was a bit nippy on the bike first thing and the layers were all on. Caught up with Bill and Sue and a place called Lauder where there was a great cafe on the trail. The ladies who ran it made some super fresh cakes and sandwiches the sun had broken through by now and it was quite warm. We had coffee in the garden and bought sandwiches for lunch later on. To...

We drove through the village to the cycle place where we were given a thorough briefing on how to put a helmet on and how the panniers fit on the bikes, the gearing and anything else that we needed to know. Then we were off on the Otago Central Rail Trail 150km. The bikes were great specially built for the trail with suspension and 'comfy' saddles. The first day was apparently the hardest, as it had the steepest gradient of the Trail. We cycled 35km amongst the ...

So this morning we decided to go and visit the Botanical Gardens as we only had a short drive today. We spent all morning there and it was great. As we had managed to acquire lunch whilst having breakfast we had a picnic ready made. We stopped about a hour out of Dunedin by a lake to eat this. When we got to Clyde it was about 3.30 and our friends were due at 4.00, by the time our hostess had showed us every room in the hotel, and then given us one in the gard...

Decided to take the bus tour round Dunedin due to lack of time. It was an excellent trip with only 11 people on a small bus. The guide/driver took us round all the main sights in the city, around the suburbs where we saw the worlds steepest street, (sorry Carolyn we didn't have time to climb it) then round by the gardens and the harbour and finally the ocean front. As the wind was still very strong the waves coming in were huge. In th afternoon we booked on the ...

Due to very strong winds and the dolphin trip being cancelled, we decided to try again today. Well worth it, they normally run 3 trips a day but because of the wind due to increase later in the day, they only did one trip today and we were lucky to be on it. The tiny dolphin in this harbour are called Hector dolphins and are the smallest of the species. They were really fast and swam in front of the boat. We also saw tiny penguin seals and birds nesting in the c...