Day 15: Getting to Dunedin
Not a ton happened on the way from Queenstown to Dunedin other than we saw way more sheep than we anticipated and ended up driving on a dangerous gravel road for over a half an hour (GPS glitch, go figure).
There were lots of sheep.
When we got to Dunedin, we had just enough time to catch a tour through the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. It costs a mere $20, and they give you a LOT of chocolate. Pictures weren’t allowed during the tour but we can tell you that they give you a lot of chocolate- and not the chocolates you’ll necessarily like. All the weird marshmallow chocolates you can think of, and they’re not that tasty to American Tastebuds.
So much chocolate was had- they literally had a spicket of it!
After our tour we checked in with our AirBnB then headed to the Otago Museum. It was fantastic. We definitely encourage anyone to go there if you’re in Dunedin… especially since it’s free!
Somehow we managed to only take photos of the animals in this museum. There was a LOT more to it, but I guess we were having too good a time to take pics.
Evil thing.
The taxidermy for most of these were REALLY old
I wonder if that’s how it looks in the wild?
An item that had been on Ian’s list of things to check out was The Beverly Clock invented in 1864. This clock is basically a perpetual motion machine that only requires a 6 degree change in temperature to create the energy to run. It’s run steadily, with no problems, since it was built 152 years ago.
Wow!
We ate dinner at Etrusco who had some really great dishes. Ian got the Seafood Marinara and I got the Pumpkin Ravioli. Everything was delicious and they had a great Cab/Syrah blend to go with it that was soooooo velvety. So good.
MMMMM
We finished our day out with the steepest residential street in the world! Balwin Street is no joke. Ian managed to drive our rental car up it, but I didn’t think it would make it the full way up. The street itself is 35o meters long and is a really tough hike just to get up half way.
Quite steep
You can’t really tell but it takes a while to walk this.
Back at our room for the night, I worked on an 18th century quilted petticoat for Felicity and Ian played his DS. We’re pretty cool people.
Day 16: Dunedin to Kaikoura
Plans weren’t to stay in Dunedin that long, but the aesthetic of the city is a lot like what we’re used to- old buildings, lots of history, lots of things happening, art galleries, museums, etc. I’d say it’s my favorite city to have visited so far.
The 3rd most photographed building in the southern hemisphere, the Train Station
Pretty gingerbread everywhere!
We had booked a tour of the Olveston House, a historic home that belonged to a very prominent family in Dunedin. Again, pictures weren’t allowed inside, but it was definitely worth going on if you like that sort of thing. There was a little greenhouse out the back of the place we stopped to snap some pretty pictures.
The side view of the home
This is the side the greenhouse was on
There were a few art galleries to check out before we left, but lunch time rolled around and we thought we should get a “taste of home” by checking out what KFC’s taste like here… wrong move. Not that NZ KFC is terrible, but it surely didn’t taste like what we were used to. They offer the $5 meal which I wrongly assumed was the same as the 5-buck-lunch and Ian got a Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich. He didn’t think the sandwich was all that great and let me show you how much popcorn chicken I got for my value meal:
I’d say there were about 9 wee pieces of chicken.
They also have potato fries that are coated in a chicken boullion/salt mixture and offer a weird ketchup that has a nuance of barbecue flavoring as well as some ginger mixed in….Not our favorite thing in the world.
At some point we stumbled upon the Moeraki Boulders. This things are SO cool.
They look like a video game type of scenery
So round.
There are more under the sand
Apparently, when they open they look like this.
They’re a weird concrete/composition of things that have been weathered down by the coast
Innards.
Ian got stuck
Victorious.
Don’t fall in!
There were lots of people to see them but we managed some no-people pictures
The water color never shows up as true in photos. The water is an lovely blue irl
Ian kept saying they had to be dinosaur eggs- that’s the only possible explanation
Watch out for the graboids!
I managed to sprain my ankle and crash to the ground when we stopped off at a shop along the way- thankfully no one was looking. Shortly after, there was another town worth stopping at called Oamaru, otherwise known as the Steampunk Capital of NZ. We naturally went to almost every shop they had as well as the Steampunk Museum– VERY worthwhile.
The shops were so cool!
Everything you can imagine!
Oamaru
Ian found a stole he liked.
Steampunk Headquarters!
Outside was like MadMax
Ian driving the death train
Death train.
You could actually pick up that thing at the bottom with the manual crane
Most of the towns in NZ don’t look like this- they all look more modern
“The Portal”
Some fun sculptures
The whole place was interactive
We drove another 4 hours until we stopped- not much to see on this drive that we hadn’t already- and ended up at a cafe/bar place where I misunderstood something and ended up with a huge amount of Speight’s beer to go along with my mussel chowder. Ian just laughed as he ate his fish ‘n chips. No harm done in the end.
I somehow drank this in an hour
Aren’t we done yet?! Nope. Next up: Lots of marine animals.
**We are not endorsed by any of the companies we’ve linked in our posts- we just want you to be able to find their information should you come along to NZ**
Like this:
Like Loading...
