Our travels continue! After we left Oamaru, we drove straight to beautiful and hilly Dunedin. Dunedin is a fabulous city, which actually reminded us a lot of Chicago in certain ways. It's fitting therefore that this is where Kara and I both had our first real pangs of homesickness. Ah, to be able to sleep in our own beds! Ah, to be able to afford to go out to eat! (SOB. SOOOOB.)
We stayed at an absolutely adorable Harry Potter themed hostel called Hogwartz. It had TONS of space and comfortable beds, so it was a nice place from which to explore the city. Dunedin is all hills and Hogwartz was right at the top of one, so we got our exercise! The hostel was very crowded, and yet again we made some friends and got some great advice for our continuing travels. :) There was a very comfortable reading loft too, which I especially enjoyed! (We had to contend with a slightly younger crowd this time around though... Oh, younguns on a Saturday night.)
Dunedin is laid out so that the main center of the city is the Octagon, which Hogwartz was just a few minutes walk from. We spent the majority of our time in the city wandering around this area and visiting some of the awesome free museums. One of the interesting things about New Zealand, though, is that businesses close during the holidays for a much longer time. We were in Dunedin from the 2nd-5th, and a lot of places were closed through the 6th!
The next day, we got up early and called around to try to find an auto electrician for our car (as the passenger window won't work anymore), but no luck- ah, the holidays. So instead we went to the farmers market, which was right by the Taieri Gorge train station. This is a very famous and really beautiful building, which is one of the most photographed buildings in NZ. We didn't get a photo of it. But the farmers market was wonderful, and inside the train station there was an art gallery of local artists that was really varied and interesting.
We were right next to the Settlers Museum, so we headed there next, and learned a lot about the history of the Otago area. They had a automated Christmas display from the really early 20th century up, which was very cool and also terrifying (and vaguely racist). They also had a super-sweet car display.
In the afternoon, Kara went to the art gallery and I headed off to the Otago Museum. They had cool displays from Edmund Hillary, some amazing stuff on bugs, concepts for bases in Antarctica, and the Animal Attic which was a taxidermied animal exhibit displayed as the Victorians would have displayed it!
It included gems such as this:
We both got up early on our last day in Dunedin- Kara went to church and I headed to visit a bunch of really amazing bookstores (which WERE, thankfully, open). I also wandered a bit in the Dunedan Botanic Gardens, where I found out that Dunedin has a Lebanese population! How 'bout that!
The Catlins are an area along the Southernmost coast of NZ. It's made up of beaches, native forest, and farmland. The Catlins are one of the few places in New Zealand where you can still find untouched native forest, and we took full advantage of this opportunity! We drove along the Southern Scenic Route, which is full of pull-offs and short tramps of which we took full advantage.
We did the Catlins in two days driving. We came in from the North on the first day, and stopped first at a ridiculous roadside attraction (4k off the road) where there were a few whale fossils to gawk at. Pretty cool! Next we drove to Nugget Point, just outside Kaka Point, where there is a beautiful lighthouse. If you look down below, you can see seals frolicking. It's a good place for penguins, too!
After we settled in, we headed over to Curio Bay for sunset. Curio Bay is the location of a 180-million-year-old petrified Jurassic fossil forest. The forest was flooded and covered in ash from a volcano, and it all turned to stone. This type of forest is really rare, and there are only 3 accessible ones in the world. It was PRETTY GOOD. Curio Bay is also known for being a breeding spot for yellow-eyed penguins, and there were a few on the beach!
We celebrated by going past the backpackers all the way to the actual Slope Point cliffside, which is the southernmost point of New Zealand. It was crazy. The wind was by far the most intense wind I'd ever felt. I had heard that the trees were really cool to see there because the wind forces them to grow in shriveled and curled-up ways, and it was just as great as I imagined. I'd been looking forward to visiting Slope Point for months, and it definitely lived up to expectations! We explored for a long time, and fortunately the wind didn't blow us off the cliff.
I've been feeling like these blogs should be more impressions and traveling-thoughts than recitations of what we've done, but we'll appreciate these recitations in a few years when we look back on this (and they're a good vehicle for the pictures)! Also, hostels remind me a bit of Open Books in many ways. There's very rarely time to sit and be introspective, because there's always something happening, which makes it easier just to write what we did. But as I get time to muse on matters, I am thinking of throwing up a post here or there to talk about what I've been musing on. The first one will be coming soon!