Dunedin

 Dear all

We arrived in Dunedin yesterday afternoon, but spent the rest of the day doing chores & getting our bearings so not much to tell. Today we decided as we were in a very central campsite, that we would walk all day! So our first port of call was what is alleged to be the steepest street in the world - Baldwin Street. This is not somewhere you would want to live as the gradient is 1:1.286 and believe me that's steep!  A few crazy tourists drove their hire cars up and down it & thankfully all their brakes worked! We walked to the top collapsed for five minutes then walked down again - what else can you do! Next stop was the botanic gardens, which on the map looked huge until you realised that most if it is taken up by a huge hill covered in trees, but is too steep for paths so can't be walked. We ate our lunch in the 'lower' gardens and mooched off to the University Cricket Oval, which has got to be the most southerly test ground that I have ever been to. Its very pretty as it is nestled between two small pine covered hills and is right on the edge of the Otago University campus.

 The University is the oldest in NZ and has a massive campus which dominates the NW part of the city. We had a wander through on our way back to the main street & it is an eclectic  mix of old buildings and modern state of the art architectural prize winning buildings, but it really works. There is also a number of new student digs which looked a million times better than anything we ever lived in! On the other side of the campus is the fantastic Otago Museum, which is housed in a really new modern building full of light. As we were short of time we restricted ourselves to a visiting exhibition - Your face here, where you upload your face onto a card and walk around the exhibition learning loads of facts about your face. There are also some interactive stations where you look at your face aged/different art styles/symmetry. It was great fun & we got to email our results as you can see!

Our next stop was back to the beautiful railway station, which was one of three built in the city between 1873 & 1906, when the city was at its height of prosperity. The building is stunning both on the inside and the out & is made out of local volcanic and limestone with Royal Doulton mosaic-tile floors. They run the Taieri Gorge Railway from here and it is a very popular tourist trip, which unfortunately we didn't have the time to do.  Our final stop was the First Church of Otago, which was designed by Robert Lawson for a competition in the mid 1800's little knowing that this Gothic edifice would be his masterpiece. By now Dean was pooped so he 'retired' to the pub and I went to have a little shop and picked up some bits for by scrapbook and then collapsed in the pub for a couple!

Night all

Hugs

Sara