Dunedin Tuesday 1/29/08

Dunedin lies on the southeast coast of the south island of NZ. It boasts 100,000 residents, 25,000 students at the university, a distillery (the only one in NZ) and a brewery. The reason it has all those things is that it thinks it is Edinburgh in Scotland. The early Scottish founders laid it out to mimic Edinburgh with a height reversal as the center of Dunedin lies down at the harbor mouth and is surrounded by hills while the center of Edinburgh is perched atop the highest hills to look down on the harbor. Apparently the Dunedin folks weren’t as nervous about the Viking invaders. You can still pick up the roll of an "r" in the local lingo and our cab driver from last night was tossing a "wee" this and "wee" that into every sentence.

Our hosts at Claremont House, Adrian and Ingrid, are originally from Holland but have lived down-under for at least the last 30 years, first in NZ then 20 years in Brisbane in the printing business, and finally following their student daughter back to Dunedin. They had been antique collectors for years and didn’t have anyplace to put them so they bought this mansion on a hill, spent 18 months refurbishing, and loaded the place up with the accumulation of a lifetime. The result is pretty spectacular and they are justifiably proud of what they have achieved.

Mary had the poached egg with a little fruit this morning and John of course had to try Ingie’s mushroom/ham omelet. So much for the once-a-week big breakfast. Our breakfast partners were a newly retired couple from northeast England on the coast near Durham who are on a 5-month holiday with a mixture of driving, cruising, flying and train travel. It seems that with our 3-month trip we are not in the least unusual among visitors to this part of the world.

The only thing on the agenda today is seeing what we can see of the town by foot so we grab some time to update posts (finally) and swap stories about world travel with Adrian who is a very amiable and chatty fellow. Ingrid is a bit more businesslike and finally hauls Adrian off to get at some of the chores. We hike the mile downhill into the city and about a third of the way down pass a tennis court with a fairly low fence at a school on the side of the road. One would naturally wonder what happens when a ball comes this way over the fence. If you drop anything in Dunedin you will find it in front of the railway station at the bottom of the hill.

We stop at the info center and check out the tours for the day; John pays a little old lady 50-cents for a map of the historic buildings of Dunedin; we walk a few blocks and see a few buildings and poke into some stores; we walk a few blocks to the Cadbury candy factory and decide to pass on the tour; we walk a few blocks and walk around the historic railway station (where you find your stuff that you dropped); we walk a few more blocks, see a few more old buildings and at that point decide that our heart is definitely not in the program today. We need a day off.
When in doubt, do lunch. We are at "The Palms" which is on our recommended list. John has the fish special which is a local Moki with a salad, and Mary has a cold smoked salmon salad. We have decided to pay the price for our laziness today by walking back up the hill and it is really up hill. Dunedin claims to have the steepest street in the world (with no apologies to San Francisco) and we suspect that we may be on it. We arrive sweaty and tired at about 3:30 and settle in for a bit of napping, reading and internet stuff.

We fire up for dinner and take Adrian’s suggestion of "Berta the Cow" which is located at the bottom of the hill. It is a vast improvement over the night before. John really likes the hazelnut stuffed chicken with veggies and mashed and Mary has the shrimp, scallop and rissoto appetizer which is just the right amount for her. There are two other tables eating, one of them a couple we had seen both nights at the "Blue Ice" restaurant in Franz Josef--what are the odds? The other table has six folks speaking French and we find out later that they are Swiss. We chat with one of them for a couple minutes and none of us understood a single word the other said.

We walk back up again which may be a local record, chat a bit more with Adrian and take a glass of wine to our turret for a wee bit of reading before bed. We're looking for out kilts.

Today's local headline: MP Faces challenge for seat Otago Daily Times