Mar 2008

As I mentioned a while ago, we recently met up with our friend Adam. Brody and I took a break from the stresses of dishwashing and coffee making to head back to the east coast and check out the city of Dunedin and the surrounding areas. It was nice to see someone from home. Although, as I write this, I'm not so sure I'm excited for the boys to be back together). Adam brings comedic relief and an excuse for Brody to act like he is in college again.

We started the weekend by attempting to check out some yellow-eyed penguins - supposedly the most rare penguins in the world. They proved to be extremely rare (or maybe our patience was a bit thin), and we had no sightings. Our poor luck continued as we headed further south in search of our campground. As we got closer, we saw an area that appeared to be on fire. The emergency vehicles and helicopters with water buckets were a dead give away. The area turned out to be our campsite.

We had a break in our run of bad luck the next morning as we checked out the Moraki Boulders. The boys were skeptic about taking a detour to see some rocks (yes, Brody the geologist had to be convinced, but I think they were jaded from our previous foiled plans). The boulders ended up being really cool - they're absolutely huge and their existence is a mystery. Scientists know they started in the soil, and as the cliffside eroded, they boulders proved to be more resistant to the elements and appeared on the beach. Brody was excited and dazzled us with some geology talk.

Later that afternoon, we made it to the city of Dunedin. We checked out the campus of the local university. The boys and I have agreed that we can’t appreciate college campuses that don’t have matching buildings. The architecture of CU has made us spoiled. We also went to the Cadbury Chocolate factory, where our bad luck returned. The production floor was closed for cleaning so we had to take a shortened tour. The upside is that we paid a discounted price. The downside is that we saw all the lame elements of the tour. The boys didn’t hide their disappointment, and I heard complaints all night. We watched a video about the factory and we were promised a surprise at the end of the walking portion of the tour. It turns out that the only part of the tour was to see a giant chocolate fountain that sprays chocolate all over your clothes. Our free samples were even disappointing, as they handed out the reject chocolate bars that don’t sell well. After the chocolate factory, we headed up town to the Speights brewery, which turned out to be far more interesting and rewarding. Speights is the Budweiser or Coors of New Zealand, and I have to give props to the Kiwis and claim that their domestic, mass produced beers are much better than ours. We got to sample all the Speights beers - which almost negated the crapiness of the Cadbury tour. Almost.

The next day, we checked out Baldwin Street - the world’s steepest street according to the book of world records. All steep hills feel the same to my quads, but apparently this one is the biggest, badest one. We also headed out to the Otago peninsula to check out some Albatross (only saw one) and penguins (saw none), but the scenery was pretty. We were further disappointed with the petrified forest and Niagara Falls. Check out the photos below to get a sense of what we felt. Only we drove a few hours to see them. I think some one is sitting around the tourist map shop thinking up silly things just to see if we're huge suckers and we'll drive 2 hours to check it out. We were suckers.

Overall the weekend was a nice break. We saw some beautiful parts of the country, and brought home a little souvenir named Adam. Check back soon for our latest adventure at the Wild Foods Festival...Yum!