Monday, 10 October 2016

Dunedin

Day 1 – Furthest Point from Home!


Today we were heading for Dunedin, which is officially the furthest point in the world from London at 11,851 miles and pretty much the only reason we were going there!



It was a 3 hour journey that would have been travelling through great scenery if the weather had not been bad and all we could see for most of the journey was thick fog.



On arriving in Dunedin we tried to book into our accommodation but were told we couldn’t until after 2, so we decided to drive up to the peninsula to see the wildlife that this part of NZ was famous for.



The drive was a nice little coastal road that hugged the beaches with tight winding bends which stopped at the top of the headland where the Albatross Centre was, as this headland was a breeding ground for them.



We had heard on the radio that a fisherman was just about to be prosecuted for killing 30 Albatrosses on his long line, so it was quite pertinent that we then learned more about this in the centre.



It was very wet and windy on the headland so we thought better on booking a tour of the headlands to see the nest sites of the Albatross (and we had heard on the radio the last of them had flown the net this morning).  Also we weren’t prepared to come back to sit around waiting for the resident penguins to arrive back on the beach later on that day. Instead we decided to have a look around the museum before we headed back to town to check-in.



It was a back-packer hostel and when we were shown to the room it was the smallest we had stayed in so far, with only room for one bunk bed, Shell quickly bagsied the bottom bunk (which will make my midnight dash a bit tricky tonight).




As there was little point in hanging round in the room we headed out to see if we could find a second hand book store to get a Chile travel guide.  Unfortunately this has proved difficult so far and once again we were disappointed after checking out the second hand stores.



Dunedin as it sounds,  is closely associated with Scotland as there was a large amount of Scottish immigrants that settled here (for the gold rush I think?).  So, we thought we would do as the Scots would do and go for a drink.  In our defence the pub we went to, Speights, was one of the main breweries in New Zealand.



A couple of beers later we headed to the supermarket to pick up some food to cook back at the hostel.  On returning we went to the kitchen where Shell and I knocked up a spag bol to eat later, chatting to a few of our fellow back-packers as we did so (one of them was baking his own bread – hardcore back-packer!!).



Earlier in the morning, we had bad news that we could not move our Chile flight to when we wanted to or for any time this or next month! We had tried to sort this out via E-mail and eventually asked them to call us. Whilst we waited for a response we went back to the kitchen to have our evening meal.



After dinner we went back to the room and phoned the travel agent and tried to sort out alternatives for our flight and he said he would get back to us in a few hours.  Whilst we waited we had a few drinks and went for a fag in the communal area where we met a guy from the west country so we started chatting to him and she gave us some tips on Queenstown.  It turned into quite a long conversation with a couple of bottles of red chucked into the mix, so we arrived back at the room some time later a bit tipsy.



A short while later whilst practicing some boozy Spanish the travel agent phoned back and we ended up having to pay extra money (not good) to get a new flight on the date we wanted.  Once we had confirmed and paid for this I then had to get on a website to book our connecting flight from Queenstown to Auckland, hopefully I booked the correct date and time!!! (Shell had fallen to sleep by this point!!).   

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