Dunedin

Dunedin Station

Stained glass in Dunedin Station

Our hosts were off to work today which left us free to explore Dunedin, proud of its Scottish roots and connections.  Scottish street names abound – we almost expected to come across Findon Place – and a statue of Burns has him imperiously overlooking the town centre on the excuse that his great nephew was one of the ‘founding fathers’.  The sun shone brilliantly from a near cloudless sky making for a very good walk around the town centre. There are just enough old buildings (about 1860s to 1920s) to give it a distinctive character.  The railway station is the most splendid.  It’s ornate both externally and internally, with mosaic tiles still in excellent condition and some fine ’railwayana’ stained glass.  Trains are in short supply, being just goods trains and a ‘must experience’ tourist train that we hadn’t time to experience.  The interior houses a good café, exhibitions of the local artists’ society and the platform hosts part of the farmers’ market on Saturdays.

Imperial Buildings, Dunedin

Other buildings reflect the trading and business wealth of Dunedin a century ago.  We followed some of the i-Site’s historic trail and photographed a number of examples in the brilliant sunshine.  We’d been commissioned by Iona to photograph ‘Baldwin Street’, described in the Guinness Book of Records as the World’s steepest street.  Yes, it’s pretty steep (1 in 2.867) and we walked to the top.  It’s now a Dunedin tourist attraction so Aenea has a certificate recording that she’s gone to the top and as we were descending a bus-load of far-eastern tourists were eagerly testing their calves and snapping furiously.

John climbing up Baldwin Street

View over Dunedin from Signal Hill

Macaw in Botanic Gardens Aviary

Dunedin spreads over the hillsides leading down to the bay and there’s no shortage of pretty steep suburban hills.  We took the car up Signal Hill Road to a lookout point some 300 m above the water for a panoramic view over the city (not added to this blog since we haven’t downloaded the panorama software).  To end the afternoon we visited the botanic gardens where we spent most of the time walking around the aviary, not the plants.

In the evening Pat took us to ‘Sandfly Bay’, firstly because it is a nice place and secondly to have the chance of seeing penguins.  The bay was living up to its name with an off-shore gale blowing the sand horizontally in sheets so we abandoned the half-hour walk down and along to the penguin hide to make a scenic trip to the end of the peninsular with the possibility of seeing albatrosses and little blue penguins.   We saw both.  

Sandfly Bay

The strong wind had given some albatrosses the excuse to take off and circle around an area that had a large colony of spotted shags.  In Pilot Bay a crowd had assembled to see the penguins come ashore and we joined them.  In the event, we had a long wait watching the swell until it was pretty dark, and we were starting to chill when the first short line of penguins could be seen arriving on the shore.  They were quite small and headed straight for the tussocky grass where they had overnight nesting spots.  No photos allowed.  The flash would probably spook them.  If it wasn’t for the red torch of a local volunteer guide, we’d have seen very little since it was so dark by then but some 40 tourists like ourselves were peering to and fro from a fenced in area and caught glimpses of the little birds waddling ungainly across the terrain, sometimes over our path.  It was a somewhat surreal experience.  By the time we got back to Dunedin it was after 10 pm but we all agreed it had been a very good evening.