Dunedin - 20 February 2014

Today we met at 8 a.m. and left around 8.30 a.m.! First we took the vintage Taieri Gorge Train (www.taieri.co.nz) waiting alongside the ship in the Otago Harbour, across the Taieri Plains and into the rugged hills and country side of New Zealand. At 10 a.m.breakfast and around 12 p.m. lunch was served on board. The train consisted of old carriages with wooden seats, middle age ones with lovely upholstered seats, luckily we were in the newer carriage.

Alan, you will not believe it: I had lovely local beer, a Speight's Summit lager brewn in Dunedin. 

At around 2 p.m. one could either go directly back to the ship or go into Dunedin. I choose to see the highlights of Dunedin City including a tour of the Otago Museum and a visit of the Botanical Garden. 

Dunedin ist New Zealand's first city, constituted in 1865, and it is indeed a city of firsts. It has New Zealand's first university, botanic garden, daily newspaper, co-op dairy factory and skyscraper, the tallest tree, the first girls' high school in the Southern hemisphere; New Zealand's oldest farm buildings and working brewery; and the world's steepest street and only mainland albatross colony. The Māori name is Otepoti, "place beyond which one cannot go", where waka (canoes) could travel no further and were put ashore.

A bit more information: Dunedin is a bustling University city, at the picturesque Otago Harbour. Originally a Presbyterian Scottish settlement, this is the second-largest city on the South Island and retains a distinct Scottish ambiance. The 19th century buildings and homes reflect the wealth deriving from the goldfields in the Otago Province in the 1860s.

The early arrival of settlers in Dunedin and the anticipated growth of the gold rush obliged the authorities in Britain to undertake some hasty planning. Plans for a typically classic 19th Century English town were quickly drawn up in England without regards to the topography of the land. As a result many of the streets go straight up very steep hills (since 1879 they used to have cable cars like in San Francisco, rails are still buried under the asphalt and the cable cars remained working until 1957 when they were replaced by coaches, but the authorities are checking the possibility of re-installing the cable cars!) Dunedin actually boasts the steepest street in the world as recorded by the Guinness Book of Records!