New Zealands Scottish City

---

Dunedin is New Zealand's Scottish city, Christchurch was founded by English Christians and Scottish Christians founded Dunedin. Today Dunedin is one of the most important university towns in New Zealand, home of some really nice architecture, and the site of New Zealand's largest chocolate factory.

We stayed in the city centre Nomad backpackers, not as nice as the little hostels out in the small towns but a good location for going out and seeing the city. Laura and I drank a bottle of wine each and went out for a really great evening at the Raa Bar.

The next day we had two activities first the chocolate factory tour - Cadbury's World then the Speight's Brewery tour.

Cadbury's World Dunedin was pretty interesting, lots of detail on the history of chocolate, from Central America and Mexico - (when I was there the chocolate was pretty bad). Then about the gradual refinement of the processing of the coca beans into the product that we know and love today.

After that a wander around the factory - looking at machines and trying some of the bars. There are many different makes of Cadbury's chocolate in New Zealand compared to back home in the UK, there is country fudge, thick milk chocolate surrounding fudge, coconut rough, milk chocolate infused with desiccated coconut. Well we got to try all these and more. Then we wandered by the chocolate waterfall, just like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, one ton of milk chocolate falling 30ft in less than 10secs... a lot of chocolate.

After visiting the Chocolate Factory we visited the Brewery. Speights is now the most popular beer in New Zealand, and not bad either - not as good as proper beer from England or Belgium but not bad. The brewery was really interesting - the hops are from Nelson, the kettles were huge copper structures, and the whole building had the air of a museum, except it is a working brewery producing the beer day in day out.

At the end of the tour we got to taste many of the brews on offer. All very nice, shame I was a little hungover.

---

Photos

Me Looking Stoopid
Driving the Cadbury's Car

Comments

[Andy.Harris]

your blog
shoulda stayed in pomland