Dunedin!

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Checked in to my hostel in Dunedin around 4:30pm. Dunedin is very much a Scottish town. The influence on it is seen everywhere. Dunedin is also very hilly. There is a mini replica of a big tower in Edinburgh in one of the parks here. It’s also very much a student town as the big Otago University is here.

Pictures

After dinner I headed over to the Speights Brewery for our brewery tour. Speights is the South island beer. It’s also one that I will actually drink haha. I met up with the others from the bus and we did the tour. At the end we got to go into a bar like room and pour our own pints. They had 7 different beers on tap. So for half an hour we were given free passes to the taps.

My favorite one was called Summer harvest and it’s an apricot and honey beer. Yum! But I tried one called Porter as well that was a dark beer but tasted like coffee and that was good too. Distinction was another dark beer that had caramel flavours but I didn’t like it. I had a ton of fun in there!

The next morning at 9am I was at the Cadbury factory to do a tour. We had to take off all our jewelery and wear a hair net for safety reasons as we went right into the factory which smelt SOOOOO GOOOD. We got all kinds of free chocolate on the tour. A lot of it is New Zealand style so lots of chocolate covered marshmallow....they love it here. Weird!

I also learnt that Canada and America eat the most chocolate per person per year haha. Ooops! We got to see a giant chocolate fall. A tonne of chocolate drops down an old silo in 28 seconds. It was awesome! Got a cup full of liquid chocolate which is soooo good.

I bought some Mint Chocolate hot chocolate mix which if you don’t know is my favorite. It just came out here. Delicious! A lot of their chocolate is different to what we can get back home in Canada even though it’s all Cadbury.

After lunch I caught a bus over to Baldwin Street which is the Worlds Steepest Street. I somehow managed to walk up it to the top. It was tough and really steep! Cars have to really gun it at like 90 km/hr just to get up it. It’s a residential street so houses are all built on either side and at the top. Great view from up there!

The next day I headed over to the farmers market in the morning which was really cool. They had all kinds of yummy things there. But it was cold and cloudy so I headed back to the hostel for some lunch and then got picked up for my wildlife tour.

There was only 8 of us so it was really good. We stopped in at the Albatross center first. If you don’t know, Albatross are HUGE birds that look like seagulls but are about 10 times bigger with huge wingspans (up to 3 meters) and they can travel huge distances without ever touching down. They are incredible and hard to get a picture of! But we did see one flying around above us.

We then drove over to see the seals at the Otago peninsula. They are a protected NZ fur seal colony. We got a great viewing spot to see them playing around on the rocks and just being lazy. They are such cute creatures!!! We then had to walk down to the beach and came within a few feet of big sea lions. They are funny things. There was a few just laying in the grass having naps.

We then watched some of the yellow eyed penguins coming in from sea. They are so adorable! I love them. I was so tempted to smuggle one into my bag. They are rare penguins and are very unsocial except with their mate. They hate their neighbours and are really loud.

There are only 20 female sea lions in NZ and a lots more males so it’s rare to see the females. But there was one on the beach with a male sea lion protecting her. They let us get quite close. It was a fantastic tour and our tour guide also does his part to help the animals. He has worked with the conservationists to protect the sea lions and tag all the babies.

I have to say, I really enjoyed Dunedin even if it was really cloudy, cold and rainy for most of my time there. It was a lot like Christchurch but way more hilly.

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