Living the Good Life: Dunedin

Hey Guys!
So we are currently only working part time, so we got 6 days off and decided to go on a tour up to Dunedin, across to Queenstown, and then down to Doubtful Sound.

The drive from our place in the metropolis of Centre Bush to Dunedin took around 2.5 hours. The first place we hit up was the Cadbury Chocolate factory for a little tour. It's not too surprising that Roberta had it as one of the top priorities to do in Dunedin.

The Cadbury Silos

We started off just browsing through an area that talked about the history of the factory and of the history of chocolate. We then got suited up in our hair nets and removed all our bling. This one poor girl had some facial piercings and she had to put tape all over them, so she was pretty much looking like a mummy walking around. They didn't let us take any pictures inside in case we leaked some of their secrets I guess.

We checked out the chocolate chip making machine and then headed to where the easter chocolate was made. It takes 6 months to produce all the eggs/bunnies for easter that is then eaten in the week around easter! Since it was just Easter, they were not currently making those things.

We were then shown how Jaffas were made. They are like round Mini eggs that are red in color. It takes 24 hours of rolling and adding of sugar/water to make the hard outer candy layer, so I'm sure it would be about the same for mini-eggs. They are quite popular here in New Zealand and have been made since the 1930s.

A picture stolen from the internet of the Jaffa race they have down Baldwin St every year.

Each jaffa has a number on it which has been purchased by someone. The first Jaffa down wins $10,000! There's a few jaffas

there!

We got many treats along the way and someone was feeling a bit sick at the end. You shouldn't have to guess very much to figure out who that was. We were shown what 1 ton of liquid chocolate looks like at the end when they dumped it from the top of a silo to the bottom like a waterfall.

Crunchie Mountain

After our chocolate fiasco, we headed up to Signal Hill to check out the view of the city from there and then over to Baldwin Street which is supposed to be the steepest street in the world.

View from Signal Hill

Esther made it up and down again. She's a beauty.

It was getting close to supper by then, so we headed to over to a holiday park. It's starting to get dark pretty early now (around 6:15) since the fall back of daylight savings. There have also been some overnights where it has gotten to around -5 degrees, so it definitely feels like fall. Thankfully on the freezing nights we were in our place with a heater as that would have been chilly in Esther.

It was nice and sunny the next morning so we got up and headed to the Dunedin botanical gardens to check out the pretty fleurs.

There was also a large aviary within the gardens much to Roberta's delight. They had all kinds of parrots from all over along with a few native birds. We got quite the kick out of Sam the talking Cockatoo. Here is a clip of us having a little chit chat.

After a few hours frolicking in the botanical gardens, we headed to check out Otago University. There was a nice elderly gentleman that showed us around a bit. He was a true kiwi character let me tell you. We hadn't known him 10 minutes and he was inviting us for dinner and such. I am definitely going to try and be as friendly as these kiwis when I get back home. The university wasn't really anything special, really compact. It had nothing on the U of S.
Roberta's note: I liked the uni, the river Leith running through it was quite nice.

We strolled around the Otago Museum for a bit looking at a bunch of fossils of the extinct birds. It would have been cool back in the day to wander through the forest and see 3 meters tall moa cruising through. We humans really have a habit of destroying nature.

There were 7 different species of moa. All were extinct around 500 years ago as a result of

Maori hunting. These were made from ostrich feathers to show what they may have looked

like.

This is a kakapo, the world's largest parrot that is also flightless. It only survives on a few

predator free islands.

Next on the list of things to do was my number one must do which was to tour the Speights brewery. That makes it the third brewery we have toured since we arrived. This was definitely the coolest one of them all. They still brew the beer like they did in the early 1900s, but that will change soon as they are building a new state of the art brewery that will be fully automated. Currently the brewery is all gravity fed. The start of the process occurs on the 8th floor, so that is also where we started our tour. We entered through a "secret" door that led through some halls telling the history of beer in the world.

Apparently the phrase "sculling a beer" originated from when the vikings used to conquer new areas and drink beer from skulls of people they had decapitated....a little morbid

James Cook was the first european to discover New Zealand. He used to make his crew drink an awful tasting beer made from needles off trees to prevent them from getting scurvy.

John Speight himself who ironically died from cirrhosis of the liver.

After the touring was finished, we were given half an hour to try all the brews on tap. We all took full advantage of that and downed quite a few.

We then made our way to the Forsyth Barr stadium to check out a rugby game. A New Zealand trip wouldn't be complete without it. Unfortunately we won't be able to see an All Blacks game, but this would suffice our needs. The home team Highlanders (last in the league) were playing the top team in the league the Brumbies. The league is known as the Super 15 and has 5 teams from New Zealand, 5 teams in Australia, and 5 teams in South Africa. We sat in the student section known as The Zoo. Yes we are still trying to pretend we are living a student life. It was a good atmosphere even though the home team lost it's 10th straight game.