Dunedin (Duh-NEED-in) is just about as far south as you can get on the planet and still be in a civilized city. At about -46 degrees latitude, if you were to go east or west, the only thing that would stop you from arriving back in the southern part of New Zealand would be Patagonia. And so, like Patagonia, it's windy as hell. They call them the roaring 40's, in reference to the latitude (followed by the furious 50's). Something weird must be going on because Antarctica, the coldest place on earth, is only 1,600 miles away, but the Northern Hemisphere equivalent to Dunedin would be just north of Portland, Oregon. Like Portland, the climate is far from Antarctic. I'm not sure it ever get's below freezing there. If it did, driving would be an incredible nightmare. It should be pointed out though, that mainland Antarctica begins at a latitude of -63 degrees. Sixty Three degrees North is only 130 miles from my house. Maybe those thousand miles of high winds act as a temperature barrier similar to those fans that blow down on you as you enter some grocery stores to keep the hot air out.
Dunedin is a kind of a Scottish town, and also a university town, so it stood apart from others we visited. The streets in the town are crazy steep, like the steepest streets in San Francisco, but across a relatively larger portion of the town. In fact, they claim to have the steepest street the world. I had to drive up it, of course, and it was indeed steep. I had to stay in first gear and noticed that the sidewalks were staircases. I heard that the layout of the city was designed in England by people who had no knowledge of the local topography. When the plans arrived to Dunedin the engineer followed them building the streets according to the blueprints, regardless of what the ground looked like.
They had an excellent botanical garden which we accidentally wandered into while on a walk. It was so well done and big that we stayed for 2 hours. I couldn't believe it was free. They had plants from all over the world, and i was blown off my feet when i saw a Giant Sequoia tree that was already around a 100 feet tall! It didn't say when it was planted. Personally i think people should grow forests of those things wherever they can.
Many plants down there have foliage that goes from green to nearly flourescent yellow. It's seriously vivid and doesn't translate to film well.
Some cool bike jumps i found.
The botanical gardens. Maree took a million pictures of this place.
They had a cool cemetery right next to the gardens.
Considering its size, the city also has a very nice art museum, also free. I think the strangest thing about the Dunedin though, was the huge sprawl of housing spreading out from the downtown area. The downtown area was small but there were so many houses spreading out over the hills and beyond that i couldn't imagine where all those people worked. Maybe the University has far more students than i imagined.
They had lots of nice things, like a nice beach, and....
Nice neighborhoods stretched on forever.
While in Dunedin the weather turned bad on us. I think we stayed about 3 days, because it kept raining and blowing, and our next stop was to be the mountains. There is just no point in going to the mountains in low clouds and rain, so we stretched out our time. We finished our shopping (i mean, Maree finished her shopping) and he had to resort to more touristy things like taking a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. That tour started off like a Willy Wonka Wonderland, with animatronics and everything, but quickly became very boring. They had a cool 60 foot chocolate falls in a big silo.
