Moeraki Boulders and Dunedin Journal & Photos - New Zealand - Lynx Travel

Scottie did show up and is now the morning of the 4th and he is driving the camper from Dunedin to the Catlins. He showed up at the room about 1:15 AM and we talked until about 2:45 AM. We got up and packed and on the road about 10:00 AM. Scott doesn't like the feeling of being the passenger on the wrong side of the road. I did alright driving except a couple of times when I couldn't find fourth gear and another time when I went around a turn a little too fast and thought we were going over. My biggest problem driving is that there isn't any room for my feet so my left foot ends up underneath the clutch pedal and if I have to stop quickly it can be an adventure trying to move from the bottom to top of the pedal. The scenery has been getting more and more beautiful as we go south. We stopped at about noon to go to lunch at the Ashburton McDonalds where Scott grossed me out by getting a McKiwi Burger. This strange concoction was a burger with a beet, fried egg and lots of lettuce. That is a bizarre combo.

We got back on the road and next stopped at the Moeraki Boulders which are on a beach about 80 kilometers from Dunedin. They are a carbonate of lime, silica, alumina, and peroxide of iron. They are formed around a central core of lime crystals which appear to have the power of attracting and consolidating the above ingredients from the adjacent soil. The boulders are about 60 million years old.

That is the description from the flyer. Mine is they are really strange out on this beach out of nowhere. Some of the smaller ones looked like overgrown soccer balls. Scott took a picture of me immerging from one of the broken ones like I am being hatched. It was about here we started seeing these yellow flowers all over the place. They completely covered a couple of bigger hills. A bartender told us the name but I can't remember it now but I will ask Scott later. He's busy now learning to drive on the left hand side of the road. The flowers are really pretty even though I do remember the bartender calling them weeds.

We left the boulders and arrived in Dunedin about 4:00 PM which was really too late to see any museums. The town square is an area they call the Octagon that has a statue of Robbie Burns in the middle with his back to a church and facing a pub as the guide books say. They don't however tell you who he is. We were told by a gas station attendant that all the camper sites were a good 5 kilometers from the downtown pubs so we just parked for the night behind the Octagon in a public car park on Moray Place. We checked out the information center which really told us we were too late to see anything and proceeded to look for a pub. We were told Dunedin was a drinkers paradise with pubs everywhere, but we had to walk 4 or 5 blocks before we ran into our first one called the Albert Arms which was fairly expensive so we headed off across the street to the Robert Burns Pub which was to fancy and they had no footrest at the bar which I think is a must for a real pub. Walking down the road some we came across The Last Moa which was just right. The bartender was really cool telling us about cricket and rugby. Things I didn't know, a cricket match can last up to 5 days for up to 8 hours a day and the sports teams are not owned but sponsored. They sold these little mini pitchers of Speights Beer for $4 NZ. I asked if we could have one and he said they were actually a promotion thing and were Speight's property and they would want them back. He did however then say but the do get dropped and broken. Very cool I left him a $20 tip for breaking the pitcher into my bag.

We walked back up to the Octagon to go to Ruby in the Dust where we ate. Scott ordered some Beef Nachos and I got us a Kalahari Surprise wood fired pizza. It was great I thought, made of baby octopus, squid, fish, mussels and shrimp with mozzarella. It need on Old Bay to be perfect. They had a neat sign in the kitchen of a little guy holding up a beer with the slogan Helping Ugly People Have Sex Since 1862. Scott picked up some newspapers one of which was the Otago Gaily Times. The picture on the front page was the back of a guys T shirt that said We Recruit. We left that paper there. Finally we went to a pub call The Outback Inn which was run by the area college students. The also had the jugs but they gave us mini glasses to drink out of, almost thimble like. The bar had a cool feature, we thought the taps were ceramic but ended up they were all frozen. Master technology at work. The final great thing about this bar was the men's bathroom that was a shrine to Anna Kournikova. You could tell this place was run by students. We look for some more pubs from a guide book but they were all either closed on gone. That brings us up to date and I realize now looking up that Scott has us on some gravel road in the middle of nowhere but it is real pretty being right on coast. I forgot to tell him about the roads we can't go on. They were mostly north I think. Until tomorrow.