Our time in New Zealand is coming to a close pretty quickly, but there are a few more places we want to see before we leave and Dunedin was at the top of the list. In another life I had strongly considered getting my Masters in Kinesiology from the University of Otago in Dunedin, so I was especially curious to see the place I would have spent two years of my life. Dunedin is a mid-size city  situated on the East coast of the South Island, about 3 hours from Queenstown. We managed to trade a rainy and windy day in Queenstown for warm sunny weather in Dunedin, and after eating lunch at Velvet Burger we spent a leisurely afternoon wandering around down town and admiring all of the beautiful architecture.

There are a lot of really impressive old stone buildings in Dunedin, but our favorite was the old train station. It took three years to build out of local granite and basalt, and was opened in 1906. At its peak it could handle over 100 trains in a day, but today its just visited by a couple of sightseeing trains and the building is also used as an information center, bus stop and art gallery. Living in Queenstown, which is a major tourist destination, where things are open all week, we had forgotten that the majority of places in New Zealand virtually shut down on Sundays. Dunedin, on the other hand, is more of a "normal" city so we weren't able to look in any of the cute little shops or have coffee in any of the quaint cafés, but we did manage to snag a spot in a tour of the Cadbury chocolate factory.

The Cadbury factory in Dunedin manufactures all of the New Zealand specific candies... things we had never heard of before we arrived here like Jaffas, Crunchie bars, Pebbles and Snowballs. We started our tour by exploring their little chocolate museum in the visitors center where they explained the history of the Cadbury company and displayed all of the old candy wrappers and marketing materials. Then we were led "backstage" by a tour guide in purple overalls who explained to us how chocolate is made and a bit about the process behind the manufacture of different candies. We didn't actually get to see inside the factory for "health and safety" reasons, but we did get to spend time in a sensory room where we got whiffs of the different chocolate flavors from giant PVC pipes on the wall and we got to design our own melted chocolate treat for consumption with tiny wooden spoons. At the end of the tour we climbed to the top of a giant silo where we watched over 1 ton of liquid chocolate pour from the ceiling in a giant cascading waterfall. It had nothing to do with making chocolate... they just do it because they can.

During the tour we learned that the steepest street in the world was just on the other side of town, so of course we had to go check it out. At its steepest point, Baldwin Street goes up at a staggering 35% gradient, so for every 2.8 meters you walk you gain 1 meter of elevation. The road is so steep that the sidewalk is actually a staircase, and the top of the road is paved in concrete rather than asphalt, because on a hot day the tar would melt and the asphalt would actually slide down the street. Our car struggles enough just getting up our driveway, so we figured it was safest to just park it at the bottom and walk up. The street is incredibly steep, but not very long and we made it to the top in less than 5 minutes and were rewarded with a pretty cool view over the city. The rain clouds that we had left behind in Queenstown began to roll in just as we got back to the bottom of the hill, and we made it back to the car just as the first drops began to fall. The drive back to Queenstown was wet and windy, but by the time we made it home the bad weather had cleared up and the stars were out.

For more pictures of this beautiful town check out the Photos post.

Two weeks ago we woke up to a gloriously sunny day, and with just a few weeks left in New Zealand we decided it was too good to waste. We've been living just 45k from Glenorchy all winter and had never made the drive out, so we decided to hop in the car and have an adventure. Glenorchy is a little one horse town, with just a gas station, a general store and a few cafés, but it has some amazing scenery and was the setting for quite a few scenes in the Lord of the Rings. We had brunch at the Glenorchy Café and enjoyed pancakes and pulled pork sandwiches in their back garden in the sunshine and then took a walk down to the lake shore. From the lake we noticed what looked like a trail up one of the smaller mountains in the middle of the valley, so we stopped in the store to ask about it and found out it was a fairly straightforward hike.

After a short drive out of town we parked the car at the trail head, slathered on some sunscreen and headed into the trees. The first two-thirds of the trail was steep switch-backs through the forest that reminded us a lot of hiking in Alaska. The trail was well marked with orange blazes, despite the fact that steep terrain and heavy brush made it pretty much impossible to step off the trail even if you wanted to. Once we reached the tree line, however, the trail markers completely disappeared and the final one-third of the climb was an extremely steep scramble through the tussocks and spear grass and over loose rock. After an hour of clinging to clumps of grass to try and stay on the unstable and near-vertical mountainside we crested the ridgeline and realized we had missed the trail and had been following a goat track instead.

Once we were on the established trail the going was much easier and we made it to the summit just as the weather started to take a turn for the worse. The wind picked up and dark clouds started rolling in, so after 4 hours of climbing we only spent about two minutes on the summit before making a beeline for the treeline. The views from the summit were well worth the effort though, from 1,375 meters we had a full panoramic view of the Dart and Rees river valleys and Lake Wakatipu. The hike down had its own challenges and even on the right trail the terrain was very steep and we were constantly setting off little rockslides. Still we made much better progress on the way down, and reached the trees in about a quarter of the time it took us on the way up. The rest of the descent took about 2 hours and we reached the car just as the first serious raindrops started to fall. Our timing with the weather couldn't have been more perfect!

You can see more pictures from this beautiful hike here.