Tag Archives: Travel

On our last leg(s) – the journey to Christchurch

Sunday 22 March 2026 – Dunedin was our last stop on the tour of the South Island. All we had to do was to get ourselves to Christchurch and hold ourselves in readiness for our return flights to the UK. Because of the unpleasantness in the Middle East, our original journey back via Dubai had been changed so that our route was now (a) via Singapore and (b) a day later. Thus we would have two nights and one day in Christchurch, and a layover in Singapore’s Changi airport of some six hours: total journey time therefore 30 hours, including 24 hours in the air.

But first we had to get ourselves to Christchurch, a distance of some 360km. Despite Jane’s best research efforts, there wasn’t a whole host of things to do and see en route, but she did find a couple of interesting diversions on our journey.

The first of these was still just about within the Dunedin city limits – Baldwin Street, dubbed the World’s Steepest (driveable) Street.

It’s notoriously difficult to convey steepness, either up or down, in photographs, so I made the sacrifice of walking up the steepest bit so that I could bring you a dispassionate measurement of the gradient.

It’s not that steep the whole way; a section near the top is the steepest.

I walked up the road, but Jane took advantage of steps, which run up one side of the steep bit.

For fun, we did another way of conveying the gradient.

At the top is a seat, much needed by some of the folk that had got that far

and some info about the street

Of course, some people have to make getting up the street a real challenge, and there are a couple of plaques there which are nods to the “because it’s there” lunatic tendency of some people.

and there’s one rather charming record, by the water fountain there, of a successful attempt to climb the street by a young lad aged only 3 years and 4 months.

After that little workout, we moved on, leaving logging country for more pastoral landscapes.

There were some exceptions to the low-rise nature of the landscape; Jane took this photo as we refuelled near a town called Bushey.

The Glastonbury Tor lookalike at the top is the Sir John McKenzie memorial, by the way (he was a politician in the last half of the 19th century). The last two thirds of the journey is through pancake-flat landscapes, which are conducive to high-density cattle farming, something we had noted in a few other parts of the country.

As we followed the coast northwards, we reached a town called Moeraki. It shares a name with Lake Moeraki, but the connection is merely linguistic, if ChatGPT is to be believed; Both names come from the word “moeraki” in the Māori language, often interpreted as something like “sleepy sky” or “day of rest”. Anyway, this Moeraki is a beachside town and on the beach are some geologically very interesting objects: the Moeraki Boulders.

Although their formation is a matter of abstruse geology, it’s clear that they are a popular tourist attraction. They are “septarian concretions”. A concretion is a hard and compact mass formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles, found in sedimentary rock or soil. Septarian concretions are carbonate-rich concretions containing angular cavities or cracks (from the Latin septum, “partition”, referring to the cracks or cavities separating polygonal blocks of hardened material). Some of the boulders show this partitioning very clearly, indeed looking as if someone has taken a broken one and glued it back together.

There are some broken boulders on the beach, which also give an idea of the crystalline nature of the material between the compacted mudstone.

There are many intact boulders, most of them part-buried within the sand

and very popular for kids to play on and (sigh) selfies. There’s one which looks to have rolled off the cliff where it was formed relatively recently (in geological terms, anyway).

Human provided for scale

The boulders are spherical through the way they were created, over a period of some 65 million years and starting with a seed, which might have been a shell fragment. Mineral-rich water percolating through the mud deposited crystalline material and mudstone evenly so that it expanded spherically within the cliff it was building up in. When the cliff is eroded away by the sea, the formed boulders then roll down to the beach. There are apparently other similar phenomena on the North Island as well as these here.

We might have then completed the journey to Christchurch with no further stops other than for coffee, for example at this accurately-named establishment

which had a very enticing array of cakes.

But Jane noticed that a place called Geraldine had a vintage motors and machinery museum. I was taken enough with the name of the town, as well as with Herbert and Alma along the route; but the prospect of a vintage museum proved irresistible, so we stopped off to take a look.

The desk was manned by a volunteer called Bruce, who was very pleased to see us, and accompanied us as we went into the first of the halls, which was real veteran cars.

It turned out that he owned one of them

but was also anxious to tell us about many of the other ones, too. He was a lovely chap, but we were quite glad when other customers came along and diverted his attention away from explaining all the cars there. There were some interesting exhibits, such as this Model T Ford

and this creation, which I’d never come across before, the Reselco Solocar.

We wandered around the other sheds: tractors,

with a very charming array of tractor seats along one wall

and some very elderly-looking examples;

Stationary engines;

Crawler tractors;

and models.

There were other sheds with various other sorts of machinery, such as lawnmowers, much incidental period stuff such as old cameras and household goods, and a model horse in the yard.

The last shed contained cars of a vintage that was much more my period

Vanden Plas Princess 3-litre R

Wolseley 6/99

Armstrong Siddeley

Vauxhall Veloxes

and a Jag I’d never come across before, an XJ40 (mislabelled as a JX40, I might add).

The place had the same amateur air as Brooklands Museum used to have before it got really popular; amateur in the good sense of love being lavished on the exhibits.

There were a couple of quirky roadside objects to be spotted en route – creative use of hay bale “marshmallows”

and, having passed Bushey (the name of a town near where I was born), we also passed Chertsey

a town near where we now live. But there wasn’t another roadside attraction to divert us and so we found ourselves at the Sudima Hotel in Christchurch, not far from the George where we’d stayed before (and would have again, had they had room for us). It wasn’t the Small Luxury Hotel that the George is, but it was a well-organised and comfortable room and the service was friendly and efficient.

During our free day in Christchurch, apart from writing this blog, my main task was to return the hire car. This had the potential to be complicated, as I had agreed, on taking on the car at Greymouth all those weeks ago, to return it to the airport rather than the city depot of the car hire firm. Our travel agent hadn’t managed to change the arrangement, and I couldn’t persuade the agent on the phone to Budget that I even had one of their cars, far less could make any change to its return location. So I drove it, via a refuelling stop, to the Budget city offices to discuss whether it was OK to just drop it off there. To start with, that was a very frustrating process because there was only one chap on the desk actually helping customers, but, for some reason, a couple of others drifting about Doing Mysterious Things that didn’t help at all reduce the queue of three people in front of me. The chap at the desk was being frightfully helpful to an elderly American couple who seemed to be having many troubles picking up a car; he even spent time explaining phone charging cables to the lady and helped her buy one from the machine on the premises. All this took about 20 minutes with the three guys in the queue and me exchanging ever more meaningful looks and raised eyebrows. I had just resigned myself to a long wait when a guy wandered in to the office with a key for a car he was returning and said “fuelled up, no damage; can I just leave the key here?” and the desk chap just nodded. So I followed this wonderful example, and got the nod from the desk chap that the airport/city dichotomy was not a problem, dropped the key off and hightailed it back to the hotel before they could change their mind. I haven’t received any credit card charge, so I am currently assuming that all is OK.

We treated ourselves to one more Decent Cocktail And Nice Meal at the George in the late afternoon, after which, to shake the food down, we went for a walk. Obviously. So we got a few more photos of Christchurch’s street art,

cafés,

handsome buildings;

Antarctic Heritage Trust HQ

scenes of riparian beauty,

and even a farewell wave from Robert Falcon Scott

before turning in for the night to get some sleep before the long journey home.

So, that was it for New Zealand. We’ve had a wonderful time, full of new experiences, sights and sounds; we’ve covered over 3,700km on largely uncrowded roads; and we’ve walked over 200km, including a couple of toughish hikes. The country is a delight for British tourists – well-organised for a wide variety of activities at a wide variety of accommodation types and it’s been a pleasure to be able to enjoy much of that variety. Slightly sadly, we head home; there will be no more entries on these pages for New Zealand. But fear not: we will be on the road again in about six weeks’ time and I hope to be able to bring you the exciting sights of our next trip here. Where are we going? Ah – you’ll have to keep in touch with these pages to find that out.

Oh! To go to Otago!

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Still Saturday 21 March 2026 – Apart from being in the right place to be collected for our afternoon excursion, we had to get back to the hotel so that I could pick up the Nikon and the Big Lens, for the outing was, if not a walk on the wild side, at least a coach ride on it. Accordingly, Danny, one of our guides from Monarch Wildlife Cruises and Tours, came along to add us to his small busload of people to be taken out to the Otago Peninsula to see what wildlife possibilities it threw up. (Monarch has been quick off the mark – it has the URL wildlife.co.nz, getting which must have required some nifty keyboard warriorship.) A quick look at the terrain of the area will reveal that the peninsula is part of a largish volcanic caldera with other volcanic bits also part of it,

so any journey on the peninsula was going to be up-and-downy and left-and-right-turny. We had two more punters to pick up at Portobello before we could go in search of non-human quarry. Danny explained that the Portobello name came about because of the Edinburgh link with Dunedin; Edinburgh has a Portobello (something I didn’t know – my geographical knowledge is truly being expanded on this trip) and the settlers on the peninsula decided that Dunedin needed one, too.

On the drive there, we saw some lovely scenery.

or, rather, Jane did. I was on the wrong side of the bus. Danny also pointed out various bits of wildlife that we passed, mainly birds. Again, I was on the wrong side of the bus, but managed to snatch a quick snap of a Caspian Tern,

which is apparently not a common visitor to New Zealand.

Having picked up our two final punters, the tour went to Hoopers Inlet, to find New Zealand sealions. There was a sealion creche

where an on-duty mother sealion kept watch whilst pups played.

A little along the beach, other females took it easy

whilst our group and others took advantage of their proximity to get photos. The normal rule is to keep 20 metres away from sealions, but there’s a fence here which allows people to get close.

It’s worth noting that we were cautioned against getting too close to sealions, particularly the blokes. They can (a) get grumpy, (b) take offense and charge and (c) weigh upwards of 300kg. Very different from the advice we got for the fur seals in the Antarctic; they might essay a charge but vigorous arm waving is enough to dissuade them. As I’ve said before, fur seals aren’t true seals – they’re more like small furry sealions. Sealions and fur seals are what are called “eared seals”, and one can just about make out external ears on each. Sealions, though, are larger, and the males are more aggressive; they prefer sandy beaches whereas fur seals tend to colonise rocky outcrops. And they both have different skeletal structures from the “true seals” (e.g. leopard seals, elephant seals), which have shorter legs and arms and thus much more difficulty moving about on land. True seals swim with their feet; eared seals with their arms.* It’s easy to see the arms and legs of a sealion when it’s in motion,

like this mother, who we think was coming over from the sunbathers either to tell its progeny off or to take over babysitting duties.

I looked away from the sealions on occasions (the kids’ play is terribly cute but after a while it gets somewhat predictable) and managed to get a photo of an incoming pied stilt.

After a while, we decamped to another beach, Allan’s Beach, just round the corner, where there were a few more sealions, including a large male. Apparently the older they are, the darker they get, a neat trick that humans have to use chemicals to emulate.

There were other sealions on the beach, but very little of what you might call “activity”,

so we eventually moved on to the next phase of the tour which, for us, was a boat trip. The boat in question was the Monarch (which guesswork makes me think might be the inspiration for the company name).

It was skippered by Buddy, who has taken the beardedness that typically marks out New Zealand boat skippers to a new level.

The objective of the cruise was to go out to view the Otago Albatross Colony out at Harrington Point. This is the colony for which (you’ll remember, of course) the return of the first albatross every year gives rise to joyful pealing of the St. Paul’s bells. Buddy piloted the boat and simultaneously gave a running commentary, demonstrating a good knowledge of what the birds were up to. His delivery was somewhat idiosyncratic, but the content was very interesting.

The headland in question

features a lighthouse, unsurprisingly, I suppose, but you’ve seen lighthouses before so I haven’t included a photo of it. Looking closely at the terrain enables you to see where albatrosses have their nests

which are just mud piles built up year on year and returned to each year by the parent albatrosses, which basically mate for life. It wasn’t nesting season, which is why there were no birds there. Where they were was further across and up on the cliff

where young albatrosses were going through the process of pairing up. There would be displays on the ground so that males and females could suss each other out,

and a lot of “Ho, watch me glide!” as a tactic to impress potential mates.

Northern Royal Albatross

The albatrosses that were landing and taking off and gliding about were Northern Royal Albatrosses. Whilst we were there, we also saw some White Capped Albatrosses, but they were merely interlopers and not part of the colony.

White-capped Albatross

White-capped Albatross

There was a certain amount of non-albatross action on the cliff face; some cormorants of a species whose name I can’t remember, but which Buddy said were quite rare,

and a vast mass of gulls clinging to the rock face

(with some shags among them).

On the rocks below were some fur seals (rocks, you see – told you so) and there was a comedy moment as one young pup decided that he would climb up and play with the gulls.

He really went a long way up

until eventually his mum came along to tell him that it was time to come down for his tea, or some such.

After our short (one-hour) cruise, for the final component of the day’s outing, we went to the opera. For the ~~ghastly shrieking~~ singing art form, I would have been reluctant to join in, but this was The Opera, the Otago Peninsula Eco Restoration Alliance, a private eco-reserve dedicated to conservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and education [their Oxford comma, not mine, I hasten to add], which is an entirely different kettle of fish-eating birds (and other wildlife). Starting in 1985, the property was transformed, by previous land owner Howard McGrouther and conservationist Scott Clarke, from a working farm into a crusading endeavour to save endangered penguins. It’s a good story of a concerted and linked effort to conserve and protect a species of penguin that was in danger of extinction – the yellow-eyed penguin, or hoiho. The reserve allows tourists to view hoiho while out of sight in specially built trenches. There’s also a rehabilitation facility for penguins, a safe place where injured, starving and unwell penguins (principally hoiho, but including other species also) can be treated for their injuries, fed and brought back to health before being released back into the wild. This was our first stop. It was a slightly bizarre experience, because we saw a compound full of basically motionless penguins.

The reason for this is that it was the moulting season for these birds. Unlike many birds which moult small quantities of feather all the time, penguins undergo what is known as a “catastrophic” moult, in other words they exchange their entire set of feathers for a new set all in one go.

Moulting is an energy-consuming (and I think quite uncomfortable) time for penguins, which is why they don’t move around much when it’s happening. Whilst they moult, also, they cannot enter the water since their plumage is temporarily not waterproof, so they can’t swim to feed themselves. Ain’t nature a strange thing? A couple were doing a bit of mutual preening

but otherwise all was still. The main type of penguin was, indeed, the hoiho, or yellow-eyed penguin;

but there were others, too: the fjordland penguin

and the erect-crested penguin.

(a subtle difference – the erect-crested penguin’s two crests are nearly parallel rather than in a sharpish V shape).

After the enclosure, we moved out into the open-air part of the reserve,

where nesting boxes have been set up for incoming wild penguins.

They were largely empty, but one had at least one inmate and clear evidence of moulting.

We also saw a couple of fur seals

and, round the corner, some more, including another young’un with climbing ambitions. He’s the small brown maggot in the grass at the top of this picture.

By this stage it was beginning to get dark and cold and the hoped-for emergence of penguins onto the beach hadn’t happened, so we called it a day at that point and began the long and winding road back to Dunedin and our hotel.

This was our last stop in New Zealand, bar the necessary stopover in Christchurch in order to catch our flight home. So the only prospect for the morrow was the drive up to Christchurch. As ever, Jane had made sure that we couldn’t just get in the car and drive the whole way, oh dear me no. There were a couple of Things To See en route, and so I’ll regale you with those details in the next entry, which may well be the last for this trip.

* If you want to be nerdish about fur seals versus true seals, then here’s what ChatGPT has to say in the matter:

All seals belong to the pinnipeds (the fin-footed marine mammals), but they split into two main families: