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).

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

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;

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.