a Blanket of Wool

Today we left our great B&B in Christchurch (amid boisterous behests by the every other patron to change our itinerary this way, or that way) and hit the road for Dunedin (as in, “after dinner, we’ll be done eadin’”).

On the way, we learned to drive in New Zealand. Among the great road signs were “merge like a zip”, a tree and a bench (picnic area), a choo-choo train, and a picture that clearly meant, “drive crazy when wet”. By the way, if we haven’t mentioned this before, New Zealanders have a great sense of humor—and hospitality. We have developed a new mantra, “Just ask, and New Zealand will provide.” For example, the first time we started feeling a little bit weary behind the wheel, someone said, “I could use some coffee.” Just then, around the next bend, we saw a sign: “Driver Reviver: free coffee, 2 km.” Yes, New Zealand is that cool—free coffee on the highway!

We drove along the east coast of the country, which seems to be the sheep capital of the world—it’s literally covered in a blanket of wool (except that about half the sheep are naked these days). We think we saw some of the little blue penguins in the wild near Oamaru—we didn’t really feel like spending money to be sure, but we snapped some photos so you can decide. On the way from Oamaru to Dunedin we passed some crazy spherical boulders that had fallen into the ocean, so we took some photos there, too.

This evening we checked into our hostel. When we arrived, this scrawny pasty-faced guy in his early 20s with scraggly long dark hair answered and said immediately “we’re full.” Well then! Fortunately we had a reservation. So we forced him to stick around and check us in, opened the door to our shared room by jiggling the key for about 5 minutes, dropped our things and followed the guy on his begrudgingly-given tour. Not such a great hostel, but later in the evening we were pleased to meet our roommate (we had reserved a triple, but ended up in a quad) who is 34 (more than 4 years older than the oldest of us) and who has just moved to New Zealand from Vancouver, Canada to basically hit the restart button on her life—she’s beginning a new undergraduate degree in fine arts, with a specialty in painting. It’s nice to know that people older than us are restarting, so even if we royally mess up our physics careers there’s still hope!

At dinnertime we walked around town. The center is called the Octagon (obviously due to it’s 8-sided shape). Dunedin is the Gaelic name for Edinburgh, and the town was founded by Scotsmen who picked this location because it’s the same latitude as Edinburgh. They decided to recreate Edinburgh, but properly this time. So their roads are straight throughout the downtown area. This is basically the only interesting fact about the town as far as we could tell.

We found a Japanese place to eat (the sushi here is incredibly cheap) and went back to the hostel happy that we had decided to only spend one night here. Not only is the hostel only so-so, but the town is completely dead. We hear it’s a student town, and since no students are here there’s nothing going on. And by “nothing going on”, what they really mean is “there’s absolutely no one in town”.

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