Freebies and thievery - Dunedin

We kicked off our time in Dunedin by treating ourselves to brunch. The long dog in St Clair sat at the end of a residential street overlooking the rough sea below. As we sat in the warm, waiting for our food to arrive, we watched a few adventurous surfers pushing their way though the unpredictable surf, only to be shot back to shore when they found the right wave. In the garden, there was a small swimming pool that I’m sure would be unbearably busy in the summer but sat unused, no one fancying a dip while it was only 8 degrees out. We were lucky to snag a seat indoors, it was packed, much busier than we expected for weekday, it gave us hope that we’d have a nice meal.

So far in New Zealand we hadn’t had the best luck with eating out, with very few exceptions our meals out have ranged from disappointing to mediocre. Maybe it’s down to us, we check the reviews before we go and they’re always favourable but when our food arrives there’s always something off. Maybe we’re just too critical or maybe the more traditional fare that Kiwis love just isn’t our cup of tea.

Saying that, we enjoyed our brunch at The Long dog. We split an almond croissant to start, then I had an Eggs royal and Ben a breakfast bagel. It wasn’t mind-blowing, but for once the hollandaise wasn’t weirdly sweet, and the pastry was well laminated and buttery - not the soggy fare we’d been presented before. It was very reasonable priced too, well within our tight backpackers budget.

It was a short twenty minute drive from here to Dunedin town center, we parked up at the train station, a free camping spot that would be our base for a day. Compared to the rest of NZ, Dunedin was a historical building paradise with heritage architecture around every corner; so we took ourselves for a wander, aimlessly walking street after street, taking bad photos and soaking it all in. Our ambling brought us to the First Church of Otago, a stunning building of Oamaru stone built in1873 only twenty five years after the first European settlers arrived in Dunedin. We explored inside, finding our way to the attached heritage center where a very friendly church volunteer gave me a free pen.

After a few bits of city admin were completed, we had a walk around the almost deserted port before heading to the Otago Settlers Museum where we explored the expansive free museum. It was very well curated, focusing mainly on the indigenous Maori, the early Chinese and Scottish settlers, their lives and stories. We spent a happy couple of hours here before we headed back to our carpark home for dinner and some sleep.

I wouldn’t say we slept well here, I don’t know what we expected from a spot mere feet away from a railway but as we hadn’t seen many trains during the day we thought we would be fine. We were wrong. The trains blaring their horns all night combined with an early 8am kick out didn’t leave us feeling overly fresh, so we drove to a nearby seaside spot before making our morning cup of tea and eating breakfast. After some time relaxing and enjoying the view we were ready to make the drive to the Royal Albatross Centre to try our luck at spotting the giant birds.

We could have been guaranteed a glimpse of an albatross had we elected to go on one of the tours on offer, but at the time all of the tours were at least $70 each and as much as we wanted to see the birds, not at that price, no thank you. I don’t know why but I have a small issue paying so much to see a wild animal, I’d rather have half see it off in the distance rather than pay to look it through a window that’s been built next to their nesting grounds. We were lucky when we arrived and several albatrosses were swooping over the nearby cliffs before diving into the sea to catch their dinner. It was hard to judge their size until a flock of seagulls flew by and looked minuscule in comparison. Content with our sightings and badly taken photographs we were happy to head off.

We checked into our campground for the night, Portobello village park, before we hopped back into the van. We drove along steep and winding mountainous roads to sandfly beach on the other side of the peninsular. We parked at the end of a dead end road, before grabbing a bottle of water and our new camera and heading down the track towards the beach. It started easy, a small worn dirt path through farmland with stunning views of the bay laid out far far below. After an information board about the beach - informing us it was actually named due to sand flying about rather than the small demonic mosquito like creatures called sandflies - the track seemed to disappear, a large mountain of sand that had been pushed up against the hill side in it's place.

With no small amount of trepidation I slid my way down, not at all frantically and silently wondering how on earth I was going to “slide” my way back up again. Finally we made it to ground level, all that was left was skirting up around normal sized sand-dunes trying not to disturb the hidden and sleepy sea-lions scattered there before we made it to the beach itself.

It wasn’t a great beach for laying on, sand whipped its way through the air, making delightful patterns and polishing off a good layer of skin around our ankles, but for spotting sea-lions it was great! They were playing and sleeping and being all-round adorable giant smelly beasts. We didn’t get too close - not just because of the smell but because they can be quite wary of humans and have been known to bite - but we got close enough to snap a few pictures.

After walking the length of beach and back, it was time to clamber our way back up before the light left us and we were attempting it in the dark. It wasn’t as hard as I’d feared, just putting on foot in front of the other, ignoring the possibility that a misstep could see be sliding my way back down the sand to begin again. Slightly out of breath but filled with the joy of the experience we hopped back into the van and back to the campground.

We'd been lucky so far on our trip around NZ, our van had never been broken into and our items were always safe at campgrounds. Unfortunately that was about to change, after we’d cooked dinner that night we made a small mistake, we left our bag of food and spices behind in the kitchen and by the next morning they were gone… well sort of. Not everything had been taken, just half of the spices, our pepper grinder and the butter. It almost felt like it would have been better for them to have taken it all, at least then there might have been a possibility that it had just been thrown away by the staff, but to have it rifled through made us feel strange about it, angrier too - who takes someones pepper grinder for ffs sake! I hope that someone genuinely though it had been left behind as a donation, it wasn’t in the free to use box provided, but this line of thinking makes me less angry about the whole event.

Trip date: April 2023

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