Another chill and do little day. The weather is bright, sunny and breezy. Despite the sun it’s chilly and my jacket comes out for the first time since we got off the Trans-Sib. We spend a few hours in the centre of Dunedin sightseeing, browsing the shops, buying some clothes and getting a hair cut for Andy. Also dubbed the ‘Garden City’ – at least according to the tourist bumpf, but any gardens are not immediately evident and seem to be some distance from the centre. The hub of the city is the Octagon, a small patch of grass crossed by Princes Street and bordered by cafes and restaurants, the cathedral and home to a statue of Robbie Burns. (Are you beginning to get the Scottish connection?). But it is not the congested, snarl of traffic you might expect in a city centre, quite the contrary. The centre is compact and is predominantly low rise. There is a comfortable mix of the new and old the Victorian and Edwardian gothic sitting happily alongside more recent buildings and the architecture generally has a more varied character than some New Zealand towns. And whilst the traffic is minimal, it seems more vibrant than in Christchurch. Perhaps it’s the fact that it is a university town – over fifth of the city’s population of 123,000 are students? Recently in the news for a raucous Freshers toga parade through the streets which got a little out of hand (eggs and flour were thrown and students vomited in the streets!) Like Christchurch it is possible to stand in a city centre street and view the hills in the distance; the kind of vista not normally associated with European towns and cities! The urban sprawl though is just that, stretching for miles across the hills around the harbour – Dunedin is New Zealand’s largest city by area.
We take a walk around the University campus which is situated just north of the centre. A pleasant, buzzing hive of activity; this must be the most people we’ve seen in one place since we arrived in New Zealand (apart from at the Billy Connolly concert)! At the heart of the campus is a majestic 130-year-old gothic stone building on the grassy banks of a small river. Whilst the streets around with their rather run-down bay-fronted, single-storey weatherboard houses, doors ajar and sofas on the porches have a rather bohemian air.
The train station is another majestic Victorian pile which appears, if the information in the ticket hall is anything to go by, to operate only one service; the Taieri Gorge Railway, reputedly one of the world’s great train trips – a half-day scenic journey along the Taieri River Gorge. The train runs twice daily and when we arrive to admire the building (which is beautifully preserved both inside and out – the tiling in the ticket hall is superb) the train is standing at platform 1 being washed down! The station’s other great claim to fame is being New Zealand’s most photographed building, although how exactly that is measured is hard to guess.
Another interesting NZ phenomenon and one that is hard to get used to is seeing Lloyds Bank’s pre-TSB livery, including the Black Horse, in the guise of The National Bank. Does the average Kiwi-in-the-street realise that one of their major banks is a high street bank in the UK in which the British government now has a majority stake, one wonders?
Now we have got over the shock of how much everything here costs compared to south-east Asia we have come to the conclusion that the cost of living here is generally much lower than in the UK – food and clothes, for instance, are much cheaper as is a round of drinks – $10 (£3.50) for a beer and G&T – or a £2.50 for two drinks in a cafe.
Phrase of the day seen on a directional sign on the Otago University campus: Queer Support = ????