Creme eggs to Dinosaur eggs

We spent a couple of Days in Dunedin meeting friends and seeing the city. Dunedin was founded by Scottish settlers hence the reference to Edinburgh in it's name. A lot of its streets also share their names with Edinburgh streets, the two principle roads being Princes street and George street.

Dunedin is home to NZ's most popular beer, Speights and also the Cadbury factory. Which we dutifully felt obliged to inspect. Both scrubbed up to standard despite visiting the brewery on its down day when nothing much was actually happening, and popping into Cadbury's between shifts, when... nothing much was actually happening. Dunedin's other, somewhat obscure claim is that it houses the steepest street in the world so it only seemed right that we should choose to walk up it on one of the hottest days of the year. we then tried to drive up it next, expecting total embarrassment at the expense of our poor car but it made it up and did us proud.

A short way out of Dunedin is a bird sanctuary where we popped up to and saw Albatross flying around above us which was great, because neither of us have seen them before. We then stayed there till after dark, because if you nestle down just off the beach, accompanied by Dept. Of Conservation volunteers, and wait till dusk, you get to see little blue penguins stumble out of the surf, amass on the sand and then waddle up into the tussocks around you to feed their chicks. It was great to see, but the birds are only pint sized and there was unfortunately a loud Chinese family there too to see it who's kids kept scaring the penguins by not sitting still. A scared penguin adopts the don't move until they're gone defense which meant it was almost pitch black by the time they came up past us but one seemed to get a wee bit lost and doubled back right around us so we got a good view of that one. Still very worthwhile.

The road between Dunedin and Christchurch was again full of fantastic scenery and landsapes and we stopped to look at the Moeraki boulders on our way past. These boulders lay on the beach and are very odd indeed. Perfectly ball shaped they look like they might once have been giant eggs that have fossilised, some are smooth while others look to have been covered in giant scales. There apparently is some scientific explanation for them, but we chose to ignore that bit and started looking for lost dinoaurs. Apparently, the sand dunes behind the beach, are full of these boulders, some being the size of a TV and others up to the size of a car. As the sea erodes the dunes, out pop these boulders which then lie on the beach. But as the tides come in and out, so the sand that the boulders sit on gets flushed away and they slowly sink under the sand never to be seen again, so it's constantly changing, but no dinosaurs.