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We checked out a little after 10am, paid for the extortionate car park next door and set off on our way for Dunedin, although significantly down on junk food given an absence of any conveniently located supermarket or newsagent.
The second largest city on the South Island and the fifth overall, Dunedin was founded by The Free Church of Scotland as the principal town of its free church settlement. It is for this reason that the city is named Dunedin, coming from the gaelic name for Edinburgh - Dun Eideann - and the city's surveyor was instructed to emulate the characteristics of Edinburgh in the town's design. Today alongside the city's architecture and heritage Dunedin is known as being home to the Speights Brewery, the Cadbury's Factory and the steepest street in the world - all of which we intended to see on our short visit.
Upon entering the city we were first confronted with its single most notable difference between itself and Edinburgh which is its rather obscure road layout. Whilst the New Town of Edinburgh was built on a foundation of grids, Dunedin is centred around an Octagon and a number of diagonals and curves. Similarly to Edinburgh it is built on a number of hills also making navigation rather more difficult. As it would happen the street on which our hostel was on was not on the map, the map had rather conveniently decided to overlay the city centre of Christchurch over a portion of the city centre map of Dunedin and after 5 minutes random driving in this overlain portion (where we assumed our street must be not being on the rest of the map) we gave up and drove for the tourist information centre to get ourselves a decent map.
In possession of a good map we quickly found our street (about a 10 minute walk from where we stood and about the only street we didn't previously drive down) but not before a tourist information employee would attempt to tell us of the history of Dunedin and how its street names and layout is based on Edinburgh's. Whilst it is true that the street names are almost identical and that they share a large number of suburb names (Leith, Waverly, Liberton, Musselburgh) he was very swiftly corrected on the layout comment, which couldn't be more different.
After checking into the hostel we decide to take a trip to the supermarket to stock up on supplies and once again make a complete pigs ear of the roads! Taking a wrong turn at a confusingly named intersection at the Octagon (where the street names would continue on the other side of the intersection, but not directly opposite its counterpart) we ended up on a series of one way streets and off ramps and at one point turned left onto a one way street going in the opposite direction (which we might add was not signposted - we know this as we would, 5 minutes later, come down the same road). 30 minutes later we would make it to the supermarket that would have been maybe only a 15 minute walk and stocked up on food, junk food for movie watching and vast amounts of cadbury's chocolate to get us in the mood for the following day. Then it was back to the hostel (successfully navigated in 5 minutes) and in front of the TV to watch The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers prepared and rested for our busy day tomorrow.
As fate would have it the actual factory part of Cadburys is closed on weekends and today was a Saturday, however, we went anyway got to have a look around the place, round the museum, watched a video, got a nice bag of free chocolate (or included in the price chocolate more like) and got to see the Chocolate Fall, a decommissioned crumb silo where you watch a tonne of melted chocolate fall the 5 storeys you've just climbed in a matter of seconds. The overwhelming urge to jump in after it was immense. Much time was then spent deliberating one what to buy amongst the enormous range of chocolate available in the gift shop they have some 23 different flavours of chocolate bars alone - Lucy's favourite being the forest fruits chocolate bar, my own being the fudge brownie variety - and a number of chocolate bars we had never seen - Moros (essentially mars bars) banana flavoured chocolate bar, Chocolate Fish (which is like a marshamallowed filled chocolate bar) we even struck up conversation with a very pleasant sales employee who helped us in making our decision.
After a lunch of a barbequed sausage roll (for charity) we then embarked on the city walking tour. It took in the Octagon, War Memorial, Centopath, Railway Station (which is actually very pretty), Cadbury's World (again!) a walk through the University of Otago campus (Dunedin is a huge university city in New Zealand) before heading up towards Baldwin Street, the steepest street in the world.
Whilst the street's claim is disputed it is recognised by the Guiness Book of Records as the steepest street with a gradient of 1:2.86 or about 19 degrees, which doesn't sound a lot but is really quite ridiculous. Every year they have competetion to see who can run up and down it in the fastest time (the current record is 1:56) and Cadbury's release 30,000 jaffas (a small orange candy coated chocolate) every July, each of which is sponsored by a member of the public where the first to the bottom wins a prize. Suffice to say it took Lucy and I a little longer than 1:56 to reach the top of the hill, although doing somewhat better than some who reached half way and gave up and being slightly more sensible than a group of backpackers who were freewheeling down the hill with their heads are arms out the windows (someone killed themselves doing something similar in a wheelie bin).
We then had to get ourselves back in to town fast as we'd not quite taken into consideration how long it would take us to get out there or how long we'd spend on the street climbing it.
We arrived a little late for our brewery tour but some sweet talking to the man at the reception desk saw him catch us up with the rest of the tour - a group from the kiwi experience - looking a little flushed from our epic walk. We walked round trying the various ingredients before being used in the brewing process, walking through the various stages of fermentation and storage, a little bit on advertising and Speight's various different products. It was all very interesting - and the first brewery I had actually ever been to. We were then taken to a little bar where we were given the time to pour ourselves as much as we could from their range. Well you didn't need to tell a group of backpackers twice and we had a nice little circuit going on where we would pour our drink, join the back of the queue and finish it whilst waiting to pour another. Lucy and I managed to try all 6 drinks they had on tap. And decided that my favourites were Speights Pilsner and Summit (they're new nicely branded bottled light beer).
Rather tipsy on 6 beers in a short space of time we headed back to the hostel to make dinner and make plans for drinking. On our walk back from Baldwin Street we'd run into a lot of students drinking and getting ready to go out, but after settling into the movie room with the Lord of the Rings 3: The Return of the King and eating through a sizeable quantity of food and chocolate (thank you Cadburys) it was late and were tired and stuffed and had sobered up so we decided to call it a night and save our money for Christchurch.
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