Dunedin

Or Scotland in the southern hemisphere.

First and foremost, we stayed in a place called Hogwartz, and yes, it is Harry Potter themed (though not obnoxiously so).

Second: finally a town with some charm! There are beautiful old buildings everywhere, though apparently only because the town couldn’t afford to tear them down and build new ones during the Bauhaus invasion. Thank god.

Third: three breweries and three craft beer bars! Yay!

When we arrived, I spent a good half our or so just combing my hair out (see previous post about wind). Once I managed that, we headed out to check out a couple of beer bar recommendations from Luke and Kelly. We ended up hanging out at Metro, which serves primarily Green Man, an organic brewery located in Dunedin. Good food and great beer, but the staff unfortunately doesn’t know anything about beer. Oh well, Post to come on MBR.

After that we headed over to Tonic, another craft beer bar. And hey! The bartender could actually talk to me about beer. We also dug the atmosphere and had a good time talking to some other folks hanging out there, so we ended up going back the next night as well.

Next day we started off by splitting up to indulge in our respective vices: JR headed to the Cadburry factory for the tour there and I set off for a couple of brewery tours. First brewery I hit was Emersons, all of which was very good. The woman in the tap room (Pip Honeychurch- what a great name!) was also really great to talk to. After that I went over to Green Man- they don’t actually have a tap room, but they let me in to have a peek anyway (saying “I’m a beer writer from America” gets you places in NZ. Funny thing is none of them ask who I write for, how many readers I have etc.. Which they probably should before they give me a bunch of free shit.)

After our tours, we met up with a friend of a friend, Tim, who works at the Public Art Gallery in Dunedin. We really enjoyed meeting Tim- he’s just a genuinely nice guy. We had a great time. He took us for a short tour of the art gallery before we headed out for a walking tour of Dunedin. Pretty buildings, but our time was short due to a wildlife tour we had scheduled later that afternoon/evening.

The wildlife tour kicked off with a visit to the Royal Albatross center. As part of the tour, you could get tickets to go inside and see the nests, etc., but you could see the albatross flying around outside, so we didn’t bother. Beautiful birds- I can’t believe how huge they are! (wing span of about 9 feet) This part was my one big criticism of the tour though- we spent an hour and a half there for the five people who went inside the center while the other 20 of us waited outside for them. Wasn’t really down with that- split us up please?

After that though, they took us out to some private farmland where there’s a fur seal colony, sea lions, yellow eyed penguins and blue penguins. Yay! They were all so cute! And it was cool seeing them out in their natural habitat rather than in a zoo. We were probably twenty feet away from the sea lions, if that. Pretty cool.