Dunedin

Sorry, we are really behind on blogging and it takes quite a bit to upload the pictures, so bear with us! We arrived in Sydney yesterday, but we'll get to that once we've finished recapping New Zealand - each country deserves proper credit, afterall. And, just to clarify, we are adding our own bits and pieces, so these entries are from both of us. The formatting is funky, but we're over spending time fixing it since we're in an internet cafe.

We arrived in Dunedin (pronounced Dun-E-din) the morning after sailing all night and we went downstairs for our usual breakfast. Each day we meet new people at our table, cruises are very friendly places we have found out, and today we meet a couple from Huntington Beach. We travel halfway around the world and we meet a couple (Sylvia and Sam) that live a few miles away on Brookhurst and Indianapolis. Turns out Sam used to work in the apparel industry and knew people from Quiksilver who worked with Stephanie.

Took a quick walk around Port Chalmers where the boat was docked – it’s a whopping one block town that took us all of 10 minutes to cover. We then took a bus to Dunedin for our city tour, the first part being a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory (Steven LOVES the Cadbury eggs). Interesting to find out how they make their various candies, it was a bit Willy Wonka-ish - unfortunately, no cameras allowed inside the facilities, but we were able to snap a few of the outside and of the shop.

There were millions of little pieces of chocolate on this mound, it was pretty impressive and made us hungry.

They did have a little shop where you could buy "discounted" chocolates and we bought a few pieces - we use the term discounted loosly because it would have probably been cheaper to buy it in the US. Turns out we were pretty smart because chocolate in NZ/Australia is somewhat expensive. Or, let me rephrase, it's expensive when you are on a budget.

Back in the bus for more highlights of the city including the train station (driver said it is the second most photographed building in the southern hemisphere – not sure if we believe him), the college campus (largest in NZ), and beautiful view from the mountain top. The city reminded us somewhat of San Francisco as it was hilly and used to have cable cars. Finished off the evening with dinner and a great drink called the Beverly Hills Iced Tea (way better than the Long Island version).

The outside of the train station:

Steven was in heaven when he found out there is a Scotch bar inside the train station - there are over 300 varieties of Scotch on this wall...sadly, the bar wasn't open when we were there. Next time.