Dunedin

After leaving Christchurch, a city based on Oxford and Cambridge, we made our way to Dunedin, a city directly based on Edinburgh. Halfway between the two cities at Moeraki, there are some rather bizarre large smooth boulders lying on the beach. They look like rather large snooker balls, except that they're all black, so wouldn't make for a very good game.

Dunedin is a pleasant enough city. At its centre there are two octagonal shaped roads, one inside the other. Inside the smaller octagon is a square with a statue of the greatest ever Scootsman (no, not Craig from the Proclaimers), by which I mean Rabbie Burns. This was our belated opportunity to pay homage to him, as we'd been on Fraser Island on Burns' Night this year, where there was a sad lack of haggis, neeps and tatties.

We wandered round the town, past the mini-version of the Scott Monument, along Princes Street and George Street and somehow found ourselves in a public house (that kind of thing never used to happen in Edinburgh). This was the venue of one of the funniest things to have happened so far on our trip - we were watching on the telly as New Zealand beat Australia by ten wickets in a one-day international for the first ever time. My, how we chuckled. Little did we know at that stage that we would be doing more chuckling in the following few days.

Dunedin is on the west end of the Otago Peninsula, so on the following day we drove around the peninsula. The scenery was gorgeous as we went right to the east end where we saw seals sunning themselves on the rocks. Then we went back westwards and stopped at Larnach Castle, New Zealand's only castle. Obviously we are a bit spoilt for good quality castles in the UK, so Larnach Castle was a bit of a disappointment. It was a decent enough 'country house' but couldn't compare to any of the castles back home. However, Mr Larnach had chosen a quite superb location for his castle - the views down to the coast were magnificent.