big south trip: day 1

Day 1: Christchurch to Dunedin

How wonderful it feels to be travelling again! This experience is notably different from our nomadic lifestyle from Aug-Jan for a few reasons:
1) I'm travelling not with my boy, but with our German friend, Ann-Kristin, who's been in Chch and at City Church just about as long as we have. She's also here on a work-holiday visa, and this is a bit of a last hurrah for her before she returns to Berlin in September. We packed the car with lots of chocolate and enjoyed hours of boy talk, which was not standard when Bryan was my travelling buddy :)
2) We have a home to return to! It's a completely different mindset when you know that you have a place of your own and a community of friends at the end of your journey. This evening, when we were asked at the hostel where we were from, both of us immediately answered "Christchurch", though undoubtedly the person asking expected to hear "Germany" and "America".
3) We're travelling by car, not on foot or by bus, as with all but 5 days of our earlier wandering. Having a car (it's Ann's, and has no heating - this will figure centrally in later updates) means that we can take detours and stop in every small town and stay in hostels that aren't within walking distance of a bus stop. It's glorious.

We took our time heading south, as a friend of ours (who's not known to be a particularly early riser), Phil, happened to be travelling the same route, and we'd hoped to meet up with him for lunch if he could catch up with us. We stopped to buy cheap 1 kg bags of broken cookies from the CookieTime factory, paused again in Timaru to record in daylight our late-night trip of last week, and crossed the railroad tracks to sit high on the rocks overlooking the ocean in Oamaru before discovering that Phil had not received some of our texts and had already passed us by. In the end we just met up for dinner in Dunedin at a crappy (but within budget) Chinese restaurant, one of many Asian eateries squeezed in shoulder-to-shoulder in this university city.

One of the highlights of the day was our short walk along the beach and barefoot across a frigid stream (remember, it's the heart of winter here) to reach the photogenic Moeraki boulders, as round as bowling balls and clustered oddly along this 50m stretch of coast.

Our hostel, Hogwartz, is one of the nicer hostels we've stayed in to date, through (as with most everything in Dunedin) it's perched atop a steep hill, where our car is squeezed along the side of a skinny one-way street with the handbrake fully engaged.

-Rachel

Pictures:
1) the seashore at Caroline Bay, in Timaru
2) a building made of local Oamaru white stone
3) Moeraki boulders