No penguins in Dunedin

After a 1 night quick stop in Christchurch, we were on the bus again the next morning to Dunedin. 

Dunedin is further down the east coast, towards the south pole. We arrived at midday into the university town. Our hostel was called manor house, and it literally was a large scottish country house converted into Dorm rooms and kitchens. It was a very quiet hostel considering we were in a 12 bed dorm. We arrived on a rainy cold day and had to wash our only wet weather outfit. So, we had to spend the remainder of the day freezing in shorts and T-shirts. 

It was movie night in the hostel TV room so we spent the evening watching a very bad old school kiwi film. But, we got free popcorn so it wasn't so bad in the end. 

We woke up the next day trying to decide what to do. Originally i wanted to catch a bus to Otago Peninsula to visit Penguin Place. After a lil chat with the hostel man he then broke the news that there is only 1 bus from Dunedin to penguin place, therefore, we would not be able to return. We were starting to think that maybe we need a car to travel New Zealand. Our other option was to pay $150 for a nature tour. this seemed a little pricey for us, when the only animals we really wanted to see on the nature tour was penguins (we had already seen seals and the albatross bird). We have set ourselves an activity budget for New Zealand and this tour didn't really fit in high on the list.

So we felt a bit disappointed that we didn't have anything to do in Dunedin and we were here for 3 nights. We decided to make the most of a free and again rainy day and research and book in all of our accommodation, buses and tours for the next 6 weeks. We spent a fair bit on our credit cards as we opted for a very expensive tour which we weren't planning to do, this made us feel slightly better about not doing the nature tour. 

We explored Dunedin city but there isn't really much to report. The city is just shops. It has a beach and a harbour which we were planning to explore on our last day.

Day 3 was hot and sunny, yay! So out came the shorts as we were going to the beach. Our hostel man told us about a tunnel beach which sounded pretty cool. It was off the map and you needed to get a bus there. We decided not to listen and try an walk there to save a bit of money. We walked to almost off the map and we were half way up the steepest hill we've ever walked. Absolutely shattered in the heat we worked out that this road leads to the tunnel beach, the realisation then hit, that it was a steep hill all the way. 

We then thought to ourselves 'how much better is this beach to the one we can presently see at the bottom of the hill'. So we decided to walk down the hill to St Clare beach. Yes, we gave in but we were rewarded for trying with beer and cake in the pub at the bottom of the hill. It was a nice seaside town beach. We walked back to our hostel the short way round the harbour and finished the day with a thai green curry from a local restaurant. 

Overall, we weren't too impressed with Dunedin, probably because we couldn't do any tours but we felt that it was a bit of a boring place anyway.  We said that if we were to do it differently we would either miss it out if weren't doing a tour or only stay for a day.