Dunedin

We spent Friday and Saturday nights at the Albatross Inn in Dunedin.  This is an old Edwardian style house built in 1912 originally for one family.  It is now an eight bedroom inn.  Dunedin in the second largest city in the South Island with a population of around 130,000.  It is also the home of the Otago University, the oldest university in New Zealand.  The mother of a student also stayed here last night.  

So this morning we saw a little of the town.  The permanent  court house was built in 1895 of gray and white stone and was quite an imposing building. Across the street and in front of the train station, there were pretty Elizabethan gardens full of trimmed boxwood and dense with pansies.  

The park was full of kids celebration with bubbles.  It was a fund raiser for Cystic Fibrosis.


We found the local Saturday farmers market by the train station.and found the selection very unusual.  You could buy eggs, apples, leeks and kale, but no corn, green beans, tomatoes or berries.  Tom bought some apples for an afternoon snack.

Dunedin has a Cadbury factory and we had an interesting tour. The plant employs over 500 people, but since it was the weekend, we could not go into the actual factory.  We did have an entertaining walk through that included chocolate samples and also getting to watch a ton of liquid chocolate being dumped from a vat above us, into a vat below.  Almost all of the candies here are different than what Cadbury sells in the US.  All their cocoa beans come from a partnership with Ghana, an of course their dairy is all local and they process their own milk.  Most of their candies are based on sweetened condensed milk that they make.  They had a historic Cadbury milk truck that was a Model A Ford, with a maximum speed of 25 mph.There candy is very milky and not as sweet as what we are used to.  We did by some Jaffa balls which are one of their most favorite - sort of like large orange M&Ms. 

There is such a mixture of architecture.  Along with many buildings from the early 1900's, there is the  Toitu Otego Setter's Museum.  It included the heritage of the Maori who came to New Zealand around 1000 years ago and also the European setters, primarily from Scotland.

We found a very interesting canoe made from flax, an abundant plant on the Otego peninsula. We guessed it would have floated although it would have been easy to turn over.  And also a reproduction of an early summer shelter the Maori would have built. The were migratory people when they first inhabited New Zealand. 

There was also a reproduction of the type of permanent house early setters from Scotland would have built - this was a copy of the Buchanan cottage built in Dunedin in 1848.  It was made of wattle and daub and flax for thatching - all materials common locally.  The inside was set with household goods of a primitive settler.  This Scottish society grew into the Edinburgh of the South. 



They had a volunteer fire department in Dunedin in 1861 when the city burned.  This new fire fighting equipment was purchased in 1962.