A population of 100,000, of which about 40,000 are students at the university or polytechnic (they still have polys here, how sweet). It must be a lot quieter during the vacation when half the town, sorry city, leaves for Wherami Flats or Hopeful Gully or wherever.
The local paper had a big article about the university. Harvard, they said, is famous for Law, MIT for Computing, Oxford for English but Otago is famous for the bad behaviour of its students despite being an excellent university, noted for its Dentistry and Sports degrees. Apparently the bad behaviour includes: missing lectures, drinking, smoking illegal substances, not keeping accomodation clean, being noisey late at night and playing loud, so called, music. "Hoon" is the NZ term for people who behave in such an appalling way. "Young" is the word the rest of us use. I fear the author of the article would be appalled to hear that not every Oxford student spends their time reading "The Fairie Queene" and singing madrigals. I'd guess that students have been known to shout in within Harvard's ivy-ed walls as well. Of course it isn't like that in Bristol, UWE students at least would never do such things.
You have to remember that Dunedin calls itself "The New Edinburgh" (why not the new Dunedin?) and the Scots take education seriously. Actually, lots of dentists seem to have trained in Sotland, perhaps because the Scots live on deep fried Mars bars and need more dentists? Anyway, another link with Dunedin.
Anyway, Dunedin likes to think of itself as the epitome of Scottish-New Zealand. So there are lots of sandflies and lots of rain. There is a Burn's Society and the Scottish Social Club has regular nights of reels and such, where, I imagine, middle aged bank managers in kilts feel the blood of Rob Roy and William Wallace beating in their veins for a few exhilarating minutes. The Dunedin Summer Festival included Pipe Bands, Scottish Country Dancing, the New Edinburgh Folk Club. Probably cabers were tossed and "Och Aye" muttered more than once.
There are also shops, a theatre (at which the Beatles once performed, no doubt an event strongly opposed by city elders at the time) and all the trapping of civilisation. We also had the best meal we've had on our holiday to date and so the fierce Calvinism must be abating slightly.
A sign of its superiority is that it is in Otago. The south island is divided into, Northland, Southland, Westland, Otago and Canterbury (around Christchurch). Only big places get a proper name for where they are, the rest just a geographical shorthand.
We stayed two nights (in the rain) and watched albatrosses and glow worms. But I'm going to whizz on because I'm blogging more slowly than I'm travelling.
From Dunedin another cross country drive through mountains and past lakes (all adjectives apply) gets you to Waneka.
Waneka, I'm afraid, brought out the cynic in me. It is a pretty site for a town but it is in the process of being "life-styled". Life-style is big in NZ, it's a word used more often than 'sheep' or 'historic' and that's saying something. Wherever there are views of lakes or mountains (almost everywhere) you are starting to see posters advertising sales of life-style blocks of land. And life-style is getting big in Waneka. Soon the views will be obscured by the life-style houses (which in some cases seems to mean a second home, in others escape to the good life). And these aren't little beach houses, several we saw were over $1,000,000 which is a lot in NZ. One came complete with 'boutique farm', another with 'boutique winery' - "because you deserve it".
'Boutique' is even bigger than 'life-style' and has about three meanings: there are boutique hotels (i.e. each room individually designed etc), boutique breweries (i.e. small and probably producing special beers) and boutique farms and wineries, for which an alternative adjective might be 'expensive toy'. I'm not sure who 'deserves' a boutique winery, nurses? primary school teachers? social workers?, university lecturers? (no, we don't).
From Wanaka, driving up into the mountains around the northern edge of the lake, you reach, eventually, the west coast and the Fox and Franz-Josef glaciers. We looked at Fox
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but I was suffering from a bit of mountain/glacier/lake/island/river/waterfall/pass/green pasture/forest overload. I wanted something ordinary so we continued north until we reached our favourite NZ town of Nelson.
Nelson is that rarest of things in NZ, just a reasonably sized town. There is some tourism but it isn't intrusive. There are cafes, coffee shops, art galleries, second-hand book stores. I could imagine living in Nelson, you don't need a life-style (though a hobby might help during the winter evenings). We stayed three nights, the longest we've stayed anywhere in NZ and even as we left spent an hour or two meandering through quiet streets, edged with streams and divided by parks and gardens.
Here's a shot of the ordinary little restaurant where we had a meal, and one of the ordinary view it had as we were leaving.
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