Days 38 — 39: Dunedin
A hunt in the museum and a very steep road
We didn’t stay at Dunedin anywhere near long enough to do it justice, and so this post is probably going to be equally as fleeting.
We left the Catlins and made our way to Dunedin to stay the night. There was very little choice for places to camp so we ended up staying in a pub carpark next to the oval green. We arrived too late to go to the circus as they were dismantling the tent that evening.
We had a bit of bad weather that evening, and it was a pretty chilly night, but we managed to stay warm under all the covers.
Despite only stopping briefly in Dunedin, we wanted to at least do something while we were there so we dedicated a bit of time the following day to explore.
One of the top activities to do there is the Otago Museum so that was our first stop.
Our limited time — and only two hours of parking — was nowhere near long enough to appreciate it properly, but we did our best.
It was a great visit and we would definitely have gone back if we were staying for longer as there was just so much to see. The natural history section was great.
Unfortunately for you readers, I didn’t take many photos in Dunedin so this post is a little bit wordy. However, I did manage to capture something pretty epic in the museum.
In a small glass display, there was a gecko that had been rescued from Germany after it was illegally taken from New Zealand and sold on the black market.
Now, we just happened to stumble upon this display at the perfect moment. I’ll talk you through it because I found it really cool.
When I first looked into the display, I could only see a small cricket sitting on a leaf near the front. It wasn’t long before I spotted the gecko too, and compared to the cricket, it looked huge.
We soon worked out that we weren’t the only ones that had spotted the cricket, the gecko had too. It was actually partway through its hunt.
It’s probably a little hard to fully get how cool it was from my amateur writing skills, but Anna and I were completely entranced just watching the two animals.
We both genuinely felt suspense akin to watching a horror film where you know what’s going to happen and you can do nothing to stop it.
We watched as the gecko very slowly made its way closer and closer to the cricket. And then amazingly, the cricket started actually moving towards the gecko! It clearly had no idea that the gecko was there, and I’m not kidding when I say that, in our minds, the gecko seemed huge despite only being a few inches. The expression on its face was calm and menacing at the same time and Anna and I were shouting things like “Why is it walking that way?!” and “No, no, no, no, oh my god, it’s so close!”
It was some pretty intense stuff.
Eventually, the cricket moved into range and met its demise. Unfortunately, I didn’t film this as a video. I was too caught up in the moment that I just kept taking photos to make into an animation. This does a good job of showing the build-up, but the actual finale happened so fast that I only got it as a blur. A video would have been better but not to worry.
It’s fair to say that I felt like a bit of a David Attenborough while all of this was going on.
With that heart-pounding experience over, we moved onto to another heart-pounding experience: walking up the steepest street in the world.
Baldwin Street in Dunedin is the steepest residential street in the world according to Guinness World Records. I have mixed feelings about it.
There’s no denying that it’s what I would describe — using the legitimate Dan Harris Road Steepness Scale — as “pretty steep” but I just find it hard to believe that it’s the steepest. I’m clearly wrong as even Wikipedia says it is, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting.
That didn’t mean that I didn’t still take some cool optical illusion photos of my favourite model…
With the climb accomplished, we chose not to pay $2 each to get our certificates and instead left Dunedin on a long drive heading to Timaru. We camped next to the port there which was quite a cool experience — the scale of the cranes, containers, and ships was just huge.
As I said, it was a flying visit through Dunedin, but our time is running short and we’ve still got a few more places to explore before saying goodbye to the van and to New Zealand.
