This blog will cover my insane trip between Queenstown and Dunedin, and my 2 day stay in Dunedin itself. I will combine Wellington and Rotorua into the next entry, which will finish things off so I can move onto colder climates. Anyway, last time you heard from me, I had just spent an enjoyable 2 days in Queenstown, most of which I remembered. But not all.
So I woke up bright and early, kind of disappointed that I had to leave QT. Other than my drunken escapades, the town really sucked me in, and I could have easily spent a lot more time there. It probably worked out for the best though, because it's not very big and I had seen everything there was to see. So, onto Dunedin. I had booked a combination bus/train tour that also got me to Dunedin. The premise is that the bus takes me from QT to the train, and the train winds through some funky valley until you're back on the coast in Dunedin. I'm not a big fan of buses normally, but what the hell, right? Well this turned out to be the best bus ride EVER.
I'm waiting outside, and a coach arrives. You know, those greyhound-looking mofos. Seat like 50 people or something. I get on and go to walk to the back and quickly realize...there's no one else on the bus. The driver says "Where ya goin? Sit up 'ere with me mate. You're the only customer today."
What?
Yes people, I had a full-sized coach...to myself. For a 4 hour ride. Besides being odd, this seems like extremely bad business. It's not like I paid a mint for this bus ride. I'm pretty sure my fare didn't even cover the gas money to get there. I wasn't about to question my good fortune though (ya know, since I don't like people), so I just sat up front. It took about 45 seconds to get even more odd.
"So where do ya wanna go mate?"
What?
I gave the answer that most people would give...wherever you were going, obviously. "Dunedin?"
"Well I know that mate. Ya think I'm daft?"
"Uh..."
"I mean what do ya wanna see on the way?"
"I didn't know I had an option?"
"Since you're the only guy on here, I'll take you to whatever you want to see, as long as we're at the train station by 12:30. You like Lord of the Rings? Dams? Sheep? Aaaah...you look like a man that likes sheep mate!"
What the hell do you say to that? The bastard was calling me a sheep fucker! I just started laughing uncomfortably and said "I thought this was a tour. You pick the destinations, I take the pictures. I didn't exactly study for this! And I don't like sheep like you're implying I like sheep! *pause* "There any giraffes around here though?"
He laughed and said "I think we're going to get along great, mate!" Okay, we'll start off by goin to Cromwell for breakfast and figure it out from there!"
Sure. What else am I supposed to say? "NO! FIJI! NOW!"
So we headed off along another side of the lake towards Cromwell. As we approach the town, the driver goes "Hey, you wanna go see a bunch of fruits?" No, driver...no I don't. And I'm starting to get a little worried about this here driver. What he was talking about was pretty fucking amusing though, if a bit weird:
Don't even ask why the town has a gigantic fruit statue out front. The driver had no idea, and neither did any of the people we talked to while we were eating breakfast. It's a pretty little town though, surrounded by those mountains in the pic, with a cool river running through it. Very visually impressive, but quite small. Driver (he told me his name once, but I didn't remember nor did I care to - I just called him driver) said Cromwell was "boring as shit" and full of "old nosy people". It wasn't hard to see that, despite my limited time there.
After breakfast, he again asked me what I wanted to do. I had no idea, so I asked him to at least give me some suggestions. He suggested a massive sheep station, checking out the Clyde dam, some of the small towns along the way, or skip most of that and drive around LOTR land for a while. I liked LOTR, but I'm hardly a hobbit groupie, so I suggest as much of all that as possible. He was cool with that, so we were on our way.
First stop was the Clyde dam. It was...a dam. Fairly big, rushing water, etc. Nothing too special. Driver seemed disappointed I wasn't impressed, so he told me a story about how locals earn good luck points from the local gods for tossing tourists into the dam. I told him he'd have to get a backhoe in here, stat, if he wanted to get me over the fence and into the dam. He cracked up and let me live, luckily.
Next up was an aborted trip to a sheep station. As we were driving up, he asked me if I liked Canadian music at all. I replied in the positive, and he blew me away with his response - "Good, because this station is owned by Shania Twain. We see her in the grocery store in Cromwell all the time. Nice lady." HOT DAMN! We were goin to Shania's house! Then he crushed my dreams with a quick "She's only down here a couple months of the year mate. Certainly not in may, when the weather's shit!"
My dreams were dashed again when we drove up towards Lake Wanaka, and it started to snow. Driver quickly said that it would be a bitch to get all the way up there, and there would be no guarantee we'd get to see much anyway, since it's so big and the gate might not be open. How big? Try 42,000 acres. Wow. That's a lot of sheep. "Well, maybe we can find a giraffe station around here so you can get a shag in. How about llamas? Can you handle llamas?" Asshole.
So, back east we went. It was snowing a lot harder now, and it was pretty hard to see where we were going. You ever been the only one on a bus in a snowstorm? It's oddly comforting. We were laughing about the first line of the newspaper report if we ended up crashing - "A 52-seat coach has been found destroyed in a storm. The driver, one passenger, and a llama were all found dead aboard..."
During the drive, I asked driver a million questions about New Zealand and beyond. He hated being a bus driver, but had no choice. He worked in the mines in Australia for years, making killer money and only having to work a few months a year. But the economy died, the jobs dried up, and he had to move back home to NZ. Jobs were hard to come by, and this was the best he could do at the moment. He explained what life in small town NZ was like, and how people view foreigners like me.
His best story involved a buddy of his that had an odd dream - ever since they were 14, this guy always talked about traveling America coast to coast...via Greyhound. 12 years later, he saved up for his big trip, ponied up huge money for the airfare and bus tickets...and found out how sketchy Greyhound and it's stations are. He was expecting to travel in the lap of luxury! For 12 years, he never did any research about it at all! Awesome.
After passing many, many sheep and going through about 7 different changes in weather, we arrived in Rohan. For the uninformed, Rohan is a region of land in Lord of the Rings. It was pretty impressive when you're there, but it doesn't translate well to pics - check it:
See? Boring. The rocks in the ground were pretty crazy up close though. Definitely worth the detour, but more of a "ya had to be there" kinda thing. After we drove through Rohan for a bit, driver turned off the paved road onto some crazy gravel road. He saw the look on my face and said "Relax canuck, this is the way to the train station. You're not getting murdered. You think I would have wasted all this gas bringing you out here to murder you, mate?" Asshole.
Driver warned me that the train station was in the middle of nowhere. During the summer, the train goes all the way into Middlemarch, a town about 15km up the tracks. For some reason, in the winter it won't go that far, and you're forced to come out to this station. When he said the middle of nowhere, he meant it. It was called Pukerangi, but why label it as a place when no one lives there? There was NOTHING around, and the train station was pathetically tiny. See?
That's the town! What the fuck!
So, after an awesome 4 hour bus ride, it was time to part from Driver...or so I thought. Turns out I was wrong, because he was handing the bus off to someone arriving on the train, and coming to Dunedin with me. Sweet. We headed off on the train, and while I'm sure it's a killer ride in the summer, it was raining like stink and I couldn't see much out the window:
Basically I just bullshitted and did a couple of jager bombs with driver on the way down to Dunedin. He told me some more stories about his family, and about the train we were on. Once we arrived in Dunedin, he even grabbed a mini-shuttle and drove me to my hotel. I tried to tip him, but he wouldn't accept my money. "Spend it on beer mate. After you see the girls here, you'll see that I'm doing you a favor. You're going to need those drinks!" Awesome! He turned out to be correct.
So...Dunedin. It was pouring rain when I arrived, so I just decided to chill in my hotel room for a bit. That got old real quick, so it was off to explore, rain or not. I didn't make it far the first night, just up onto the main strip, walking up to the University and back. I contemplated a pub, but I was pretty soaked and pooped, so I just went to a 24 hour market and grabbed food and beer. I spent a quiet night alternating between drinking, watching rugby, and writing a couple of articles. Such an exciting life on the road.
The next day actually turned out to be a lot of the same. After walking around Dunedin a lot, I realized three things:
1. The town had some great architecture.
2. The town had some shitty weather.
3. The guidebook lied about a lot of stuff.
My main goal of the day was to find the "drinking barns" they talk about so much in Lonely Planet. "Cavernous, barn-like pubs filled with drunken students". Sounds like fun to me. What did I find? Semi-large pubs. That's it. Like the Foggy Dew (Fuck you Foggy!) or Clancy's. Just spacious. Not barns! No barns! Denied. They still had beer though, so all was not lost.
After a couple wobblers, I headed down to Otago University and into the Otago Museum, which was supposedly the 2nd best museum in the country. Surprisingly, it didn't disappoint. Right inside the door was a stuffed moa. A moa is a HUGE extinct fuzzy bird. Bigger than an ostrich. The museum worked on donations, and you stuff the donations into the moa. He was awesome. Moa!
Some of the carved statues were really cool:
There were lots of other cool things in there too. I putzed about in there for a couple of hours, then walked around the city some more. Saw some cool buildings n stuff:
Train station
Cool church
After all that touristy stuff, it was time for some more pub action! I walked up to a big pub, and this sign was posted at the front entrance:
Really? Fucking Rock Paper Scissors? These were some simple folk! After laughing at the sign for a little bit and getting strange looks from passers-by, I decided to go inside and take this bitch down. That thought lasted about 8 minutes - I got bounced in the first round, over a pint of Mac's Gold. Dammit. I continued to make fun of the whole idea of it though, since, let's face it, it's a pretty stupid contest to have. One guy finally had enough, and directed me to the corner. He didn't say anything, just dragged me to the corner and pointed at a poster:
If you can't make that out, it says you can "win a trip to Canada to compete in the World RPS Championships." At that moment, the dragger spoke.
"You think we're fucking simple, you wanker? You want to call Kiwi's names because we like this stuff? Your country hosts the fucking WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS MATE! What the fuck does that make Canadians?!?"
Touche, bastard.
He was good-natured about it though, so I sat around and drank with the players? for a while. Cool guys. They led me to another bar, where I met a few of their female friends. I happened to mention that Otago (university name) must mean "ugly girl" in Maori, which one of the guys thought was hilarious enough to repeat TO ALL THE WOMEN. Thanks champ. One of the chicks actually though it was funny though, for some reason. I talked to her over many beers, and...I woke up next to her in my hotel room the next morning. Yes folks, I'm pretty sure my traveling draught is over! I can't guarantee what happened with 100% accuracy, because I don't exactly remember 100% of it...and I'm 100% sure she looked a lot better the night before...but who cares, I'm not picky! I'm sure she was just as disappointed when she woke up and saw me! SCORE!
I gave her the boot quicker than you can say beer goggles, and packed up and headed to the airport a happy man. Dunedin might not have been the coolest place ever, but at least Otago girls are easy. Which means I'm obviously going back.
