Day 9 – Tuesday 7 April

Dunedin was clear, sunny & warm when we left early this morning, a very pleasant promise for the day ahead, so very different from yesterday. Our drive from Dunedin was through rolling hills & reminded us of some parts of coastal NSW, green & lush. Our first stop was the small town of Moeraki so that we could see the famed Moeraki boulders. We saw some examples up close at the Otago Museum & had a very good explanation from a museum guide of the Maori legend of what they were & why they were there, plus the geological explanation. Basically these are round rocks that are concretions & are hollow inside, they are washed out of the sand dunes & lay on the beach at the mercy of the elements & people. After driving around Moeraki for a while we couldn’t find any evidence of the famous boulders anywhere & we ended up on a high headland lookout, with a notice board with an explanation of the formation of the township of Moeraki & points of interest. Of salient note was the little arrow & note that pointed out that the Moeraki Boulders were 1.7km along the beach northwards. Getting out the binoculars I spotted a bunch of rocks on the beach & a crowd of people wandering around them, a cafe overlooking it & a road off the highway.

At last, the cafe had a prime location built on the sand dunes overlooking the beach & looking directly at the famed Moeraki Boulders. We enjoyed a cuppa & a bite to eat on the sunny deck & enjoyed the vista of the boulders on the beach.

Next stop was the port city of Oamaru, just a short drive up the road & we were there by 10.30am. Oamaru must have been a busy, bustling city in its heyday of the mid to late 1800s, with a railway station at the port & breakwaters built to form a sheltered harbour. There are a lot of very large & impressive stone buildings in the heritage (port) precinct of Oamaru, with a lot of these converted to boutique shops, primarily for tourists. There are also a few empty & apparently abandoned stone buildings as well. In the main street the bank buildings are looking immaculate with clean stonework & a smattering of other large buildings such as the Town Hall & the Court House just as impressive. There must have been a lot of money in Oamaru in the boom days. The seaside park is excellent with a fantastic playground for the kids & a very creative kiosk/cafe built on the foreshore from rustic (& rusty) steel. A tree carver has also been very creative on some dead trees next to the park. The old wharf has seen better days & there are a few tired old fishing boats tied up alongside & a motley collection of boats anchored in the harbour.

We walked the main street of Oamaru as well as the heritage precinct, enjoyed a boysenberry ice cream & then headed off towards Twizel. Our first stop was just outside the township of Duntroon to look at the ancient Maori drawings on the sandstone cliffs. The drawings were a little disappointing, a lot of them had been cut out of the rock & taken off to museums. The drive up along the Waitaki Valley was pleasant with the lower reaches of the river having flat roads with long straight sections before turning into the normal New Zealand twists & bends as we got closer to the mountains. The three hydro-electric Lakes Waitaki, Aviemore & Benmore that we passed had some very pleasant campsites dotted next to the shore. We stopped at Omarama for a quick bite then continued on to Twizel, the site of yet more “Lord of the Rings” movie sets. A lot of the cast & crew stayed at the motel we are staying at. After checking in to the MacKenzie Country Inn we backtracked about two kms down the road to the local salmon farm located on the Wairepo Arm of the upper reaches of Lake Benmore. We fed the fish for free & marvelled at how quick the Chinook salmon are to accelerate, twist & turn to grab the food. Across on the other bank there was a line-up of campers & caravans with anglers trying their luck on the free roaming salmon that inhabit the lake with seemingly very little luck.   Back to the motel where we can see the snow covered peaks of Mt Cook & his brothers from our room then dinner in the dining room with a couple of bus loads of Chinese tourists. It is not surprising that they come to NZ in droves, we have noticed that the motels cater for them very well by employing Chinese staff who can speak Cantonese & Mandarin & the restaurants have buffet style food for them with Chinese & western style food.