Next stop was Oamaru. This fun town got its riches from refrigerated-meat shipping. Apparently it was lucrative enough to support building huge Victorian stone buildings. In its heydey in the 1880s, it was as large as Los Angeles was at the time. However, it overreached itself and teetered on bankruptcy. In the most recent decades, there has been a repurposing of the buildings, leading to quite some fun places. In fact, it totes itself as the steampunk capital of NZ!
The main streets have beautiful stone buildings.
Check out the detail in that stonework!
Even McDonald’s was decked-out to try and fit in!
Inside St Patrick’s Basilica.
They even have a 4-person, tandem-bike vehicle!
The other thing Oamaru is known for is penguins! They have two colonies on their shores. The little penguin (same as the ones we saw in Australia), as well as the world’s rarest penguin species, yellow-eyed penguins. We tried for a while to spot some, but didn’t ever see any. And gave out to the cold wind (brutal chill on-shore breeze) and retreated to the van. We did see some NZ fur seals, at least.
We decided to keep moving on and inspect Moeraki Boulders. They are spherical rock-concretions that reach over 1-m in diameter. They were formed by lime holding together mud, pebbles, and shells that were buried under the ocean floor long ago.
This is one that was split apart.
Then we landed in Dunedin. After doing some much-needed work (like laundry and washing the van), we thought we would hit up Baldwin Street, the world’s steepest residential street, according to Guinness Book of World Records.
It starts off pretty tame, but gets pretty steep at the end.
Look! I am taller than Jonathan, even though he is directly behind me!
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