We woke up early enough to get on the computer in the common room and check our emails. My mom sent me one about how they wished I’d called when we landed in New Zealand even if it had been collect just to let them know we were safe. I emailed her back and kind of apologized and said that internet was actually harder to come by than I thought it would be, at least for free. The airports wanted to charge $10 monthly for a membership to use their Wi-Fi in 500,000 airports worldwide or something, which would be acceptable if I spent more time flying, I guess. Still seems to me that that should be free when you consider the ridiculous cost of flying. The hotel we stayed at the first night wanted to charge $7 for half an hour of Wi-Fi, or $10 for two hours. That’s just bogus. It’s not like it costs them any extra whether I log on to their network or not, and being as we’ve paid $175 for the damn room I think should entitle us to some free Wi-Fi. Anyway, I didn’t really have time to do much else with the internet since we really just needed to be getting on our way and I still needed to shower (I’m a smelly, smelly man). We walked around Oamaru a bit more and then headed south.
We were heading toward the Moeraki Boulders, which are some rocks famous for being large and round, but we apparently overshot them and ended up at a place off the highway where you can look at seals. They were really cute! Amanda and Alyssa were way ahead of me getting out of the van because my boots are actually kind of complicated to tie (not much, just a little…I think I’ve actually spent much of the trip tying my shoes, though). When I got up to the cliff edge where they were standing, Alyssa said, "We see a dead seal down there." So I looked where she pointed and just then it looked up at us and rolled over. It was sleeping. Most of the seals were. We found some more, but they blend in really well and when they sleep, they sleep. They really do look just like the rocks around them. We walked down the cliff to another viewing area and we saw a lot more of them, these ones were more animate. I saw some that were either kissing or fighting, I wasn’t sure which. I know that seals are famous for kissing but this seemed a bit aggressive. I got lots of video of the seals.
We backtracked to the Moeraki Boulders. There was a "suggested donation" just to walk down the beach where the boulders are located, and like suckers we paid it. They were pretty cool, though, so I don’t feel so bad about paying two dollars just to look at rocks. It’s not as though I hadn’t paid more than that just to climb some stairs. My theory is that they’re actually eggs. Maybe dinosaur eggs, maybe alien eggs, maybe Godzilla eggs, but in any case, petrified eggs. I think this because of their very round shape and because there are several that are broken, but still hard rock…if you saw them, you’d see exactly what I mean. We have a bunch of pictures and I took some video. We saw an old guy climb inside of one of the broken ones and sit down. We checked out the café, but it was really expensive, so we left. We also bought nothing at the gift shop. We did take some seashells from the beach, though.
From there we headed down the road to Dunedin. Right inside of town, we stopped at a gas station because I wanted something cold to drink and some munchies. I was feeling drowsy so I wanted something with caffeine. I ended up with chicken flavored potato chips (how weird is that?) and an energy drink called Lift+. I thoroughly enjoyed both, but what I didn’t enjoy was that the van wouldn’t start. The battery had gone dead. I’d left the lights on, but seriously, for no more than 10 minutes, probably actually closer to five. The gas station had no jumper cables. Fortunately the rental company has roadside assistance on all of its vehicles. I called, they said it would be 45 minutes before somebody could come jump start us. I fell asleep waiting. So did Alyssa. Fortunately Amanda stayed awake. After that we had to keep the van running for 45 minutes to an hour to let the battery charge back up, so we drove to the highest point of the city where there was a memorial to the city’s first mayor and a great view of the whole thing. I think that Dunedin looks bigger than Christchurch, even though it’s not (supposedly). We drove around Dunedin for a while after that, even though we didn’t have to (it was 45 minutes just to reach that lookout), and holy bajeezus, that city is hilly. Seriously, almost all of the streets are steeper than you want to drive on, it sucks the ol’ gas. In fact, Baldwin Street in Dunedin is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the steepest street in the world, with a slope of almost 19 degrees. Nifty, eh? We didn’t see Baldwin Street but driving down High Street reminded us of riding the Raging Bull at Great America.
So we ended up driving all over Dunedin looking for a record store called Records Records because there was a mention of it in the guidebook as having lots of underground stuff from Dunedin bands that were active largely during the 90s, starting in the grunge years, which interested me. Apparently they had the "Dunedin sound" similar to how grunge started out being called the "Seattle sound." Eventually the Dunedin sound influenced bands like The Strokes and The Hives and such, which is a genre that I like well enough, even though I don’t like The Strokes or The Hives. I think they’re annoying. The White Stripes, The Vines, Jet, and several others associated with them are pretty good. Well, we couldn’t find the record shop, so after chugging up and down hills for so long we decided to just find a place to stay for the night, park the van, and walk around. It took us another few hours to find a place to stay, and we ended up at a campground pretty far from where we wanted to be. The center of Dunedin is called the Octagon, similar to how Madison has the Square. We were probably as far from the Octagon as Amanda’s & my apartment is from the Square. I don’t know if that sentence was grammatically correct or not but I’m going to run with it. So we put up the tent despite the ridiculous winds that we were fighting against and, as we sat in the tent contemplating our next move and throwing things at each other, the tent sides threatened to swallow us as they bowed in viciously. I admitted that it was a terrible idea. It had been my idea to set up the tent. But at that point we weren’t going to take it down so we just left it and sat at the bus stop. When we figured out that the bus wouldn’t come by for another twenty minutes we went to explore the lodge, where they had internet access. We discovered that it was two dollars for fifteen minutes. Yeah. Ripoff. So we stood around in the lodge doing nothing for ten more minutes and then wandered back to the bus stop. From there we contemplated how expensive everything is in New Zealand, because it really is. I had just paid $3.20 for the equivalent of a 20oz bottle of sprite (600mL). We calculated gas out to be over six dollars a gallon, and we’re using plenty of it by driving all over the fecking country. We realized that this is all George Bush’s fault and that we’re mostly just getting screwed by the exchange rate. To illustrate: NZ$1.75 per liter for gas. Four liters to a gallon = NZ$7.00 per gallon. US$1 = NZ$1.22, so approximately 80%. $7.00 x 80% = $5.60 per gallon. Nice. Then you consider that we have to pay a 1% conversion fee for all the money that we spend. We’re getting screwed. At least the bus fare back to the Octagon was cheap: $1.60. It’s $1.50 in Madison. We got back to town around 7pm only to find that everything in Dunedin closes at 6, except for the casino and about half of the restaurants. Dunedin is the lamest city I’ve ever been in. We couldn’t even get into the casino because we weren’t dressed well enough. We just wandered around the dead streets and ate at Subway until 9:30 when the bus came to pick us up again. When we got back to the campground we just went straight to bed.
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