around the world in 180 days

We arrived in Dunedin yesterday, a town that reminds me of Duluth. As you come into town from the north, the road winds down a hill that overlooks the town and the harbor like 35 does coming down Thompson hill. We came to go to a rugby game, but we also ended up touring a brewery, visiting a museum and wandering through a couple of used book stores (which I enjoyed and Anna didn’t so much).
The rugby game was good fun. The home team (the Highlanders) won, so the crowd was in good spirits. The brewery tour was also fun, particularly the part where we drank some beer. It was Speight’s brewery, which is the beer down here, as far as regionals go. It was pretty tasty, for a large scale brewery beer.
Today, we took our time leaving town, planning on going back to the Otago Museum, as we didn’t have much time there yesterday. As we were leaving the hostel, the owner recommended we check out the farmer’s market, which we did, and we bought tons of vegetables, fruit and, oddly enough for an island with no natural mammals apart from bats, vension sausage.
Right now, we’re on our way to the Catlins, a hilly/foresty area at the very bottom of the south island. We’re driving down a bumpy gravel road to see a blowhole, if the tide isn’t too low. I’ll keep you posted on how things are. Stay tuned!

One of the strangest things about being so far from home is looking up at the night sky and seeing different stars, and familiar stars in different places. Orion stands on his head, there is no north star or big dipper or any of those, and there’s a bunch of other ones that look even more jumbly than the stars do at home. Even so, the milky way still streaks down the middle of the sky and the moon still waxes and wanes and the sun works the same, so not everything is different.
So Jack’s Blowhole? Not worth the effort. It was a big hole and it was full of water, but we drove for about 20 mins and walked for about 30 mins (1 hr. 40 mins total) and it just wasn’t worth it. If you’re ever in Owana, NZ and are thinking about checking out Jack’s Blowhole, don’t bother. Not worth the effort.
So. An update on the major headache. We may have gotten the rental car fixed for free, but the jerks at the rental car place charged our credit card for the deductible/bond on the car. They sent Anna an email telling us they were going to do it and they just did it. We’re both a little pissed off. Nowhere in our rental agreement does it say that they can do that, and at no point did they mention to us that that is how things work. I’ve got to call on Monday and chew this guy out and the worst of it is that it’ll probably do no good. We already fixed the car. At this point, I really wish we’d never even called them and told them about the damage, which was pretty minor. I’ve learned that in cases like this, honesty is most certainly not the best policy because if you’re honest, then someone will try to screw you. Jerks.

Sorry about that. I ranted a bit earlier with Anna, but I guess it wasn’t quite enough. Thanks for listening. It meant the world to me.

Tags: complaining, Dunedin, New Zealand, Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.