We are approaching the southern end of New Zealand and the end of our visit here. Before entering the fiordland region we have a three day stop in Dunedin on the south-east coast. Dunedin is a university city and it shows! It’s really nice and vibrant, and has a lot of British-looking buildings. Many of them are Anglican churches:

but also other buildings have a beautiful colonial touch, like the train station.

Dunedin, because of its cool climate hosts the big chocolate factory of Cadbury. Plenty of great chocolate being produced there! We join a guided tour of the production, with of course also included plenty of tasting!

We spend the rest of the day trying to phone British Airways, in order to change some of our flights. It was just impossible! First it was hard to find a public phone which would take coins, so we walked a lot around to find that, when we put the coins in…it didn’t work, it would just spit the money out. The second one worked, but the volume was so low that it was impossible to hear a thing! The third one ate all our coins…done with the public phones we divert for Skype, but the connection is really not so good, and we get cut off in the middle of the call. At the end we settle for buying some credit for the New Zealand number, make the call and end up with absolutely nothing. The woman on the phone was a complete incompetent…Better luck next time! The day after it is time for a guided tour of Speight’s brewery.

The backpacker’s place we are staying at is surely questionable in style, but mainly is a freak magnet! Never seen such weird stuff going on in a kitchen:  a guy wearing a wool hat and jacket 24/7 eating only bread with peanut butter, a Chinese chopping 10 cloves of fresh garlic, a couple for the soup the rest to eat raw, a French couple co-boiling pasta and vegetables in so little water that half the pasta in the kettle was actually dry, just getting steamed…mmmh tasty! Making a simple but good pasta with pesto made me look like Gordon Ramsey!

After lunch the next day we take a bus to Te Anau, on the edge of Fiordland. It will be our last stop before Queenstown. Our room is actually in a camping site, a pretty nice one in front of the Lake. We have time for a long walk on the shore, get into town to buy some food for the trip to Mildford sound. The lake belongs to a National park

and it looks like (at least in parts of it) you are not allowed to have a motor on your boat or a dog on board!!!