Dunedin

Today I checked into On Top Backpackers. It is a really nice new hostel and only 6 beds in a dorm. They told me that unless they get really busy they only tend to put 3 or 4 people in at a time though!

I had booked on the Taieri Gorge Railway for this afternoon so I had a few hours to kill before then. I went and explored the city, mainly the shopping centre! I bought a cheap book and went for lunch in a food court. One of the best things about eating in NZ or OZ is the asian influence! I can get such cheap asian food - chinese/japanese/thai in food courts and it is pretty much always really nice!

After this I headed down to the railway station. Only one section now houses the Taieri Gorge Railways offices, the rest is a NZ Sports Hall of Fame mueseum!

I was a bit worried as it started to spit again as I walked down to the station and as it had been sunny for a few hours I had left my jacket in the hostel!

Well on the train I had been allocated a seat in the heritage carriage which was cute! The seats could be swung to face back or forward!

We set off and in the buffet carriage a bloke was giving commentary, this was quite good, he's obviously a rail buff!

The first part of the journey was reasonably flat and a bit boring but then we headed across the Taieri Plains into the gorge. It was really nice although it was quite cloudy! The river is quite famous for fishing and there was so much yellow gorse all over the hill sides. Gorse was actually introduced from the UK and it has spread like a weed all over the NZ bush! Everything in NZ grows at amazing rates. They have miles upon miles of pine forest that they use for logging. The pines take 25 years to grow to maturity here compared to 35 years in other parts of the world. Other plants are the Russell Lupins, these are gorgeous flowering plants that come out in Spring mainly in the alpine regions. I have seen a fair few but apparently they are the best up at Milford Sound! These have alos coem from the UK but I've never seen them in the wild like they are here! The drawbacks from all of this introduced growth is that it pushes out native bush which is very rare. Many trees and plants just die out as these take hundreds of years to reach maturity, this includes the Kauri tree which grows in the North Island. The Kauri can live up to thousands of years and is the second largest tree in the world after the Californian Redwood. Unfortunatly they were logged so heavily in the 1800s that only a few hundred remain and they are very young! So in many parts of NZ now they are leaving native bush to grow freely and trying to curtail introduced plantlife!

We went over several viaducts whch are made of steel. Much of this steel is Scottish steel imported in the early 1900s. The railroad took an age to build and the workers had to live alongside the track as they worked! It was mainly built to service the gold rush and then it was used to transport materials to build the Clyde Dam which I had visited yesterday.

We reached our destination of Pukerangi where we picked up a coachload of people joing us from Queenstown on a special connection. On the way back it was seriously chucking it down and a wee bit chilly on the train!

We arrived back in Dunedin and I got soaked going to the Supermarket but managed to stay covered on the way back to the hostel!

I had a bit of toast for dinner and then headed out to the cinema! I was allocated seats and the cinema although not many seats had massive sofa like seats that you could just sink into! No surprises what I watched! Harry Potter! I thought it was really good, the films are defintely getting better each time! Although Hermione annoyed me quite a bit in this one!

It was around 11.30 when I came out so I headed back to the hostel where no one had checked into my room so I had the room to myself - Nice!