#newzealand #southislandroadtrip #travel #adventure #mtb #gardens

Well then, if you read the last post, you’ll remember we had just done a lovely circular walk around Trotters Gorge and we were on our way to Dunedin. The name Dunedin is derived from the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh – Dun Eideann – the city is immensely proud of its Scottish heritage and even has its own tartan. It is also a big university town. It felt vety much like Scotland too for the first 24hrs, as it was cloudy, cold and wet. The first permanent European settlers arrived here in 1848, from Scotland, by boat. We however, arrived rather unceremoniously, on the back of a tow truck. About 20km outside of Dunedin, on one of the steepest hills in the area, Harvey lost power. We feared the worst, thinking the turbo had gone and phoned for help. We got towed directly to the campsite and parked up for the next four days until the garage reopened after New Year. January 2nd here is a national holiday.

All was not lost though (far from it! :Bloke), as we have bikes and spent our time cycling to, from and around town, to see the sights. I sent :bloke off to check out the local riding spot as I’d heard a few horror stories and being the slightly pathetic, and not very confident rider I am, thought I might die. So best to send him in first. There was also the large climb to the top of the hill I wasn’t sure about. So, we rode in to town together and he left me at the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, much safer, and went off on a sighting mission.

Meanwhile, I had an hour or so to myself, enjoying the peace and tranquillity of the garden. What a gorgeous place, set on a hillside in 30.4 hectares. According to the blurb…the average summer temperature is 18.6C and the average winter temperature is 10.4C, so not a massive difference. What does mess with my head a bit is that many of the flowers we have in different seasons at home in the UK, seem to be out at once here. They do like cottage garden style planting and they rose gardens. I’ve seen so many houses, all over the country with very traditional English rose gardens.

Bloke rejoined me and together we had a wander around and went to the top of the Gardens to check out the Aviary. The birds were beautiful, albeit tricky to photograph through the cages. A friend of mine back in the UK has a parrot, an African Grey I think, and since spending time with Dextor (that’s the parrot, not the owner), and having him land on my head a few times, I have found birds far more interesting and a bit less scary in flight. Some of these were huge as well, I don’t think I realised how big they could be, and they had us captivated for a while, especially three juvenile Macaws, who were perched together, trying to wind each other up (they looked just like the adult birds, but they were playfighting like kids at playtime :bloke) .

The next day, armed with more information on the bike park, Signal Hill, I decided to brave it. The climb up was actually really nice despite it being just shy of 7km (300 vertical meters, 1 in 20 is a very nice ratio for fast climbing :bloke). They called it The Big Easy and that was a pretty good description, not technical, just long. I may have mentioned before that I’m not much of a climber, but I was determined to do this one, in one hit and that I did. It meandered gently up the hillside and the views over the city were pretty cool.

Once was enough for today though, I enjoyed a few of the trails nearer the top, they were some of the steepest tracks I’ve ridden to date and they got progressively steeper the further down you get, unfortunately we got a bit lost (the signage is vague to say the least), and we ended up on a track that was beyond my skill level (it was a grade 5, rocky, very steep, hardly maintained with some odd features including a step-down gap to uphill landing! A real head nodder 😱. It is called “Student Track”, named for the large Uni nearby. :bloke) so I hopped back on to The Big Easy to finish the descent (yes, another two way trail, complete with runners too) and take a few photos I hadn’t wanted to stop for on the way up. Bloke rode it out to the bottom and went back up for another go, while I messed around on a couple of the tamer trails lower down by the car park. (Second time I took the Cat 3 climb “4wd track”. It’s the same height, but over 2.7km. Then down “The Mrs” for a total lap of 4.7km. The decent was lots of fun, starts technical and rocky, then opens into fast flowing berms before getting into switchbacks at the steep finish. It does have some big falls as the consequence of hitting the corners too fast toward the finish, so it keeps you focused! :bloke)…that’s the trail I wanted to stay on btw 🙄.

Next stop was the Chinese Garden, we’d noticed it on the way back to the campsite the day before. This place was a little haven in the middle of the city. Apparently Dunedin also has strong Chinese ties, dating back to the early goldmining days and the garden was built to recognise the contribution of the Chinese community. The walled garden was constructed in Shanghai and then dismantled and reassembled in Dunedin. It is based on a traditional scholars garden and has many of the classic Chinese elements, including a pond, a pavilion, a rockery, stone bridges and a tea house. It was really relaxing (my first time in a Chinese garden – the attention to detail was amazing, recreation of a landscape in miniature, repleat with a mountain made of Chinese limestone. Much of the symbolism was explained in a aural guide and we’ll worth listening to a few times by this uneducated westerner :bloke).

The following morning it was time to take Harvey to the garage to have him looked over. He seemed to be running alright again and when we got there the guy basically said “if there’s no warning light, I can’t plug it in to the diagnostic machine, so you may as well keep driving it, and if it happens again, pull over and wait a few minutes and start it again” (turn it off and on again??? You can’t be serious?? He was…. :Bloke) . That was that then, just what you need in one of the hilliest countries in the world!

So onwards we go…..to Lanarch Castle. It was one of the places I’d been told to visit, apparently you can’t visit Dunedin without going to the castle! It proports to be New Zealands only castle (there are others on the north islands apparently) . It’s really very cute indeed, quite small compared with its Scottish cousins. The grounds were definitely the highlight, lovely gardens and the views stunning, it was very easy to see why they wanted to build it there. It is privately owned and the family are doing their best to renovate and repair areas of it, I loved seeing the matriarch of the castle out in the garden, pottering around, tending to the garden. I imagine it’s lovely when the coach loads of jostling tourists go home for the day and the place is your own again.