The Great ACT-NSW-NZ Trip, 2023-2024 - Ōtepoti / Dunedin
Last stop on the trip, and Aotearoa's secondmost-southern city. In fact there aren't many cities or even towns that far south in the world, largely because the weather tends to be atrocious what with the Roaring Forties howling their way around the world at that latitude. It gets even worse as you head further south. One old sailor's expression went, "below 40 degrees south, there is no law; below 50 degrees, there is no God."
That said, we had a perfectly pleasant time, althought the streets were certainly steeper than we were used to, coming from a part of the world that hasn't had mountains in just over one billion years. In fact the steepest residental street in the world is in Dunedin.
The steepness was unintentional - most of New Zealand's early urban settlements were plotted out in London, without any consideration for the actual terrain.
People first started settling the area between 1450 and 1500, with successive waves of more Māori, and eventually Europeans, including large numbers of Chinese and Scots. In 1895, Mark Twain said of the Dunedin Scots, "They stopped here on their way from home to heaven – thinking they had arrived".
Not that the intereactions between locals and new arrivals was always peaceful - see Murdering Beach and the Sealer's War.
The terrain itself is largely the result of the entire area being one huge extinct volcano, with Otago Harbour the eroded out heart of the mountain, and features like the columnar basalts at Blackhead Promontory and Mt Cargill evidence of deep slowly cooling lava. Blackhead is being quarried for road aggregate, and the quarry owners wanted to excavate it all the way down to 50m below sea level and turn it into a boat harbour. Geology fans put a stop to that plan, thankfully.
(The Banks Peninsula Volcano on the coast east of Christchurch is another extinct volcano with its heart chewed out into an amazing harbour.)
I hadn't even known that Dunedin WAS a volcano until the morning I spent at the Otago Museum, so walking through a carpark on the way to raiding the many secondhand bookshops (Dunedin = university town) and spotting what was clearly pillow lava was a bit of a surprise. Back in 2020 one local intended to set up geology tours for tourists, and the carpark pillow lavas were one of the stops. We also stumbled across the University of Otago geology department museum, which is open to any passersby that might take an interest. Fabulous collection of minerals and fossils.
As usual, plenty of species to see (and the museum, and the albatross and penguin sanctuaries will be their own sets of posts) and a bunch I'd already recorded.
