Trip from Akaroa to Dunedin 435 km

We set off early on Tuesday morning, on a lovely sunny day, travelling up the winding road out of the crater down onto the Canterbury plains heading South. We are getting used to an Automatic car again.

The road was pretty straightforward, flat and straight, not particularly interesting, but not difficult to drive, which was just as well as it was a 6 hr journey. The area is mainly high country farming, of sheep and cattle, first settled by the Canterbury pilgrims in 1850. We travelled through small towns selling tractors and sheep shearing equipment. All along the route we saw large lorries transporting loads of sheep to the docks for shipping somewhere. This is sheep country.

If the town didn’t specialise in sheep, it was an old gold mining town, with old relics from mining times on show.

We followed the spine of the Southern Alps all the way South along State Highway 1. We stopped en route to have a look at a curiosity called the Moeraki Boulders. Almost perfectly spherical, with a circumference of up to 4m, the grey boulders lie scattered along a 50m stretch of the beach. They were formed on the sea bed about 60 million years ago as lime salts gradually accumulated around the hard core. Some of the boulders can be seen still embedded in the cliff face. They look like giant marbles.

After a walk along the beach to stretch our legs we continued on along the highway to Dunedin.

Dunedin was the country’s commercial centre in its heyday following the 1860s gold rush. Its buildings are among the most interesting and architecturally diverse in the country. Members of the Free Church of Scotland were the first to settle the area in an organized way, making Dunedin the centre of their new land. Dunedin is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh. Many of the street names are Scottish. There is a large statue of Robert Burns in the centre.