Big Trip

Ugh! Drizzle and grey skies this morning. Not too pleasant as we set off towards Dunedin. At least when we got to Moeraki beach it was dry, so that we had a reasonable walk along the beach. It reminded me of a british beach in spring or autumn. The waves were rolling in on a stiff breeze, and the sky was grey. Actually, I rather like that wildness. Anyway, we picked our way in between the vast mounds of seaweed to a spot where someone appeared to have abandoned a game of boules, or perhaps marbles, though all the marbles were black. It had obviously been a pretty rough game, as some of the marbles (or whatever) had shattered and were lying in pieces. The Moeraki Boulders are not actually boulders at all, they're concretions: accumulations of salts around a small hard core. They formed on the sea bed 60 million years ago. The manner of their creation makes them oddly spherical, and this is one of the large collections of them in one place. The ones that had broken looked a bit like inverted turtle shells, because lighter brown calcites accumulate in cracks in the boulders themselves, which I guess is one of the reasons that they break.
After the bracing walk back and a hot chocolate, we headed down to Dunedin, having nabbed the last four seats on the afternoon's Taieri Gorge train. It was an interesting mix of old & newer carriages, and fortunately we were in an old one. At first I began to wonder what all the fuss was about, but as the train climbed out of the cold drizzle in Dunedin and the sun came out, we crossed the Strath Taieri plain and climbed up into the gorge itself. The railway runs round some fairly tight curves, hugging the gorge walls on a little ledge which gets higher & higher. The views are quite spectacular, as you can see both up & down the gorge. We had a quick unscheduled stop to remove some rocks from the track, and a couple of other, scheduled ones for photos & leg stretching. There was a bit of a scrum on the platforms at the ends of the carriages as people struggled to get photos, but quite a few people only made the trip one way, being ferried on to Queenstown by coach, so it was quieter on the way down. Some nice little bridges and vertiginous drops, enough to give my mother-in-law kittens. Definitely worth a visit.
We decided to head out to the Otago peninsula to camp, which involved a hilarious coast road. I don't think I've ever driven closer to the sea. Poor Sarah was on the watery side, and was able to look straight down the four foot drop from the road into the water as we negotiated the tight bends in as stately a manner as I could manage with a mixture of head- and cross-winds, depending on the twist of the road and the dip of the cliffs. We plotted up in Portobello, on a lovely little quiet camp site just up a side road from the sea.