Well, I’ve made it to Dunedin, which is probably as far south as I get. It’s a gorgeous city, heaps of grand old Victorian-Gothic buildings. (I must admit that I have a weakness for the gingerbread-house style of architecture.) The railway station is absolutely stunning, though it seems rather an excessive amount of splendor to receive the two trains a day that come through now. Regrettably, New Zealand is no longer a train country – on the way from Picton to Christchurch, I sat next to a Kiwi bloke about my own age who said he’d never been on a train before, and I can believe it. There’s just a limited, boutique-style railway system, very scenic but more suitable for tourists wanting a change than people who actually need to go anywhere.
Christchurch, where my brother is studying, is a pleasant city but rather obsessive about its English heritage, to the point where it feels like being in an amusement park with a British theme. There are even punters on the river Avon in full regalia – white trousers, blazers, and so on.
BrotherPorpentine and I saw our first glacier last week; it was very impressive, ridges and chasms of blue ice everywhere you looked. BroPorp dropped his camera in one of the crevasses, which means all the surviving pictures are my own amateurish efforts. Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that cold; all the ice flows down from the mountains, and the glaciers are surrounded by fairly temperate rainforest (which is full of glowworms at night, very cool – like being surrounded by stars on the ground.)
Went to the Kiwi House in Hokitika on the way back; strange little birds they are, with shaggy feathers and long stiletto-like beaks, with which they seem inordinately fond of stabbing each other. And they hop like little kangaroos. There is, of course, no chance of seeing one in the wild, but I’m hoping to see some albatross and penguins later today.
Speaking of which, I’d better be going – apologies for any spelling errors, I’m typing from a cybercafe and there’s no time to edit things extensively, especially with the board running at its current pace.