New Zealand Dunedin 05Jan23

We rolled across the Southern Alps to Dunedin from Queenstown in about four hours (strangely, yet luckily, again it rained on us only as we were in the car on a travel day). We arrived mid-PM to a very nice downtown hotel and room and debated taking their costly parking or looking for a street spot; we went street and scored. Once checked in we headed across the street to the good Press Club restaurant for a tasty lunch. Despite the size and likely cultural activities in Dunedin, stuff was still fairly buttoned up. That's fine we like the outdoorsy stuff even more. We headed out the Taitora peninsula to the marine preserve & bird sanctuary. We weren't able to stay till nightfall for the blue penguin beach landing but did hike around and observe NZ's larger seals playing around. We also caught one member of the rare and declining Northern NZ albatross just hanging out on a cliff. He is part of one of the few only remaining colonies of this bird. There were also millions of gulls, of two or more varieties in this place ~ bird poo and squawking all around.

Dunedin is a larger NZ town of 100K folks but not much was open ~ we headed to St Clair beach to check the holiday vibe. We walked along the beach for a while and observed more surfing on a decent break a 1/4 mile out. It was ultimately a nice night with a great Kiwi sign on the boardwalk, "surf lessons ~ directly below the shark alert bell" and a packed pizza spot.

For the evening event we sought out the open breweries and found several within walking distance. We stopped first at Steamer Basin ~ it was meh but clean and took us down a strange alley named No Name. We engaged a nice lady there to parse the evening's intended dining choices. We changed our plan to eat at Emerson's.

We next trundled to Chris's Noisy Brewery ~ again just meh; it was also clean and decent but under-attended. On the way we'd passed the train station under construction; it held a keen old architecture.

We moved on to our last stop, the original craft brewer in Dunedin, Emerson's. It was excellent by many measures. The place was hoppin'; the Trainspotter hazy IPA was superb; the staff was fun & helpful; the food was surprisingly excellent. We enjoyed Asian-inspired stuff like dumplings in broth, pahd Thai with spicy shrimp and basically Peking duck like a tostada.

We slept well.