13 – jan 31: all day bay to dunedin

moeraki boulders

the signs of “all guests must leave by 10am” in all day bay proved to be real, and they very politely kicked us out at 10:05. no other hostel has been this pressuring about this yet! (and i’m typing this 10 days later!)

swiftly on our way, our plan for the day began as a simple short drive to our hostel in dunedin, which should have been a nice town, and a stop over at the moeraki boulders. the boulders are these huge, round, very spherical rocks that are just on the shore. oleg for some reason was super excited to see them, where as i just expected … rocks.

however our eloquent plans ended up getting shuffled, as the car’s squeaking began to annoy oleg far too much. thus, the executive decision to contact avis’s division in dunedin (as they thankfully have one there), and see if we should be worried.

we still had to stop by the boulders, which while being fun to climb on, climb in, and jump off, were not as spectacular as oleg had imagined. i did however enjoy the beach, the low tide and the expanses of sand, and of course more BIRDS.

all those seagulls just APPEARED behind my back when i asked oleg to pass me some of our bread/cookies/crackers. to their luck oleg dropping a bunch of cookies a few minutes previously and thus they were treated to a lot of thrown free food, while i took lots of photographs.

dunedin

the city was very charming. it was actually the first city we spent some time walking around for the sheer reason of walking around it. i really liked it – especially cause we found a place where internet was $3 per hour FROM THE LAPTOP. so no messing around with usb keys and such!

of course after seeing that my desire to walk around has diminished :) but we still hung out for a while – all in all a lot of interesting architecture, and an AWESOME grocery store. i cannot believe how much i missed SELECTION in food and all those CHOICES. we even found honey roasted peanuts! and beer! mmmm.

after buying food, we rushed home … err, the hostel. definition of home has become a very relative, extendable word. home changes every other day if we’re lucky, and daily on a regular basis. anyway. at “home” i snacked on some stuff purchased earlier, and did some small prep for uploading blogs and such. in the end i decided not to kill myself typing up the 5 (at least) days that i was missing, and just go and upload what i did end up having.

i don’t MIND writing long entires. but i hope that all of you “faithful” “readers” ;) can appreciate that it takes a lot of time to write this stuff, and there is no easy way to find electricity to charge laptop (about 30% of the time we don’t have an outlet in the room at all, another 50% there will only be one outlet, which we still gotta share with camera charges and such). and it does take time.

anyway. internet was great, as usual. i feel like such a cripple without the ability to look up any question that occurs to me over the day … how were the moeraki boulders made? are the seagulls here different from north american ones? what’s cool in dunedin? what should i cook tonight if i have half a red pepper, and rosemary spice? and such. let alone reading general enterntainment – slashdot, fark, overheardinny, dooce, digg, boingboing… aaaaah.

what was funny is that the internet owner/manager guy picked up on how deeply i sink into the computer when i start using it, and in the end, when we stayed there like 30 minutes after store closing, he simply asked me (first, and oleg afterwards) on how much do i think i owe him. it totally took me by surprise, as my head was still in the wispy clouds of connection and information. i think i ended up overpaying him, but for the amount of time he spent helping me set up, and the fact i ended up sitting there for so long, its been worth it :D

after internet, came the hostel, and then sleep. oh yeah! and oleg called avis who just sent him to a local holden mechanic. so oleg had to wake up at like 7:30 am or so to get in time for his 8am appointment, and i slept in till 10. mmmm. sleeping in. till 10. when have i ever used that sentence before?