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We just got back from a four-day trip to Queenstown, which is four hours west of Dunedin. Even though the weather is getting chilly, fall is only just coming to Dunedin, if you measure fall by the change in leaves. We had heard that the area around Queenstown has beautiful leaves, so we decided to go and see them. We went to Queenstown for Christmas, so I've already posted some photos of the city. But for a reminder, here are a few more. These first five photos are taken in a Queenstown park, a peninsula that juts out into Lake Wakatipu, so you can see views out towards the lake and also back towards the town.
We heard that the fall colors were supposed to be best around Arrowtown, a half hour from Queenstown, an old gold mining town. The hills above the town had a beautiful range of colors, and you can see them in the next photo.
Arrowtown has a charming shopping street which extends for a long block, with old fashioned buildings from the gold rush, which began in the 1860s and went on for several decades.
A couple hundred yards from the shopping street is the little hollow in the next photo.
And another couple hundred yards away is a small settlement where Chinese miners lived. They arrived in Arrowtown early in the gold rush. The miners of European descent wouldn't let them live in the town, so they had their own area just outside of town. The next photo is the building that housed the Chinese miners' shop, and the one after that is a cabin where a Chinese miner lived. The cabin is partially dug into the hillside. The Chinese miners had some unique methods of diverting the water in the river to expose the riverbed, which enabled them to consistently extract gold in a way that was frustrating to the European miners who didn't do as well. I'm curious what happened to those Chinese miners -- did they stay in New Zealand? The mayor of Dunedin has the last name Chin, and we were wondering if he descended from people who came at the time of the gold rush. Dunedin has many fewer people of Asian descent than Seattle, so it was surprising to have a mayor who appears to be of Chinese descent.
People still pan for gold in the Arrow River that runs through Arrowtown. The next photo shows the river, with the town's skateboard park in the foreground. The following photo is another view of the Arrow River.
Between Arrowtown and Queenstown is some beautiful country with two other rivers running through it. The next four photos were taken in the area between the two towns.
Today, for the first time, I looked at the tide table and decided to go for a walk on the beach at low tide. I can't believe we've been here nine months, we live 15-20 minutes from the ocean, and I've never gone for a walk on the beach in Dunedin. I've been wanting to post some pictures of my ride to the university, so I'll start with those, because the road to the beach goes right by the university. We live in a narrow valley that goes northeast from the northern part of town. So to get just about anywhere, we go about a quarter mile south on the main street that runs along the bottom of the valley. After about a quarter mile is a shopping area, with a supermarket, bank, pharmacy, used bookstore, and some resturants and other shops. Just past all the shops is the Botanic Gardens on the left. The first photo shows the bike lane (between the parked cars and the moving cars) that goes beside the Botanic Garden, where I ride to the university. 
Just past the Botanic Garden the road going into town merges with highway 1, the main north-south highway that goes the length of the South Island. It is pretty funny to ride my bike on the main highway just to get to the university. Highway 1, as far as I can tell, has only a few miles of freeway on the whole South Island. It goes right through the middle of all the towns and cities. In Dunedin, highway 1 splits into two one-way streets, one going north and one south, both with bike lanes, so we end up riding on it a lot. Sometimes really big trucks whiz by us. The next photo shows the scenic view about halfway between the Botanic Gardens and the University, which is up ahead on the left in about five blocks.
Just past the university is one of my favorite sights on the one-way street: the Castle Street Panel Beaters. That's the New Zealand name for a body shop, and for some reason I find that name ceaselessly entertaining.
At the south end of downtown, I left highway 1 and drove through a bunch of smaller streets to get to the neighborhood called St. Clair, which is right along the beach. The beach in Dunedin runs almost exactly east-west, with St. Clair on the western end, a big headland. To the east is another big headland, which you can see in the photo below. The yellow truck says "Learn to Surf" and there were a group of surfers in the water today.
One noteworthy aspect of the next photo is the rock in the background. It's a little island called White Island, and it's the triangular island we could see from our rental house. It's in lot of the pictures of the views from that house that I took in the second half of 2007.
The next photo shows the view looking east again.
And the next one shows the view looking west to the part of Dunedin called St. Clair. The houses on the hill are the most expensive houses in town.
The next one is a closeup of the expensive real estate, plus a woman and a dog.
And here are yet more of the expensive houses, with a coffee shop in the foreground, the yellow building. This coffee shop is noteworthy because our son, Mike, wrote a lot of his masters thesis in that coffee shop when he was here over Christmas. Almost every day he would ride Dave's bike from our rental house, high above the town, to the beach and write in the coffee shop.
We heard that the fall colors were supposed to be best around Arrowtown, a half hour from Queenstown, an old gold mining town. The hills above the town had a beautiful range of colors, and you can see them in the next photo.
Arrowtown has a charming shopping street which extends for a long block, with old fashioned buildings from the gold rush, which began in the 1860s and went on for several decades.
A couple hundred yards from the shopping street is the little hollow in the next photo.
And another couple hundred yards away is a small settlement where Chinese miners lived. They arrived in Arrowtown early in the gold rush. The miners of European descent wouldn't let them live in the town, so they had their own area just outside of town. The next photo is the building that housed the Chinese miners' shop, and the one after that is a cabin where a Chinese miner lived. The cabin is partially dug into the hillside. The Chinese miners had some unique methods of diverting the water in the river to expose the riverbed, which enabled them to consistently extract gold in a way that was frustrating to the European miners who didn't do as well. I'm curious what happened to those Chinese miners -- did they stay in New Zealand? The mayor of Dunedin has the last name Chin, and we were wondering if he descended from people who came at the time of the gold rush. Dunedin has many fewer people of Asian descent than Seattle, so it was surprising to have a mayor who appears to be of Chinese descent.
People still pan for gold in the Arrow River that runs through Arrowtown. The next photo shows the river, with the town's skateboard park in the foreground. The following photo is another view of the Arrow River.
Between Arrowtown and Queenstown is some beautiful country with two other rivers running through it. The next four photos were taken in the area between the two towns.
