Leon at LCA2006

Taieri gorgeous

2006-02-06T22:37:00.000+13:00

These were taken on the way back down, there will be more from the trip up sooner or later.

Lovely old stone building. Nice chips, too. The whole town is about 2x2 blocks, takes about two minutes to circumnavigate on a pushbike.

Beaches on the river.

One of many scenic railway bridges on the track.

The river doesn’t look fast or anything, and the water is lovely and crystal clear, but every so often the flow bunches up a bit and you start to get a hint of how much water really is flowing through there.

Shot along one of the straighter bits near the top of the gorge.

One of many dark and exciting tunnels. Some were bare rock, a few were cement-lined, many were brick-lined, a few had some combination of the above. The tunnel has a peak to let the smoke escape.

Some the drops right alongside (or even under) the track were substantial.

Some of the rapids accumulated quite a bit of driftwood. We have running water, fish, firewood and shelter, sounds like an excellent place to camp.

The rock formations run from measly to reasonably grand. Most of the rock seems to be the wood-grain-looking stuff I saw on the beach a few days ealier.

Photos from the trip home

2006-02-05T16:12:00.000+13:00

The Taieri Gorge train stopped on the way back to dump all of its icecream on the afternoon train, which had already consumed fearful amounts of it (and was packed with Japanese tourists who looked like they regarded Dunedin as being unpleasantly warm despite the airconditioned carriages).

This is the coach swap happening a little way north of Timaru. Ritchies’ reputation preceded them, so we weren’t looking forward to this.

This is the rack full of PCs at Base in Christchurch, and below is a shot of te Linux-based router controlling them all.

The Internet system was operated by small pre-paid tickets which allowed you to log in to an XP session, and kicked you off when your time expired. There was no continuity and from what I could see the system was set up to do a quick reimage on logout.

A UTP cable taped to the floor of the Internet room led away to one of the dorms, so I suspect that (given the unlocked rack door) bypassing the PCs with your own laptop and cable would not exactly be rocket science.

This was a truly ornate fountain on the grounds of the Botanical Gardens in Christchurch. There were many nice plants in evidence — as one would expect — so I’ll take time to cull out some pictures of those for you later.

This was a simple and obvious fitting in the Christchurch Airport departure lounge which I don’t see in Australian airports. It requires no paperwork or money for access, and works for all races, creeds, genders etc. I guess if the Aussies do implement these, they’ll have a coin-slot and a boarding-pass reader.

Transferring from International to Domestic within Sydney Airport took us past some repair hangers. Master Six was very impressed by the size of all of the gear. Not much else leaped out and said “photograph me!” in the two hours I had there.

Here is some of the excellent cloudscape which presented itself to the fading sun on the way across New South Wales towards home.

Gawrsh! Can't wait to see...

2006-02-01T14:16:00.000+13:00

...what they say about LCA2008 being held in Broome. (-:

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

2006-01-31T11:53:00.000+13:00

Neither Customs nor Immigration blinked (or even, apparently, checked anything), so here I am in Perth. I’ll post the promised Taieri Gorge pictures after getting urgent local stuff out of the way.

My bike, however, is back in Dunedin. I missed the rendezvous in Dunedin, so put the bike on the bus for use in Christchurch. The coach going the other way broke down, and InterCity needed to swap ours for it because they didn’t have a replacement with enough seats. The replacement (from Ritchies’) didn’t have any cargo area large nough to take a pushbike, either, so happy Dunedin resident Robin is now the proud owner of the much-travelled $10 bike.

The slower, nboisier, much less comfortable replacement coach also needed its headlight wiring fixed before we could set sail (a real confidence builder, that one), so my laptop became a temporary cinema for the dozen or so people within earshot, who followed the antics of Alex, Marty, Gloria, and Melman as they coped with a zoo transfer gone seriously haywire (with the aid of some remarkable penguins — “just smile and wave, boys, smile and wave” and the irrepressible King Julian).

I got to share a ’plane with lesser FOSS royalty GNOME (and now LaunchPad) hacker James Henstridge, and for the second leg actually got a window seat (pictures from that later too).

Taieri Gorge is magnificent

2006-01-29T16:30:00.000+13:00

Definitely on my Recommended To Visit list. I’ll post photos in a day or so (currently sitting in The Octagon connected through SpongeFromHoyts.net.nz and nibbling on dinner in preparation for coaching up the coast to Christchurch) but for what is basically a big hole in the ground with lotsa rocks and some water, it’s amazing.

Ten of the LCA crew headed out this morning. We calculate well over a thousand photographs between four of us and were wondering how far from VR capability we are.

The web booking system for the train confirmed acceptance of my card on Friday, but this morning there was no sign of the transaction having ever happened. And incidentally, it had allowed me to book for a trip that they don’t run on Sunday mornings. Yay, a web application. Leap. Click.

The train staff were very friendly and helpful. The run is basically up from Dunedin, turn right at Green Island and wiggle up the Gorge to a blinkanyamistit on the shoulder of the range behind. The Gorge itself is gorgeous, a pretty river flowing at the bottom of a deep groove in the landscape sporting some impressive rock formations. The water is very clear, so you can see all of the bottom all of the time even if it is tinged with green. There are nice beaches and “interesting” beaches (rounded rocks or sharp rocks), rocky shelves, bushy bits, foresty bits, pools, rapids, bridges spanning impressive chasms, a couple of idyllic farm-stay thingies (one of them accessible only by rail) and so on. Magnificent!

Random post-conf ramblings

2006-01-28T20:57:00.000+13:00

A pair of sea-lions stopped to sunbake at Allens’ Beach. This is a truly impressive beach. It has wide, clean, hard-packed sand reminiscent of (surprise) Broome’s beaches.

The furry lump in the foreground is the lass of the sea-lion pair sunbaking near the high-tide mark. A bunch of Yankee tourists (drunk and sunburned) managed to bother the male enough for him to chase them, but he quickly gave up and found a nice piece of driftwood to scratch on before undertaking his own siesta.

Taieroa Head has its own set of “organ pipes” albeit not as spectacular as the set in the bush across the harbour.

The incredibly tough seaweed which grows right on the breaker line around here is still incredibly tough after it dies. I can squeeze this sample for all I’m worth and it won’t even creak. Yet it’s mostly air and weighs diddly squat.

I also wonder how it manages to grow so densely amidst such tumultuous waves and not ever get tangled up. If you could chemically supply the same property to human hair, you’d be a millionaire overnight.

It’s kind of un-nerving to have the sky go from bringht and sunny to overcast and gloomy within about 15 minutes, but this did indeed happen.

Driving back down the Otago Peninsula along the ridge road saw fog hastening across, both up and down the hill in different places. In WestOz, the same breeze which hastened the fog along would also disspiate it, but evidently Otago fog is made of sterner stuff.

I’ll be taking a coach to Christchurch tomorrow night, then flying Qantas (QF46 dep CHC 15:35(GMT+13) arr SYD 16:55(GMT+11), QF583 dep SYD 19:25 arr PER 21:10(GMT+08) at Domestic Terminal 2) home on Monday. If DIMIA will let me back in.

Grumble

2006-01-27T21:36:00.000+13:00

This after pushing a bike up 3km of road which looked, to quote Cash McCall’s song Black Bear Road, “like a whole bunch’a zees and dubyas all strung together” (note fragments of road visible at stage left and diving behind some pines near centre stage).

The “Camp Track” behind the castle was very pretty:

...as was the scenery on the way back down. This was a shot over Glenfalloch and MacAndrews Bay to Sawyers Bay. The “wee train” (it seems that “wee” things can actually be reasonably large; this is a 20+ car goods train) goes past Sawyers Bay and Port Chalmers about every hour or so, and makes an incredible amount of noise for its size.

Note that coasting downhill on a pushbike at ≅60km/h for ≅10 minutes through Dunedin’s sixteen-degree (Celsius) late-afternoon air leaves one f-f-f-fa-fa-far too cold at the end of the run.

Come to Broome in 2008

2006-01-27T14:18:00.000+13:00

If you missed my Broome slideshow at the keynote this morning, here is the main slideshow and also the followup slideshow (shown looping; and the animations don’t survive translation to web) both of them to this tune.

I’ve already had three different non-sandgroper volunteers front up and want to help out. If you’re amongst them (or not! :-), please email me (whatever at cyberknights com au) so I can collate a list and get organised.

How SaMBa happens

2006-01-27T13:58:00.000+13:00

Get an idea
Stop, drop and roll out code
Profit!

I wonder how much the adoption of tools like laptops has helped the march of technology by simply enabling the capture of ideas on the spot instead of having to wait, or hastily scribble a reminder note (only to lose it or inadvertantly feed it to the washing machine), each step of which costs you some (maybe all) of the gestalt surrounding the original inspiration.

Interesting conf topics for the day...

2006-01-26T22:55:00.000+13:00

...included Aaron Seigo on KDE4’s Plasma (good to see some GNOME crew there, just checking to ensure that there were no surprises), Rusty Russell on Talloc (which has swiss-army-knifed since last year), Adam Jackson on X memory management vs B’dale Garbee on FOSS in EME communications vs Carl Worth on the Cairo drawing system (hurrah for video streams!), then a quiet afternoon listening to Hugh Bleming and B’dale (again) on software radios (as in, communications gear rather than ghetto blasters).

Morning Tea was... different: boxes of lollies and chocolates/toffees. I hope Customs will let me take some back to the munchkins. They’re still in boxes, after all.

The evening was spent Australia Daying with Davyd Madeley, Bernard Blackham, Jacqueline and Harry McNally, James Henstridge, Cameron Patrick and a couple of randoms (not sandgropers) whose names didn’t quite stick (sorry, guys!). And now... the LCA2008 pitch.

Geeks everywhere

2006-01-26T00:07:00.000+13:00

These two pictures taken in The Link today give a few samples from the crowd of hundreds.

The unassuming bloke sitting at the back of the first one (in the white shirt) is the bane of billionaire tyrants, the founder and manager of software which is run by at least tens of millions of computers. He’s just one. I can identify at least 20 other “heroes of the revolution” in each photo — one small WMD here would set the computer industry back many years.

Google throws party

2006-01-26T00:01:00.000+13:00

Google sponsored an LCA-only happy hour at a bar called Bennu. They also handed out flashing Google badges, which I’m sure the kids will love:

The recruiting style is not very... techie. Most of the people there seemed to be enjoying themselves anyway.

Almost forgot...

2006-01-25T16:55:00.000+13:00

...somewhere in there I missed posting any pictures of the Oamaru statue of royalty:

All hail the great one! (-:

Busy day today

2006-01-25T16:20:00.000+13:00

The KDE “kiosk” tools are getting to be nothing short of amazing. Aaron demoed some impressive features, including a drag-n-drop tool which comes pretty close to writing your DCOP scripts for you (in shell, Python, whatever).

Samba4 is working out to be amazingly comprehensive. They are well on the way to beating Microsoft to a fully functional SMB2 implementation. Tridge was in fine form as always, able to explain potentially boring material with memory-friendly sparkle and wit.

I’m amazed that Keith Packard is able to keep so much of the X and renderer and window manager (and so on) interaction straight in his head. Look forward to even more amazing stuff being implemented in x.org in the next year or so, especially in the area of 3D (big surprise) and smooth, perfectly correct interaction.

I’m going to have to cycle and stuff despite the pain, ’coz the morning and afternoon tea nibblies are way too tasty.

I’m sitting in the LA AGM in my newly (re)acquired capacity as an OCM. Andrew Cowie is laying out the financials on Mark Tearle’s behalf. LA appears to have done well again, gaining $21k despite the massive increase in things like donations and support over the past year. More later. Much applause. We’ll have to send James Purser a podcast of the applause he earned.

Four hundred people in one place is a bewildering experience. The Link was pretty much packed out today. Photos of that later as well.

Just around the next corner...

2006-01-25T01:01:00.000+13:00

This post is going to be a bit of a photo burst rather than insightful and witty comment on technical matters since my brain’s well overdue for a bit of off-line maintenance, or what mere mortals call “sleep”.

After the miniconfs today (“fastest Debian machine” indeed! :-), I went for a trip up to see the Organ Pipes, a rock formation just north of town. I dropped into the information centre and was told that if I cycled up Norwood Street there was a picnic area at the end of it and “a good two-hour walk” to the Pipes.

It turned out that Norwood Street rapidly becomes nearly as vertical as their steepest one, and that Mr Advisor had never tried to cycle up it. I gave up even pushing the bike about 1/4 of the way up, parked it behind a fence and walked the rest of the way. (Well... walk 20m, pause there puffing like a loco, walk 20m...) No picnic area. A 3km walk along North Road (which I could have cycled up) to the carpark for the Pipes. The best part of a near-vertical kilometer up a treacherous and knobbly path through the bush to the Pipes. Climb the Pipes.

Nice view.

Down the pipes. Down the track. 3km back to Norwood Road. Endless jelly-legged torture back down to the bike. Hop on the bike. Gently, carefully down until there are no more blind corners, then let rip. Whoosh, like a rat up an acqueduct. I don’t need to pedal again until Mechanic Street, about 2.5km from the steep bit of Norwood Road.

This is the view of Dunedin from Norwood, demonstrating just how far up it came in so few meters.

On North Road, both down on the flat and up on the ridge, cars going past made a noise like driving through puddles. This was in fact the bitumen melting and sticking to their tyres. It stuck to my tyres, too. In some places, it evidently preferred the tyres to the roadbase.

These are some Red Hot Pokers on Norwood. These flowers are common here (in Perth, they’re a bit of a novelty).

The town of Portabello from North Road on the slopes of Mount Clarendon.

Early in the climb, I watched a cruise liner gingerly navigating out past Harington Point.

On the path up from the road to the Pipes, a little bird came and investigated me. He sat less than a metre away, occasionally flitting from branch to branch, not panicking, just checking me out. Here he was about 2.5m away. In the next shot I've cropped out just the bird at full rez.

The next shots are some of the flora alongside the path. It gets quite jungly.

They have a kind of paperbark here too.

The Pipes formation is slanted at a signficant angle, and over the years individual “pipes” have broken off and rolled down the slope. This is the first thing you encounter at the end of the path.

This is what the Pipes look like viewed from the rubble pile.

One of the pipes stands out like a sentinel, warily watching the visitor.

Looking down, one can see the rubble pile surrounded by bush.

The views from the Pipes are spectacular, greeen country leading to rugged hills or blue sea.

Here’s a typical Pipe with an Aussie 50c piece for scale.

Pipe exfoliation has evidently been going on for a very long time. Bits of Pipe abounded on and around the path, as far as I could see into the bush.

Some sections of the path were too soggy or needed a bridge; these were typically covered with chicken-wire-reinforced boards. Chicken-wire and bird-mesh seems to be a common way to add grip to wooden stairs and the like.

In some places, the path had worn away to expose a multitude of roots. This made the footing particulrly risky.

On the way back down North Road, I ran across a bike parked against the fence. This led me to a lass who had plonked herself down in a paddock to watch the sunset paint Port Chalmers and Taiaroa Head.

The next thing I found was a piece of country humour. The symbol is a red H in a circle, for a fire hydrant. The nearest piped water would be at least 2km away, and there’s no buildings within cooee to extinguish.

Some of the farm-houses near the route were very nice. Here’s one across the valley from Norwood.

Just to underscore the point, here is what Norwood Road does at a point about 150m above the spot I parked the bike at.

An RRV arrives. Maybe.

2006-01-23T17:22:00.000+13:00

DIMIA emailed me to say that my Resident Return Visa has been processed, but with no explanation of why since they were waiting for information from me which I still haven’t been able to find.

Carefully averting my eyes from the state of this particular horse’s teeth, I now wonder how I set about getting an RRV stamp on my visa.

Laughter, the best medicine

2006-01-23T16:38:00.000+13:00

It turned out that what I needed to unlock my tension and kill off (mostly) this morning’s headache was a bit of a laugh. This was duly provided by Jeff Waugh and Anthony “AJ” Towns taking good-natured potshots at each other (in the limelight) over differences between Debian and Ubuntu release practices (or not).

Some of the SysAdmin talks were fairly interesting (to me, anyway), and I picked up a smattering of other good stuff from surfing the internal video streams (round of applause for Ryan Verner, the rest of the team, and Flumotion).

Samba 4 is on the cusp of being officially released, so Tridge’s talk on the topic should be interesting.

Chips, or rather, “cheeups”, as in the flat, thin, roasted-to-death slices of potato that arrive in foil-sealed bags come in some fairly bizarre flavours here. “Green onion” isn’t too large a jump, but “Lamb and Mint Sauce” or “Caesar Salad” flavours are a bit bizarre for an Aussie (well, technically a Canuck).

Bleurgh?

2006-01-23T10:08:00.000+13:00

Late to bed, late to rise, makes one bleary and red of eyes.

A few more pitchas

2006-01-22T09:57:00.000+13:00

A bunch of us went walkabout yesterday, including a visit to Baldwin Street:

Just south of Dunedin there's a beach, followed by this little point covered in igneous rock (shot through with quartz) which looks uncannily like petrified wood:

We wandered up north a little, to a lookout with nice views across to the peninsula, including this shot of Mackenzie Bay:

The lookout featured bumblebees (about 1.5cm long) and foxgloves:

We stopped in at the botanical gardens, which starred a kea and some brightly plumaged parrots (most of them Aussie):

The trip finished up near a second castle (“only castle in Nez Zealand”, hah!) with good views of Dunedin:

Well... here we are... sitting in the official back room

2006-01-22T09:49:00.000+13:00

Being privy to deep, dark secrets like the appearance of the Conf tee-shorts, bags etc, and just how rickety the networking really is. (-:

The venues are at opposite ends of the main campus block, and sign-in isn’t open until 15:00, so Sandy from ITS has kindly provided stowage for my 20 ~~tonne~~kilo suitcase until then.

I've met kiwi organisers John, Daniel, Matt and Jamie so far. Ryan Verner is helping with the setup, and I’ve run into three other delegates so far. Things are happening, despite the best efforts of the organisers. (-:

Ow, ow... I need a holiday from the holiday...

2006-01-21T08:20:00.000+13:00

Sunburned, too. ’T’was cold and miserable when I set out yesterday, so of course I paid little attention to details like sun-block cream. Naturally, the sun came out in full force later. Today will be a very quiet day.

More cultural minutae: “No Through Road” is pronounced “No Exit”, and while there are a few “No Junk Mail” signs on mailboxes, most of them say “No Circulars” Painting one’s mailbox, particularly with some variant on the theme “roses”, seems to be a fetish amongst the peninsula people.

There are also many boathouses along the inside coast:

Some of these are decorated, too:

While we’re tossing up random photos, here’s one of the University’s clock tower:

...and another of some waves running round the ragged rocks (some of the wave surges crash and explode to maybe 20m high, even in this calm weather, it must get really interesting during a storm):

I found a local food item I’d not seen before: frozen crumbed mushrooms. They’re actually little mushroom patties made up to be the same size as a small field mushroom would be, and battered. Very tasty.

Owtago Peninsula - ow, ow, ow!

2006-01-20T20:26:00.000+13:00

Note to self: do not ride ≅50km then walk another ≅10km up steep hills. It hurts.

Stopped at Mackenzine Bay on the way out and had some boysenberry icecream. ’T’was beyond delicious, and a great temptation to emulate that British icecream commercial which got itself banned. The ride to the end of the Peninsula (Harington Point, yes, only one ‘R’) was dead easy, with no real hills excapt for that last one up to the albatross place.

I rode 10km back down the coast, took a left, went over a hill, took some pix of waterbirds, and the rest was near-vertical dirt roads until I have up and asked a German couple for a lift back to the next flat bit, which they insisted was Dunedin.

Since everything hurst, here’s another photo-blast:

The road cuttings were a real education. Most of them were basically rock and mud, which the trees were effortlessly peeling off. I imagine that many of the drivers were slow because the occasional fast one would find a dog-sized rock, with consequences which may well be imagined. However, there were several interesting variations.

Several cuttings had a kind of cellular structure.

One cutting had an alabaster-looking rock full of lumps.

One headland had weird, foldback-looking strata — note also the cone-shaped indentation just below left of centre.

The roads were very skinny, and apart from the first half kilometer generall had little or no edge. I remember once looking down past my left foot another two meters to wet stones. The city buses are actually wider than the lanes here, which makes for frequent games of chicken with the oncoming traffic.

This is the road up to Harington Point.

A little way up that slope, we come to this interesting solid concrete gate. Presumably to keep the headland gun batteries from being invaded too easily.

I kept seeing pairs of rails, some down to the water at an angle, some lying on the rocks, some twisted at an alarming angle. Just nearing Harington Point, the mystery was solved when I found a wooden implementation.

This is the view back towards Dunedin from HP.

In the throat of the bay was a sandbar — with a house on it. Must be interesting during king tides.

Assorted seabirds on the mudflat near Allans Beach.

This beautiful and apparently private beach was just south of The Chasm.

This was the pine-lined walkway to The Chasm. Very impressive.

This is one of the ancient drystone walls used before fences. Good idea, too: the sheep shelter behind them when they’re available — a bit hard to do with a wire fence.

The Chasm itself was very disappointing, but it had some cool rocky coastline nearby.

Dunoon has this really pretty little cemetary, surrounded by pines (noisy in the wind, one of the locals tells me) and with magnificent views north and south.

Photoburst

2006-01-20T10:42:00.000+13:00

In no particular order:

An unusually sensible bike rack at Oamaru.

The Kiwis seem inordinately fond of adorning every local “highest” point with a massive monument. This one was East of the highway on the way in to Dunedin.

This is the InterCity coach which took me from Oamaru to Dunedin.

The Land of the Long White Cloud was kind enough to provide me with one on arrival at Dunedin. I was standing here for wquite a while after my arrival — hungry and thirsty — and with numerous windows open on the Cadbury factory, wafting intense draughts of choclatey smells across my longusffering nose.

This is some genuine, unadulterated NZ bush. The locals seem to be unusually efficient at replacing it with pasture or pine trees.

Beverley-Begg is a dear little observatory perched on the crest of the hills west of the city. It was probably quite dark here around when the observatory was first built.

This is an unusualy plaue on hte wall of the observatory.

These are the hospitable Oamaruan tearooms I mentioned, the Lagonda Tearooms.

These are the little brown wren-looking birds, pandemic in Oamaru. There is a similar bird, but about twice the size, in Dunedin, and also a much darker bird of about the same size.

The clock tower (with chimes) in Dunedin (on The Octagon) at night.

Here’s one of the larger gulls alongside a “standard” model. The plumage on this one is a bit scrappier and lighter than the birds at Oamaru.

The bay area of Dunedin as seen from the hills west of town (up near the suburb of Roslyn).

The view down Filleul Street to On Top Backpackers (red arrow).

George Street sports this massive church tower (one of several landmarks) up near the restaurant-laden area. The eateries are literally across the street.

Some of the restaurants in George Street. The blue bike is parked outside one of the Chinese-plus-Fish-n-Chips places; also starring here are a Phillipino, Korean and Sushi restaurant. There are many others.

This is the Water of Leith rushing through the University of Otago.

This is one of the many stone buildings on the campus of the University of Otago. The distinctive grey local stone is kind of like sandsctone, but not quite. As it ages, it develops a harder surface.

More in a day or so after I recover from a lap around the Otago Peninsula on a deadly treadly.

New names for things

2006-01-19T20:31:00.000+13:00

Shopping trolleys are “trundlers” and speed-bumps are “judder bars”. If you want fish and chips, go to a Chinese restaurant (most of them also do f&c).

Dunedin doesn’t need vehicle inspections — if the vehicle isn’t mechanically sound, the terrain is pretty much guaranteed to kill it in short order anyway. I went “cycling” up City Road and spent all of the uphill journey walking, and at least 80% of the downhill journey. Perhaps on a real mtb with real brakes that I was prepared to burn recklessly, but not on my newest fleet acquisition, a “WorldRider QuickShifter” ten-speed (with white-wall tyres, no less, d’ya wanna cruise the miracle mile? It’s still a set of wheels to me :-)

There is a KMart (a whole shopping centre) a block away from the backpackers. There are also a whole sheaf of restaurants: Phillipino, Korean, Sushi, The Original Robbie Burns Bar (with jazz), one of the aforementioned Chinese+FishAndChips, a roof-level steakhouse, all manner of stuff gathered around the top end of Frederick Street. It’s quite close to the Uni, for convenient conference repasts.

The Uni is quite scenic, although parts of it are off-line for repairs. The poetically-named Water of Leith flows through it, and flow it does. None of this languid tricking, not for this waterway. I’ll post photos presently.

The weather has been very Melbourne today. Sunny one moment, soggy the next. Keep your wet-weather gear handy. One thing the conference needs is a tour of the Cadbury factory, which is where the first downpour ambushed me.

Oamaru to Dunedin: where'd the flat bits go?

2006-01-19T15:52:00.000+13:00

After Oamaru, New Zealand looks pretty much like Australia — minus all of the flat bits.

The big lumps in the ground that Australian farmers wouldn't even think about clearing have sheep clinging to the sides, and pine plantations on top. The roads are very windy, very steep, and generally very far above the valley floors. I was not entirely comfortable with whizzing along through this at a hundred clicks in a very tall coach, and yet somehow the kiwis found room for a railway as well.

I was impressed to see a\little hilltop paddock barely big enough to turn a tractor and plough around in (I seriously doubt that it covered a full acre), and the farmer had gone to the trouble of making about a 10m causeway across to it from the main farm to get the machinery there and back.

Diesel over here is about NZD$1 a litre as opposed to ULP at around NZD$1.40, a much closer representation of production costs than in Australia so a lot of family cars, and probably the majority of the vans and light trucks here are diesels.

I had a look at the Last Stop backpackers, a pleasant and well-behaved hosteliery built on an impressively steep bit of road called View Street, went out to confer with Mr Beattie, and by the time I got back the last five beds had been sold to three different callers, so I trotted around to the On Top backpackers in Filluel Street. This well-equipped and apparently brand new hostel is one short arcade away from The Octagon, the heart of Dunedin. Walk out of the front door, across the road and follow your nose down the hill for two short blocks to find Countdown, a local equivalent to Woolworths — except that they’re open 24x7. Excellent!