Dunedin is New Zealand’s most Scottish city with its own Tartan and everything. And true enough … in the evenings we heard bagpipes playing in the distance from our youth hostel window.

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We spent the most relaxing three days in our room at “Hagrid’s Hut” – the old coach house of Hogwartz Youth Hostel – which was easily the cutest hostel accommodation we had in all our time in New Zealand! Nice room, fantastic bathroom and comfy kitchen plus our very own ‘closet under the stairs’ 🙂 And on top of everything else we shared the cottage with Nicole and Philip – a lovely couple from Switzerland who are on a world trip as well. Plenty of time to share travel stories over some beer or wine in the evening and catch up on the Lord of the Rings trilogy (a word of advise if you’re used to watching the special extended edition: it’s really annoying to watch the ‘normal’ length movies again. There are sooo many scenes missing that it’s not funny any more). On Saturday the four of us explored the farmer’s market together before having a nice coffee at the old Victorian train station.

Hogwartz youth hostel

Hagrid’s hut

brekki

our cupboard under the stairs

here kitty kitty

Nicole and Philip aka flipteaz

coffee time (and me playing with Philip’s GoPro)

Otago Settler’s museum with interesting, weird and funny items from early Scottish settlers until more recent household items (like vintage fridges or 3’5 inch floppy disks):

🙂

St Clair Beach near St Kilda (and just like in Melbourne they even had a Dalgety Street):

looking for the perfect angle

… found it!

Don’t these poles look like faces?

One afternoon we ventured out to Otago Peninsula trying to catch a glimpse of Larnach Castle, New Zealand’s only castle. Unfortunately you cannot see thee castle from any vantage point in the vicinity and we didn’t want to spend $56 entrance fee either – so no castle for us that day. When we continued our round trip of the peninsula we suddenly realised that we forgot to fill up our car and were running seriously low on gas with no petrol station anywhere on the peninsula 😦 our bloody GPS suggested the nearest gas station right on the other side of the harbour, too bad our car can’t swim! So we quickly turned around and drove veeeery slowly back to Dunedin barely reaching the closest gas station.

Dunedin harbour

cute mail boxes

Getting up on our last day in Dunedin we found a lovely farewell note from Nicole and Philip at the breakfast table and they peeked out of their room for a very warm goodbye. All the best to you on your travels!! We’re enjoy reading your blog very much!!