In this post, I'll be showing you the two main walks I took on Day 6 (Monday) & Day 7 (Tuesday). On Tuesday I also went back to the Botanical Gardens, but I'll put that in another post.
So, part of what I wanted to do on my holiday was to go walking. If you know me, you may think "wow, what was she thinking?" because I ain't that outdoorsy :D However, I *did* enjoy hiking/walking in Canada, and thought it would be rather similar here. And it has been. Summer here is much cooler than in Melbourne, and the woods/forest is delightful moist & cool, still in summer. So I did some planning and some looking, and then discovered, as I laughed with the woman at the information session, that most of the walks are outside Dunedin, and inaccessible unless you have a car to drive there! You can't even get a bus there, and there are a lot of buses in Dunedin! It's a university town, and I can get a bus from town out onto the peninsula, and all around town. But sadly, not to most of the walks I found. So, we had a look at the map and I picked out some of the parks-with-woods around town that was accessable.
On Monday, I went to "Frasers Gully", or as I'm an Outlander fan (books by Diana Gabaldon) and ended up quite high on the edge of a hill, I'll call it "Frasers Ridge"!
This is the top of the gully.
It was a LOVELY walk up. It started by going past a set of local grounds (a baseball diamond! a big oval and a rugby ground), and then eventually started into the woods.
Pretty good climb, huh :)
On Tuesday I went through the Botanical Gardens again and then went to the Woodhaugh Gardens, which is in part of the Green Belt that goes around inner Dunedin, and up to the Ross Creek Reservoir.
I really wanted to walk the Leight Trail from the gardens up to the start of the Pineapple Track, which is one of the tracks I found around Dunedin. But it just wasn't to be!!
Hmmm. Had to walk around to find the way back up to the Reservoir another way. On that way, I took a wrong turn and went up a hill I had already come down earlier in the day, but on the way back down solved the age old mystery of "Why Does The Chicken Cross The Road"...
Yes, that really is a chicken, and yes it did cross the path in front of me. Healthy looking chook, huh.
Anyway, back to the walk!
OK then I kept going up a little more and came across this:
Yep, a glade of small figurines. Bit weird in the middle of a walk, but I figure it's there for a reason?
Then I found THIS in the middle of a bit of bush, which turned out to the a MTB area.
Not quite as high as I'd made it the day before, and I had to call it a day before going up the Pineapple track a bit due to some knee pain (all it needed was strapping), but here's a view :)
And a bit further down.
Tomorrow, I'm going out onto the peninsula, the bottom of which you can see in the above photo. What's out there? LANARCH CASTLE.
This looks so lush and cool and lovely!
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