Tuesday - Otago Museum

Tuesday was a sofa day for Mike after the excitement of the Auckland weekend, so Fi went and checked out the three floors of the Otago Museum. It was school holidays and there were loads of kids there, a positive sign. Fi was in there for two and a half hours and didn't see more than 60% of it and she didn't see the live butterfly house. It's a wonderful museum with fabulous displays and a must-see if you visit Dunedin.

A special highlight was the small collection of items formerly belonging to Sir Edmund Hillary, including his 1953 passport, the tin mug he used on the Everest climb, an ice axe and some photographs. Other more general but equally impressive highlights were the Tangata Whenua gallery, which is full of beautifully carved local Maori artefacts (especially the war canoe, the waka), the Maritime Gallery with its collection of some 30 brass ship bells which were being rung in a klangfest concerto by the kids and the Southern Land, Southern People gallery which includes a display of Otago fossils, rocks and a geology map (unfortunately the colours in the map legend don't quite match the colours in the map):

Geological map of the Southland and Otago, copyright Otago Museum

Dunedin is located in the collapsed crater of an old basalt shield volcano some 20 million years old (so young!) which was centred in the Port Chalmers area - the basalts are the dark red brown rocks on the map.

All the terrain we travelled through last week in Middlemarch, St Bathans and Alexandra is Otago Schist (200 million years old), the dull grey colour on the map.

But the oldest rocks in South Island are in Fiordland (the Milford and Doubtful Sound areas, the pink area on the left of the map) and these gneisses are the leading western edge of the New Zealand plate which is trying to ramp itself up and over the eastern edge of the Australian plate along a major crustal break called the Alpine Fault. This ramping is facilitated by "greasy" greenstone rocks, a variety of which is the jade that the Maori carved as ceremonial and general jewellery. One day on a future visit to NZ we will go to the Olivine Range in the Mount Aspiring National Park to see these greenstones, this green toothpaste from deep in the earths crust.

When Fi got home, we drew up a list of "places to visit" in recognition of there only being ten days left of our Dunedin stay. After a bangers and mash tea and the compulsive completion of the daily Code Cracker in the Otago Daily Times, it was time for an early night as Wednesday would be Orokonui day.