Thursday - Oamaru Architecture

We were up quite late on Thursday after a long sleep, having had a great time the previous evening. We breakfasted with Sally, sat around solving the worlds problems and then set off to see more of Oamaru.

Firstly we visited the workshop of John, who is a modeller who sometimes works for the renowned Weta workshop in Wellington. He is one of the creative geniuses behind some of the amazing Steampunk exhibits of Oamaru. We're looking forward to the unveiling of his next creation in a couple of weeks or so, but you'll need to keep an eye on the Oamaru Steampunk pages to find out what it is!

Then we went for a bit of a walk around the Victorian precinct, while Fi's camera got some exercise:

Tyne and Harbour St streetscapes, Criterion Hotel front door dead centre

There is an amazing collection of businesses in the precinct including bookstores, a Victorian milliner, a working woolstore, a metalworking workshop with original Victorian casting patterns, a bookbinder, a stonemason, a bookshop, a Victorian clothing shop and several cafes and art galleries. The Heritage Society has encouraged volunteers to dress in the period style and we saw many people in Victorian dress wandering the area during our ramble as well as a young chap riding a penny farthing. Three tour buses were parked in the general area during the morning and this augurs well for the wider broadcast of knowledge of Oamaru's treasures. The Japanese tourists were particularly enamoured of Steampunk HQ.

Here is a limited collection of photos from the Harbour and Tyne Street areas. The Oamaru Whitestone Civic Trust is responsible for the preservation of a lot of these buildings and it works with the Victorian Heritage Celebrations Committee to present an annual Victorian Heritage Celebrations festival, which will be held this year in Oamaru from 16 - 20 November 2011. The sixteen programme is available now from the contacts page of this site.

East side of Tyne Street, looking north

Michael O'Brien - bookbinder

Connell & Clowes building

Penny farthing

Union Bank

Slightly Foxed bookshop

View south along Harbour St towards The Loan & Merc

The Etherneum on Tees Street

After wandering back to Steampunk HQ and arousing the railway engine from the apocalypse with our two dollar coins, we met up with Phil and Sally for lunch at Annie's Victorian Tea Rooms, a delightful establishment that serves tea, coffee, sandwiches (without crusts of course), scones and (the piece de resistance) cake from the elaborate cake trolley. All of these are served by exquisitely mannered waiters and waitresses in period costume.

Annie Baxter and the scrumptious cake trolley

Mike, Phil, Sally and Fi partake of tea

We said farewell to Phil who was going back to work and we followed Sally to the Oamaru Public Gardens. We wandered through beautiful plantings of poppies, pansies, tulips, etc all in bloom. We also got to see some lovely old elm trees and a blue cedar - increasingly rare sights. The gardens include a Peter Pan garden where we finally said our goodbyes to Sally.

Entrance to the public gardens

Peter Pan and Wendy

Poppies

We headed to Steam (the cafe) after leaving the Public Gardens and had one last coffee there before climbing into Enzo and heading back down the road to Dunedin. We took the scenic route via Kakanui and followed a few of the Vanished World markers (set up for geologically interesting sites and another aspect of Oamaru that we could not investigate because of insufficient time). We rejoined the main highway at Hampden and arrived back in Dunedin about five o'clock. We raced through three days of catch up blog and went to bed.

So a huge thanks to Sally and Phil for their generosity, hospitality, boundless energy and bonhomie. Given that before this trip, we had met in a cafe for about an hour, they welcomed us into their home and tirelessly showed us some of the best of their community and culture. We look forward to returning the favour one day and hope to see them soon in Fremantle.

We are blogging about Thursday but today is Friday and it is our last day in Dunedin for tomorrow we drive up to Christchurch and then fly to Auckland in the afternoon. We will spend Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Auckland and then fly back to Christchurch on Tuesday before flying out to Sydney and Perth later that day. So there will be a gap in the blog for a few days and we will write up our Auckland experiences on our return home in the middle of next week. If you've been a regular follower of our blog, we thank you for sharing our journey with us and we hope you have found something of interest and some moments of humour here. We love New Zealand very much and Dunedin in particular and we hope a little of that shows through in our writing.

It is bronze play-off time tonight with Australia v Wales at 8:30 and we will be at Pirates with our yellow scarves and our national anthem, ready to sing and sink some final pints of the Buccaneers and say farewell to our friends at the club. Thanks a million Dunedin and Pirates Rugby Club alike, we were here for nearly seven weeks and we loved every single minute of it. More next week about the Rugby World Cup final!