Dùn Èideann, a Cursed Castle, and Royal Gooney Birds

The last of New Zealand's four major urban centers was visited was Dunedin.The name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland (Wikipedia). It lies about a 2 1/2 hour drive south of Timaru, down Highway 1. It is most notable for four things:
1) Higher Education (University of Otago, New Zealand's first university (1869), and the Otago Polytechnic are here and the larger of two NZ Medical schools);
2) The Cadbury Chocolate factory;
3) The Speight's Brewery; and,
4) It is the Gateway to the Otago Peninsula, a beautiful 15 mile-long finger into the Pacific with lovely views and abundant wildlife.

As you might guess from its name, Dunedin is at heart a Scottish town. It even features some Scottish restaurants (although I don't think many go to Edinburgh for the cuisine). The most famous and photographed building is Railway Station, a 1906 monument to "Flemish Renaissance" architecture.

It is quite special inside and out, and the stone masonry, tile work, floors, and windows are all marvelously well-cared for. On weekends, there is a large and bustling organic Farmer's Market in the parking lot.

Being a lover of museums since childhood (having been left behind on numerous family trips reading every last label on the displays), our next stop was the Otago Museum, next to the University. Especially impressive was the fin whale skeleton below.

Since we were only down for a quick weekend, after Saturday we hardly had time to make a list for what we will do and see on our next visit: the brewery tour, a train excursion, the Otago Festival of the Arts in October featuring a recital by famed Kiwi Soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and an encore performance of the play "Heat" with the previously described full-frontal penguin nudity.
Sunday, it was time for a quick trip down the peninsula before returning home. The high road runs along its spine and on the highest point is an oddity: Larnach Castle, "New Zealand's only castle".

I won't bore you with a semantic debate over whether it really is a true castle, but it is a Very Impressive edifice with an appropriately tragic operatic tale to tell. Briefly, Mr. William Larnach was a wealthy Australian banker/entrepreneur/politician not so fortunate in his private life. He spared no expense and brought craftsmen from all over the world to build what he called "The Camp" to impress his wife Eliza, reputedly descended from French royalty. The workmanship was magnificent, but she was not impressed, and the children hated it too. Eliza died suddenly of "apoplexy", so he married her sister, who by all accounts was a stone-cold b****. She died suddenly five years later of "blood poisoning". Not deterred, he took a third, beautiful trophy wife Constance, 21 years his junior. In 1898, at the age of 65, beset by financial reversals and impending bank failure and haunted by rumors of an affair between his young wife and his favorite son, he committed suicide in Parliament.

View from the tower

The surrounding gardens are quite rightly famous.

For a daughter's  21st birthday he built her this ballroom. She died five years later of typhoid.

It should come as no surprise that it is said several ghosts walk the halls at night.

From the castle, off to the tip of the Otago Peninsula to visit the Royal Albatross Center. These amazing seabirds can have up to a nine-foot wingspan, and this is a rare place where you can see their nests from a bunker. The chicks hatch in January, and then stray no more than a few feet from their nests, fed by their parents, for the next nine months. They start to fly in September. Once they get the hang of it, they take off eastward for two to three years, allegedly not alighting on land until returning to their birthplace to nest. Hard to imagine. I am sorry my photo equipment could not get better long-range shots of these two fuzzy chicks

or this adult albatross.

Around the path from the parking lot there was another idyllic lighthouse/Pacific ocean scene.

"I'll take New Zealand for $800, Alex"

Let's say you are preparing for Jeopardy! and the category is New Zealand, one of the five "questions" you should expect would be:" Who are the All Blacks? ", in reference to their adored national rugby team.

As the tango is to Argentina, so is rugby to New Zealand. It is hard to fathom how deeply many (but not all) Kiwis feel about their team. I was not going to live in NZ and not go an All Blacks game. It took some time getting up to speed with the game of rugby, previously a deficiency in my sporting oeuvre, as my friend Curtis would say. I should have been more knowledgeable, since the Berkeley Golden Bears are a perennial NCAA powerhouse. Once you get into it, you can see that rugby and American football come from a common ancestor. It is strangely familiar: kicks, field goals, scrimmage, conversions, tackling, tries (the TD equivalent:in rugby since you only get points crossing the goal line when you "touch down" the ball to the ground). Yet it is oddly different too (scrums, rucks, mauls, line outs).
The All Black team (named for the all black uniforms) has been at or near the top of the rugby world since the turn of the 20th Century. It has long been common ground for the Maori and Europeans: the first rugby international superstar was the Maori man George Nepia.
NZ will be hosting the World Cup of rugby Sept-Oct 2011, and the preparations are evident everywhere. There are large billboards and countdown clocks and daily news reports of stadium upgrade delays and controversies over tearing down old sheds on the Auckland waterfront to create a huge tent for "party central" to entertain visitors. On the field preparations include selecting the elite All Blacks 2010-11 squad, and tuning up with traditional matches ("tests") against major competition, such as the South African Springboks

A springbok

and the Aussie Wallabies in the Tri-Nations Cup Series, pitting the three Southern Hemisphere powers against one another in a "round robin"  tournament. We might consider these "exhibition" games, but they are bigger than that.
We were fortunate enough to get tickets to see the AB's vs. the Springboks in Wellington, July 17. This was the match-up featured in the Clint Eastwood/Morgan Freeman/Matt Damon film "Invictus", telling the tale of how Nelson Mandela helped to unite a nation through rugby. The Kiwis have a different take on the 1995 World Cup, remembering it as a dark day, when the superior AB team was undone by the South African home team, possibly aided by some "home cooking" in the form of food poisoning (not that anyone is making excuses).
Westpac Stadium (named for a bank) in the capitol was the venue, a clean and tidy place seating 45,000,  

protected by the local deities.

A highlight of the All Blacks games is the Haka, a traditional type of Maori chant of greeting (not necessarily "welcome"). It is meant to test the mettle of visitors, to frighten and intimidate the opponents, and to see if guests are worthy of entering the grounds. They take it quite seriously, and there is always lot of grimacing, grunting, and fearsome facial expressions with tongues protruding and eyes bulging.

One of our Maori tour guides in Waitangi pointed out that cannibalism was part of their history, and suggested that the oral gestures warned visitors might end up as the main course.

Perhaps it all worked because it was all All Blacks from the opening kickoff

and they prevailed 31-17.

We were lucky enough to see the ABs again August 7 in Christchurch play the Aussie Wallabies

and again prevail 20-10 and essentially wrap-up the Tri-Nations Trophy (Yay)!