Feb 10 - Taieri Gorge Railway

After lunch, we climbed aboard the Taieri Gorge Railway. This is a fascinating journey into some of New Zealand’s most iconic scenery and history, where we marvelled at the engineering feats of New Zealand’s early pioneers, set among the stunning landscape of the gorge.

Negotiating the winding gorge, we traveled through ten tunnels and across numerous bridges including the famous Wingatui Viaduct – the second largest wrought iron structure in operation in the world. It is still as strong today as it was when it was build over 100 years ago.

Linda picked us up in Pukerangi and drove us to our hotel which is in the old post office of Dunedin. The train does do a return trip, but it would have put us in Dunedin very late. Since we are in the Scottish part of New Zealand, Linda played bagpipe music for us to pass the time. We saw rabbits (pests) hopping though the fields and harrier hawks gliding majestically through the air. We passed huge sheep farms, known as sheep stations. From a high of about 70 million, the sheep industry has dropped to about 35 million. I think we saw 30 of those 35 million sheep today on the return trip.

We had another group dinner in the hotel - each dinner with this group is another round of laughter and funny, sometimes amazing, stories.

BIG NEWS - the band Queen and Adam Lambert are staying at this hotel. They have a big concert tonight. They probably saw that we are staying here and figured it would be good enough for them.Read more