Thursday 2nd October – Dunedin to Hanmer Springs
On the Thursday we got up and headed towards Hanmer, one of the sites in New Zealand with natural goethermic springs. I was feeling slightly miserable as I was still thinking about the incident in Wanaka, the subsequent phone call and I also discovered a weird lump in my mouth. I’m pretty sure that this was stress related but it made me feel even more glum.
En route to Hanmer we stopped at "the best bloody gift shop for miles" and to be fair it was pretty amazing. It was a serious grotto with wares hanging from the ceilings, on the floor and adorning the walls. There was also an awesome cafe on site where we had the most amazing lunch. We carried on and stopped at the "boulder rocks" which were spherical rocks by the sea. They were very strange actually, almost perfect spheres just sat on the sand.
As we carried on our way we stopped at "Warehouse" to buy cheap C.D.s. As Lance pulled out of a turning I asked if the Police car behind was for us and it turned out it was. Rather nicely he then received a $150 fine for not stopping at a stop light. He was going crazily slowly but technically didn’t actually stop. Personally I think he may have been let off his fine if he hadn’t have given the explanation of, "I wasn’t paying attention"!
When we arrived in Hanmer we checked into a rather nice motel, well as I said I was feeling sorry for myself, and then headed out into town. The town was quite small and there only appeared to be one bar open. We chatted to a couple of locals who turned out to be, well weird to be honest, who seemed to like doing very bad English accents to me as well as citing every English stereotype they knew.