Boring old Dunedin...

After several long posts, this one is finally short and sweet, but only because nothing much happened this day. I think it's safe to say I didn't get much sleep after all the partying - I had to wake up at 7 am to catch the bus. A 5 - 10 minute walk with a heavy bag on your back first thing in the morning with 3 hours of sleep before having any breakfast is as uncomfortable as it sounds haha. Next stop, the small town of Dunedin. And I got Richie as a driver again (I found out they get a one day rest at Queenstown)! I was so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open during the morning cafe stop (where I got a toasted sandwich instead of coffee hahaha). Usually, I'd stay awake on the bus to take in the passing scenery, as the nature is the real attraction of NZ (and unfortunately when you're on a bus, you only get to see it through a window at 40 - 80 km/h), but the ride was so boring scenic wise that I decided to close my eyes and try to catch up on some sleep (though that didn't really work out and I was surprisingly awake for the ride).

My one photo for the day, which I took during the most interesting part of the drive.

I was expecting a small town (and I was used to that by now), but for some reason, I was still really disappointed with the size of the town (probably because I was expecting a bit more since it has pretty much become a college town thanks to the University of Otago). Plus, the grey skies and cold windy weather didn't help; it certainly did not feel like summer (I had heard somewhere from a local it was the coldest summer in NZ they had experienced in a long time). And yet, I was the only one walking around outside (of the few who were actually walking around town) in a t-shirt (my thin dri-fit ones), obviously with the locals looking at me like I was some strange entity hahaha. There really wasn't much of anything to look at in town, and no one participated in the Magic Bus affiliated tour of the Cadbury chocolate factory in town (there was a Speight's brewery tour tour too which no one was in the mood of taking) - really just a boring stop over. The only stop I made was to the supermarket to grab some salad and tuna for another quick easy dinner (I was in no mood to cook). The hostel I stayed at, On Top Backpackers (recommended by the Magic Bus), was one of the worst hostels I stayed at in NZ: we had to pay at the hostel's bar because they had no front desk, they weren't finished cleaning the rooms when we got there (it was well into the afternoon, and you'd expect they'd know when to be finished since the bus gets there almost every day at the same time), and the beds in my room were filthy (2 beds weren't made up at all and had dirt all over it, and the 4 other beds looked they already had people sleeping in them even though I was told there were only 2 other people in my room at the time. The bathrooms were decent, though most of the showers were broken in one way or another. So, given the boring atmosphere, and the fact I needed to catch up on sleep, I went to bed really early at 7 pm! 12 hours of sleep was bliss hahaha; actually not bad for a lazy Sunday.