Chickens, Statues & Flowers

Port Chalmers

After a while, you learn not to take everything you hear as gospel, so when we were told that there was nothing much to see in Port Chalmers and we should take the shuttle into Dunedin, we considered this, but decided to explore the town first.

One nice thing about coming into small ports on an 85,000 ton ship is that you get a pretty good view of the town from the ship. Although the surrounding hills were taller than the ship’s 12 floors, there were no buildings in town to rival our height. As we docked, I could see some sort of a tall monument off to one side and an obvious look-off on a high hill behind the pier where we were docked. These two attractions were our focus as we explored the town.

The Garden

A walk up towards the monument took us past a lovely stone church and I met a friendly black & white cat who required some attention, and a gentleman from Ohio living now in New Zealand who was out walking a borrowed dog – an interesting start to our exploration. Part way up the well-marked “Track” (New Zealand for trail I believe), we found the “Lady Thorn Rhododendron Garden” in an old rock quarry; a sort of mini Butchart garden. All the plants were in full bloom and there were lovely benches and walkways through the plants.

Continuing on the track we found the monument to Capt. Scot, and a marvelous selection of poultry wandering wild around the little park surrounding the monument. Although there were no houses close by, these birds were in excellent

What are you doing here?

health and appeared to be well fed, so I suspect they were not completely “wild”.

Although this area of the world has a climate similar to our own back in Nova Scotia, just with their seasons mixed-up, the trees and plants are completely different. It is spring here now, and everything is lush and in bloom. I was very impressed with the variety and abundance of plants growing along the roads and tracks. I discovered the reason, as our walk ended back down at the harbour where I found another simple monument to a Magnus Sinclair, a local resident who promoted the beautification of the area with plantings of local flowers and plants. The local residents had obviously adopted his vision, as buildings, residences, and even industrial sites had lovely gardens and plantings decorating them. Even the container pier where we were docked had a beautiful walkway through local vegetation part way around between the fence and water. We walked in a garden, with stacks of containers on one side and the ocean on the other.

An Odd Statue

Although this walk gave us a good dose of our daily exercise we enjoyed it so much that we set off after lunch in the other direction, following the water around, and back to the look-off over the ship, discovering a delightful sculpture garden hidden away along the track.

None of these lovely local attractions or unique features of Port Chalmers were mentioned in the “Location Guide Talks”, where the town was presented as the “Gateway to Dunedin”, and we never did actually get to Dunedin. I wonder what is there?