Rockclimbing? Surely not...

But yes, it's true - we went rockclimbing on the weekend and Kieran actually put a pair of rock shoes on for the first time in nearly a decade. What's worse, he even kinda enjoyed it.

As part of the NZ Alpine Club's Basic Mountaineering course that we're doing, we spent Saturday out at Long Beach, about 35 minutes north east of Dunedin. It's an amazingly nice place - reminiscent of Broulee or other small towns on the NSW South Coast. It faces northeast, so it's really sunny, the beach is long, wide and golden, the water laps gentle and blue-green against the shore, there's a sleepy little town behind the beach and there's a line of enormous dolerite cliffs. Kieran forgot to take the camera out, so you'll have to content yourselves with the best online shots we could find. If it ever gets warm in this place again, we're going to have to head out there for a day lounging on the beach.


Long Beach

The crag we went climbing on is called either "The Pinnacle" or "Sunnyside" - imaginative, eh?Either way, it's nice and cruisy - we did a few top ropes, looked at some mountaineering abseil systems, abseiled off the top of it for practice, spent some time hiding and finding avalanche tranceivers, watched some seals play in the water and threw a frisbee around for a bit. Good day all up


Sunnyside Crag - Long Beach

As a special bonus, here's a description of Dunedin's various suburbs and their own special characteristics - For those who don't know, we live in Macandrew Bay, which apparently has the biggest icecream scoops in town...