Tuesday 16 February

Alexandra, Central Otago
No rain today. Leaving Balclutha we decided to take a minor road we had seen on the map, following the Clutha river. We drove through rural countryside,so many sheep, so rural. At one point we climbed up and looked down on the broad expanse of the river valley and its plains. Across on the other back the hills folded into pleats of green and brown. At Clydevale we crossed over to the other side of the river. We stopped the car and walked a short way to the river bank, watching the water swirling past. When we reached Beaumont we decided to risk a dirt track called the Beaumont Millennium Road. We drove through farmland, hugging the river bank on a gravel track, one car wide and rather boggy in places, after the rain. The track runs along the course of an old railway line so was very flat and level. We stopped by an old railway bridge and saw a small Hydro-Electric Generation Station. It was really no bigger than a good sized hut and appeared to be a private installation. A pipe high up on the hillside brought water down to it and the overflow went out into the river.
Later we stopped again by two graves, in the middle of nowhere, side by side. We read the plaque which said it was The Lonely Graves site. It gave the story, part true, part urban myth. One day in the late 1800s a man out tending his sheep found a body by the river, washed up by the tide. It was that of a young man and could not be identified, so he buried it by the river close to where he found it and pt up a simple wooden headstone, which is still there saying here lies somebody's darling. When he died himself he was buried next to it and the gravestone reads, 'here lies the man who buried somebody's darling'.
We continued to follow the road to the Roxburgh Hydro-Electric Dam, an enormous construction right a cross the river, and we drove over it. We joined the mail road for the last stretch of the journey into Alexandra.
The camp site is very large, but not very occupied. We have a pitch in a large area with only one other caravan in view. The sun was shining and it was quite warm. After settling in we walked into the town of Alexandra to babe a look round and do some shopping. We walled along a riverside track and almost all the trees were either cherry or a small plum. This area is renowned for peaches, nectarines and cherries, but obviously also small plums. We had noticed at the campsite that the dividing hedges between the emplacements were nearly all small plum trees, very delicious. Alexandra is a very nice place, clean and modern with wide streets and some substantial houses. It seems very prosperous, presumably as a result of the soft fruit growing for which it is famous, although it started life as one of the gold-rush settlements. So back to the campsite and a lazy afternoon in the warm sunshine.
We have decided that tomorrow we will go back to Dunedin, what ever the weather. We probably won't go back to Catlins, it's a bit too far and would limit the amount of time we can spend continuing up the island. So we will hope for nice weather, but are prepared for the worst!
I've changed my mind about the corrugated tin roofs. We had one on the studio we were in at Te Anau and it rained quite hard there on our last night and there was no noise at all. I was basing my opinion on my 'shack' in Orkesumet when I was in Tanzania, but it was a bit silly. There is no comparison between that, with just flimsy polystyrene ceiling boards, and the houses here.