Cadbury Chocolate Carnival

Beautiful day for a chocolate festival, eh? I think it got as warm as 45 degrees today, and it may not have even gotten to freezing last night. I could get used to this. Anyway, the shot above is from about halfway up Baldwin Street, which, I'll mention again, is the steepest street in the world. At its steepest, for every 2.86 feet you walk horizontally, you'll go up by a foot. That's a 19° slope (35% grade). Here's one way to get an idea for it:

That's more or less the steepness of the street. It feels way steeper than it looks in these pictures, though. There was a pretty big crowd there, too. And who wouldn't want to be out on a day like this to see 20,000 Jaffa candies bounce and roll down the street? Down at the bottom of the street there, they had some vendors, but strangely no Cadbury vendors. Now if you were to have a chocolate festival, and particularly an event which promotes a particular candy, wouldn't you want to capitalize on the cravings that all the spectators are getting from watching the festivities? Sad times for me.

Anyway, you could donate $2 to charity in order to have your own Jaffa ball in the 'race.' Each ball had a little numbered piece of paper attached, and I guess that whoever owned the ball that made it to the bottom first would win some sort of prize. Having a ball make it to the bottom, however, is not as easy a task as one would assume. This isn't exactly the smoothest of streets (how often would you want to resurface something as steep as this?), so there are plenty of treacherous cracks and bumps that made the Jaffas bounce into the fence (and spectators). There were a lot of dead soldiers, too. And little kids ate them. Gross (apparently dead soldiers taste like chocolaty orange). If you want to see a crappy video I shot of the whole spectacle, go here. Don't worry, it's only sideways at the beginning.

The festival isn't only the Jaffa race; it actually goes for a whole week. Unfortunately a lot of it is paid stuff, but it's all kinda cool. On Saturday the festival kicked off with a free street concert thing at the Octagon with a chocolate fountain (Death by Chocolate, anyone?) and music and best of all, heat. It was pretty great, and below you can see St. Paul's Cathedral on the left and the Dunedin Municipal Chambers on the right. Until next time...