Where time becomes a loop

I feel as though I have been in stasis for the past 72 hours. Time has been suspended, inverted, stretched and compressed, with mere snapshots remaining of a ludicrously protracted journey. It all began before daybreak on Monday morning, on the Piccadilly Line in London, onto which I shuffled at six o'clock in the morning, bound for Heathrow Airport. It continued through 13 hours of in-flight poker and serial ipod abuse en route to Singapore, a jewel of a city-state that I have now visited three times, but never for longer than an hour and a half.

Next stop, Auckland. The City of Sails by day; the city of room service and snatched winks of sleep by night. Seven hours in an airport motel were enlivened by a non-functioning room key that refused to let me into my room in the first instance, then refused to allow me to leave thereafter. Then it was down to Dunedin, so far south on the South Island of New Zealand that the next stop would appear to be Antarctica. And then, as I touched down, I realised. The further you travel, the more things stay the same.

It was raining when I landed, but not the sort of rain I've previously associated with the Southern Hemisphere. This was a dank, drizzly type of rain - the type that turns hillsides a lush green and leaves sheep feeling waterlogged and morose. In other words, it was rain that might have been imported direct from the United Kingdom.

The scenery might have been imported as well. Were it not for the suspiciously Antipodean touches en route from the airport to town, I might have believed I was driving through the Peak District or the lowlands of Scotland. Rolling hills and golf courses on either side of the road, with each new landmark being pointed out by Tony, my comically lugubrious taxi driver. It was the bright yellow gumboot on the hard shoulder that did it for me. Apparently, my guide informed me, it had been lying there unclaimed for all of two days.

The pace of life out here, I surmised from that comment, is pretty relaxed. "We're going to hit rush hour head-on," added Tony. "It shouldn't worry you too much." Sure enough, we chugged through town with scarcely a break for a traffic light, past the sprawling Carisbrook Stadium where the Otago Highlanders are due to take on the Waratahs on Saturday night, and on into the centre of town. Dunedin is the fifth-largest city in the country, and second only to Christchurch on the South Island. But with a population of 120,000, it is barely a quarter of the size of Edinburgh, the city from which it derived its name.

Dunedin's Scottish influence is abundantly clear, and not just from the weather and scenery. Propped up in the window of the first bookshop I passed was a copy of the 2008 Broons annual, a comic-book I rarely imagined I'd find so far south of the border. Or have I journeyed so far south I've ended up in the world's northern-most reaches? Right now, it's a little hard to tell.