From Milford Sound we headed south, to the southermost point of local highway system (which in fact means normal road, maybe 3 class in Czech Republic). Went through Tuatapere, the sausage capital of New Zealand, but didn’t stop, as local sausages didn’t catch our attention yet. We probably did a wrong choice everytime, because it was almost impossible to eat.
There is a lot of sheep everywhere, all of them behind fences so we cannot take the picture how we are surrounded by them. Shame.
Waipapa Point was our first real stop, where we had a lunch and after that went to see two seal (or fur seal or sea lion – not able to recognize them and these didn’t have any sign next to them) laying on the beach and sleeping. We got pretty close to them, maybe up to 2 meters and they didn’t care. And they are really huge.
Slope Point is the southermost point of South Island of New Zealand. On our way there we (I) a bit pushed the car in front of us, I somehow prefer to go rather quickly on gravel roads. When we parked they apologized for being too slow and then we found that they are Czech as well. Two girls which went here for holiday, Zdenka works in Great Britain while Marketa works in Saudi Arabia. They know each other from school, made a few Skype phones and went for a month long holiday. Cool.
It was pretty windy there and the wind was really cold – of course, it was from Antarctica.
Further we went, to Curio Bay
where is some petrified forrest. It is really there and it is nice, but small penguins got our attention. There live the yellow-eyed penguins, one of the rarest in the World. They are really cute and we spent there maybe more than hour watching them getting out of the water and drying out before going to burrow.
Just around the corner is a campground, where we parked for the night and didn’t believe our eyes when we saw sea lion in the middle of camp spooking people. It was quite strange, he was about 300m from the ocean and had to go up on small pathway to pretty steep hill. And he was really quick when he start over you.
Had a BBQ for a dinner and plan pancakes for breakfast – that sounds good, doesn’t it?
In the morning Tomas got up early and started pancake preparation. Zdenka and Marketa didn’t believe their eyes when they woke up in their car and saw the pancakes. They were really good, doesn’t matter we made them from wholegrain flour.
Just next to the camp is Porpoise Bay where should be Hector’s dolphins, which are really curious and like to swim around people. From the bank it looked like there is just a few of them and we went surfing on the kayaks. And when we got on the ocean we found them (or probably they found us) – there were heaps of them swimming all around really closely.
The surfing was really good, waves hold pretty good and as I lend my kayak to Marketa I was just looking and filming. It was probably her first time on kayak but she did well, even managed to show some tricks, which Tomas trained for a long time, and finally ended with swimming.
We hit the road pretty late, around 4pm and went to McLean Falls, which were really nice and we did some promotional photos for Axon there, continued to Cathedral Caves (another one than before) but they were closed, because are accessible only in low tide and finally went to Purakanui Falls, which weren’t bad as well.
Had a dinner and went to Dunedin to find some place to sleep. On our way I saw wonderful sign, actually two of them. The first one was simple – „Slow down“, while the second one was longer – „No doctor, No hospital, one cemetery“. It makes you slow down 🙂 And I also recall one other sign – „Possums – the New Zealand’s small road bumps“.