With little more than a week left before we had to be at the (already postponed) ferry in Picton, we realised that we had to get some miles on the road in the next few days. From Manapouri we enjoyed the beautiful scenery of Southland on the way to Te Waewae Bay on the south coast.
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From Te Waewae we drove straight through Invercargill, which had been described as rather boring by nearly everybody we met, and also ignored Bluff, which is not really the southern most point of mainland New Zealand after all. Instead we left the main highway right after Invercargill and turned east into the rugged and magnificent coastline of the Catlins on the south east corner of New Zealand.
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After visiting some lazy seals at Waipapa Lighthouse we stopped at Slope Point – the southern most point of mainland New Zealand … and quite boring 🙂
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That night we chose a campground on the tiny peninsula right between Curio Bay and Porpoise Bay, that offered great sunset views and was walking distance to a yellow-eyed penguin colony living in Curio Bay. The next morning we were hoping to spot a resident Hector dolphin pod in Porpoise Bay which was just a short walk to the beach on the other side of the camp ground. Due to the large amount of pictures we’ll write a separate post on these animal adventures.
Along the way up north we stopped at McLean Falls for a nice little bush walk and both wished we could continue our trip on the Harley parked outside of “Le Frog” café.
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Further up the coast we found a cute little picnic spot near Nugget Point for our afternoon tea with smoked salmon and curry onion bread. Nugget Point got it’s name from the huge round boulders strewn around the surrounding ocean like giant gold nuggets. Would be really nice to find a gold nugget that size, eh? And of course these rocks were home to yet another fur seal colony sleeping in the afternoon sun or splashing around in the water.
From Nugget Point it was only a short drive to our final destination for the day: Dunedin.
Gone walkabout 