The Catlin's & Te Anau, New Zealand

2923-E Olney-Sandy Spring Road Olney, MD  20832 Phone: 301-774-4646 Fax: 301-774-3610

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October 4, 2000

I reread our Maui Rental contract and all the roads down here are OK to drive on.  When I finished yesterdays entry Scott had just pulled in to our first stop in the Catlins. We would find out throughout the day that 90% of the roads in Catlins National Park are gravel.  Catlins was not that far from Dunedin which was a good thing because we spent all day there and as Scott was saying all day you really do need about a month so you here so you can stay and see everything for as long as you want.  Everything we saw today was incredible.  The first stop was at Nugget Point which was at about 46 degrees south according to a sign on the lighthouse on the point indicated.  The lighthouse is at the end of this jagged point and you walk out to it on this path about 100 feet or more high over the ocean with these shear cliffs.  It was lightly raining and the ocean was really rough that really made this place look really forbidding.  Somehow Scott spotted a bunch of seals lying in the rocks at the bottom of the cliff including one baby seal whose coloring was light tan.  When we were leaving Nugget Point I got what I wanted to see the most on this trip.  A penguin was just walking across to road.  He walked away into the undergrowth real quick and I missed getting a picture of him but I spotted a second on who had not crossed the road yet just standing next to the camper not more than 5 feet away.  I got a picture of him or her.  He was a yellow-eyed penguin according to the guide we would see at out next stop.  I think penguins are some of the neatest creatures alive and I was unbelievably happy.  Scott said don't worry we should see a lot more of them but never did the rest of the day.

Boat Below Nugget Point (Scroll Over Box For Movie)

  The next stop was at Roaring Bay where they had a penguin blind but a sign there said we were probably to early as the usually show up at 3:00 PM.   It was a pretty site even though there were no penguins.  Our next stop after that was a little disappointing also which was Cannibal Bay.  It was a nice enough beach location but we went to see sea lions and saw none.  The real pain was you have to do all these off road runs to get to the places then you don't see what you want which is another problem of not having enough time to spend at each site. 

Rainbow Falls (Sroll Over Box For Movie)

Matai Falls (Scroll Over Box For Movie)

Purakanui Falls (Scroll Over Box For Movie)

The next 2 stops were for waterfalls.  The first was Purakaunui Falls.  The neat thing we started seeing on all of the next walks was the forests you walk through all seem like Jurassic Park times with all these huge ferns and wild looking trees that you don't see back home.  The had one overlook to the falls that wasn't that impressive but when you walked to the bottom you got the full effect of these falls that kind of layer down like a wedding cake.  Definitely worth the stop.  The next falls were Matai Falls and Horseshoe Falls.  You walk down this steep hill to get to the falls you go left to Matai which we did first.  Scott climbed over the fence so I could take his picture and while climbing on the rocks almost fell.  I didn't go as far in the water on the rocks but my boots are great and I never slipped once all day walking on all these slippery paths.  Horseshoe Falls was only about w minutes away and wasn't as easy to see but it did horseshoe around us and was kind of neat to see because of all the vegetation slightly obscuring the views  In Owaka we stopped in a Four Grocery Shop and picked up our meal of the day 1.5 liter Cokes and a bag of chips, cheese puffs, and small bag of pizza flavored crackers.  Thumbs up on the Salute Sea Salted chips made in olive oil and Pam's Cheese Bites which were very cheesy and fluffy.  The pizza flavored crackers were like cardboard though.  At this time Scott began to rave about the chips in Sydney.  The boy loves his chips.  By the way it is October 5 in the morning and he just left to run up the lake here at Te Anau and said to drive up the lake in a couple hours to get him.  Hope I can find him.

Our next stop was at a place called Jack's Blowhole, another long out of the way drive that came up empty but for a strange reason.  The spot was closed due to lambing.  They had these signs up say you could enter at your own risk and that ignorance was not an excuse for going in, so we passed on Jack's Blowhole.  Actually I just got these backwards some.  The order went Cannibal Bay, Jacks Blowhole, Owaka then the three waterfalls.  The whole time driving around though is just incredible.  I don't know if it was the way the sky was which was dark and ominous over the land to the north of us and usually bright and sunny over us on the coast but the colors of the rolling hills were just amazingly vibrant.  The greens of the grass and the yellows and oranges of the weed bush of the day before were incredible.  Also they say there are 60 million sheep in this country and I believe them.  You hardly see any people but sheep are everywhere.  I noticed later that the sheep in the country are pansies compared to the sheep on the highway.  The highway sheep never more when you drive past.  The country national park sheep stampede away as Bedlow roars past them.  The little ones are really funny looking when they run also, they kind of bound not run.

Jack's Blowhole Sign Movie (Scroll Over Box For Movie)

Waipapa Point (Scroll Over Box For Movie)

Roaring Bay (Scroll Over Box For Movie)

About this time it really started getting windy.  The next stop was Tautuku Bay.  We first saw it from the top of this hill and then got to drive right to it.  It is this incredible half moon bay with a beach over a hundred maybe 200 yards wide.  The wind was whipping the sand and the surf was really rough but it was so windy the wind would blow water of the back of the waves as the broke.  Next stop was Lake Wilkie which made us think of the 55.  A very pretty lake set in the middle of a forest with no visible shore line.  It sort of had dark water and had these huge grass like plants surrounding it.  A very nice spot for the 55.   The next stop ended up being another disappointment, especially when I saw what we missed in a post card.  Cathedral Caves.  The caves come in right off the ocean so you have to get there at low tide which we did exactly somehow at 2:09 PM.  The wind was blowing so hard though that the water was chest high in the caves.   They did have a guy up their telling you not to go down so you didn't waste your time.  All the better was that we drove to the spot which was going to be a 2 kilometer walk in each direction.  You could drive in for $2 NZ which they didn't charge since you couldn't see anything. 

Next stop was the information center in Waikawa.  They officially were not open yet since it is too early in the spring and not many people are here but the lady who runs the place was doing some yard work and let us in.  She saved us a trip to Porpoise Bay since she told us it was too early for the Porpoise also.  We did go to the overlook and I took about a million pictures of the surf crashing up over the jagged rocks on the coast.  Curio Bay was the next stop down the road where we saw a petrified forest right on the beach.  It's weird to see these old fallen trees on a beach and you touch them and they are rock.  Again the coast was just forbidding.  The last stop was Waipapa Point where the wind was at its worst.  I could barely stand up at the lighthouse it was blowing so hard.  Scott walked down to the shore and grabbed some seashells.   

We stopped quickly at The Frog and Firkin in Invercargill.  Had chicken nuggets with some sort of Old Bay type seasoning and strange calamari.  They had chopped up the calamari and processed it into onion rings.  The town was bizarre in that we have been driving in hills all day and now we get to this town and it reminds me of Levelland, Texas.  Flat as can be no building over 2 stories height and streets straight as an arrow. 

We pulled in to Te Anau and got set up at the Te Anau Mountain View Holiday Park.  It cost $23 NZ to hook up for the night.  Scott and I love the trailer life.  Scottie said I hate packing and unpacking on vacation like we had to do in Hawaii.  I had a little trouble, like I expected, getting the camper hooked up but succeeded in the end.   I took a shower because I was quite ripe from a day of walking up and down all these hills.  At one point I had my arm up holding a handle on the camper over my head and Scott asked me to put it down.  I told him I was just going to anyway because I couldn't stand it either.  After getting fresh we walked to three bars in a light rain again.  The Moose and Bailiez had unusually tall bars.  Not a problem for Scott at The Moose where they had pint glasses and he could almost rest his chin on it, but at Bailiez they had the tall pilsner glasses and he could not drink from above the bar.  He would actually have to pull his glass off the bar to drink.  The last bar was The Ranch Cafe Bar & Grill where at least there were a couple of people.  Some kids playing pool came up and asked how tall I was and when I told them one went crazy because the had wagered money on the my height.  Scott got a big kick out of that.   Well it's about 8:30 AM I should get ready to hopefully find Scott.

I found Scott with no problems since there is only one road going to Milford Sound.   Unfortunately though I saw a sign and heard on the radio that our road was closed at a certain point due to high risk of avalanche.  I confirmed that at the Best Western at Te Anau Downs where I also met Scott.  Te Anau Downs consists basically of the hotel and that is it.  When I told the guy at the hotel that I was waiting for a friend who was running up from Te Anau he asked if we didn't lock those type of people up in our country.  It was a pretty drive though and there was an incredible rainbow running the entire length of the lake.  I don't think I have seen a complete rainbow from one end to the other.  It was really brilliantly colored at The Te Anau Downs location.  I hope the pictures turn out.  We turned around to go back to Te Anau so Scott could take a shower and found out that our misfortune had probably saved us a huge headache.  The lady at the camper park told me that even though Milford is on the map it is not really a town and the do not sell gas.  Of course, we had not filled up when we left Te Anau and had maybe 140 kilometers left in the tank with easy riding and we had a total of at least 180 kilometers driving probably through some sort of mountains to get to Milford.  She said they did have emergency gas there so we could have made it probably but we are no rocket scientists so I'm sure we would have done something else stupid to fix the situation if it had occurred.  It is the morning of the 6th right now as I write this and Milford Sound is not looking very good but I will get to that later.  We filled up with gas, which we will do no at every stop, and I wandered around the lakefront for a little.  They had a statue of at Takane bird that was thought to be extinct until some guy found one in the are in 1948.  There are now thought to be 200.  The also had a memorial to all the residents who had given there lives in the World Wars.

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