This morning was a very early morning and a bit of a rude awakening to be perfectly honest, especially after getting to bed at..........mmmm! I impressed myself though with getting up for a delicious cooked breakfast, and although not in the minority there was one of the party from last night that I actually didn’t see again until we docked back at Milford!
On our early morning cruise we headed out to poke our nose out to the Tasman sea before then slowly making our way back to the dock. It was a lovely cruise but it didn’t actually stop raining until we were safely back on dry land! Typical huh?! In reality though it did mean that we saw the waterfalls as they are supposed to be seen, the only problem being that we couldn’t really take too many pictures cause it was raining soooo much!!
The cruise ended around 9.30 am and my plan today was to head off to Dunedin, a 6 hour drive away! It wasn’t really a terribly appealing option to be honest but time really isn’t on my side at this point so after a short walk around the waterfront area at Milford I started to make my way.
Back through the tunnel, the view still wasn’t good, then back to the mirror lakes which I stopped to visit although unfortunately I did so at the same time as 5 bus loads of Chinese tourists all going along the walkway in the opposite direction to me!
I reached Te Anau again and after picking up a bite to eat on the go I went along to the wildlife centre to check out the rare, and famous it seems, flightless takahe bird, and the poor little thing really didn’t look too great to be honest, so much so that there was a sign on her cage saying that even though she makes funny noises and lays down a funny way she is actually ok!! Really? I am so not convinced, I’m not so sure she was going to even make it through the night!
I still had a 4 hour drive to Otago Peninsula to go so pressed ahead once more saying goodbye to the poor little bird.
It’s funny when you’re travelling around cause there’s only so many routes around NZ that you can take and then really only one route between each place, so generally you tend to meet the same people over and over again which is nice, you get a chance to exchange travel recommendations and tips and catch up on where they are in their travels.
This time though meeting up again happened quicker than usual! One of the people I had been up chatting with the night before on the boat was headed in the same direction as me but anymore than that I didn’t know, his name was Peter (easy to remember), he was German and was in NZ for one weeks holiday after having two weeks in Australia on business. Well, coming out of Te Anau I ended up behind this camper van which was doing a pretty good speed, overtaking other vehicles and generally keeping a pretty good pace, so I pretty much kept up with him, overtaking when he did and slowing when he did. Tiredness was quickly overtaking me though so on a particularly clear stretch I decided to overtake purely for a change of scenery! It so happened it was Peter I had been following and had then overtaken, I didn’t see him but he saw me and when I stopped on the way for fuel he stopped as well to say hi and buy me a tea. From there we then decided to travel on to Otago together get a bite to eat and check out the peninsula wildlife in the morning. And despite him having a sat-nav and me just having a good sense of direction (!) I was somehow leading the convoy!
Our first wildlife experience at Otago......shame it was dead!
Once at Otago Peter headed off to the camper site and I headed off to the backpackers before meeting up later for dinner and Blue penguin viewing.
Otago is one of the best places to view the Blue penguins as they come out of the water in the evening after a days feeding at sea so we headed off to the perfect spot to find around 20 others already there and a couple of local volunteers giving info on what we can expect to see and where we can expect to see it. It’s getting a bit late in the season for the adults to be coming back to feed their young so our chances of viewing were reduced but we hung in there waiting and waiting. These penguins are the smallest in the world and its getting seriously dark now so our chances were even more reduced really! But still we waited. It seemed like a real little common cause community going on, everyone there waiting for these little penguins to come into view. It soon got too dark to see them though so without a viewing we had to call it a night (although we were some of the last) and headed back to the car, on the way though we were rewarded with a perfect viewing of two little penguins heading home and they are so tiny but soooo cute!
No comments:
Post a Comment