Calypso's Journal: Invercargill and beyond

46 degrees south

Invercargill was the next stop along the route but we also wanted to get down to Sterling Point at Bluff, the southernmost tip of South Island and just a short hop from Stuart Island, the remote and sparsely populated island that lies just to the south. There is another ferry which goes there regularly but we couldn’t do everything and the day was cold, wet and windy – our third and final dismal day over a four week period.

We'd heard so much about the fabulous Bluff oysters that this was on our minds so we set off in search of them.

Apart from the rather fancy (and exorbitantly expensive) restaurant at the point which did serve them correctly (in our viewpoint) e.g. fresh in the shell on a bed of ice, we only found them at fish & chips shops at a more than ridiculous price served out of the shell, battered and fried - not our scene. So Bluff oysters we did not have! Well, if we couldn't have oysters, we drowned our sorrows in a tasty pot of green-lipped mussels instead.

While we were in Minerva Reef last year before going on to Fiji, we met a chap who was crewing on a Dutch boat who lives on a sheep farm in Invercargill and flippantly said should we ever get down there, we’d pop in to see him. So we did just that. His name is also Paul and he happily showed us around his property schooling us non farming types a little on the ins and outs of sheep farming. Quite captivating and very interesting and what a beautiful part of the world.

From a high vantage point on his property, we could just see Stuart Island in the distance with beautiful rolling pastures all around.

Paul & Paul looking over the winter crop

From Invercargill, we carried on along the southern coastline to a region known as the Catlins Coast. At Curio Bay, we visited a rocky shore with 150 million year old petrified trees and stumps (or 180 million if you read another sign but what’s 30 million in the greater scheme of things) and were able to observe the rare yellow-eyed penguins as they came ashore after a day out catching their dinner.

We got so cold waiting for the penguins that Paul became as sick as a dog the following day which he managed to pass on to me a few days later. Sod!

Despite feeling like hell, he did manage to traipse along to several gorgeous waterfalls with me. There are literally hundreds of waterfalls everywhere we go in this country. Can’t ever imagine them having a water shortage.

Purakaunui Falls

Dunedin was our next port of call, a fairly large city with some lovely old buildings but we really couldn’t do it justice as the flu bug got the better of us. We did, however, take a drive along the peninsular to the albatross reserve, another beautiful journey.

Just further up the coast is a rather intriguing phenomenon, the Moeraki rocks. These perfectly round rocks lie on the beach in a group unlike any other rocks before or after. Just a small section of the beach with a dozen or more round boulders seemingly thrown down from above but having no relation to anything nearby. Strange indeed.