The catlins!

 Dear all

Woke up early this morning to a cloudy, but light sky! However by the time we left the sky has tinges of blue - Yeah.  So our first port of call was the ill fated Nugget Point from last night. Today was as clear as a bell & the sky was cleared to further we walked along the point. There was the obligatory Lighthouse for such a rocky outcrop, but the real draw was the wave thumped rocky outcrops, which when the sun hits then at the right angle they look like they have seams of gold running through them - sadly the sun didn't shine that way for us! But it had emerged and we saw loads of fur seals, shags, sannets & sooty shearwaters & a number of spoonbills down on the cliffs. Apparently sea lions and Elephant seals co exist with the seals occasionally but we missed them.  The sky was now virtually cloudless - so much for the weather forecast. We then headed down to the spectacular rain swollen multi tiered, Purakaunui Falls which is located down a very pretty walk. The same could be said of Matai Falls and bit further down the road, which had a longer but equally pretty walk to get there. Lunch was spent overlooking the majestic Tautuku Bay with its beautiful long golden beach. Then it was on to the last of the local waterfalls - Mclean Falls. The walk to reach the falls was magical and I half expected to see some fairies or elves nestled in the moss covered trees, ferns or rocks. It was something straight out of the Lord of the Rings Movies!!! LOL  The fall lived up the walk with another very swollen multi tiered water fall at full flow. The spray coming off made it difficult to take photos, but I think I managed to get a couple of OK shots.  Our final stop for the day was at the Porpoise & Curio bays. We went to Porpoise day which is another stunning sandy beach. We managed to see some Hectors Dolphins swimming near to the beach. They are extremely rare and have only just started to come back to this bay each summer to breed so we felt pretty lucky. Just next door is the amazing Curio bay which is famous firstly for its 160millio year old fossil forest left over from the Jurassic period. There are petrified stumps & fallen log fossils on the shore line and you can clearly see the grain of the wood in the stone. WOW! However also resident on the beach are nesting Yellow-eyed Penguins (yep more!)  This group however are very used to people and allowed curious tourist to stand quietly nearby and take photos. So we managed to get some pretty good shots and watched them sunbathing, which was pretty cool. DOUBLE WOW!! We couldn't top that, so sped our way down to Invercargil which we hope to use as our springboard to Stewart Island our most southerly stop of our trip around NZ.

Night all

Hugs

Sara