Well!
Today was supposed to be a brief day on the blog as we were travelling and doing nothing special. You never can tell what’s around the corner though, especially on the New Zealand coast. We took the “scenic" route from Invercargill to Balchutha en route to Dunedin as the coast looked as if it’d be pretty from the map and Lonely Planet mentioned some places where penguins, seals, sea lions and dolphins are sometimes to be seen.
The coastline was, indeed, pretty. It’s difficult to know when to stop taking photographs! Bays, rocky wave-cut platforms, cliffs, in all shapes and sizes, with such diverse landforms, dependent on the type of rock, folding, faulting, weathering and erosion.
We looked down on Porpoise Bay from a small cliff and there below were several Hector’s Dolphins “playing” in the surf. Apparently the species is rare with fewer than four thousand in the world and this is the only place in the world where they live permanently so close to the shore. The photos are not spectacular, but we are delighted to have even this reminder that we saw them.
Over in the adjacent Curio Bay, we’d hoped to see the petrified forest on the beach, but instead we were greeted by three Yellow-Eyed Penguins or hoiho. They are considered to be the most ancient of living penguins and again, there are only about four thousand remaining birds. Lonely Planet indicates that they are most commonly seen at sunrise and late in the day and advises people to keep at least ten metres away and hidden. These guys didn’t seem to know about that, and apparently weren’t concerned about humans being close to them as they continued to groom themselves without an obvious care in the world.
It’s been really difficult to decide which photo to post as we have so many!
On the other hand, there was much squawking from an oyster catcher when a young man, evidently only intent on having his photo taken close to a penguin, disturbed him/her. It looked as though the bird had been sitting on a nest and eventually flew at the man from behind, clearly very upset.
Jean
