These pictures are a little out of order but they are all from Friday, April 24th. We started the day at Curio Bay which is in the South Catlins and made our way up the east coast along the Catlins area back to Dunedin for those of you following along on a map.
This is what happens when you use your feet instead of the zoom on your camera to get close to the wildlife.
Female sea lion posing on the beach at Cannibal Bay.
We saw a lot of these guys at Cannibal Bay in the Catlins. We had gone to Surrat Bay first and were talking it up to Fernando (since we had seen sea lions there before) but when we got there it was empty. Luckily, Cannibal Bay is the next bay and we found sea lions there.
This guy was huge and snoring away on the sand. His fur was a lot lighter than some of the others -- he reminded me of a bear.
This big guy kept posing on the beach whenever anyone walked by -- we joked that he was getting paid by NZ tourism. He was really enormous...I wish I got a photo of someone else in the picture to give you an idea of how big he was. Of course we really didn't want to get too close to him. At one point he opened his mouth as if to growl at us.
The winds near the east coast of NZ are brutal -- southerly gales from Antarctica blow the trees so they end up looking like these on a farm near Slope Point.
And this is Slope Point - the southern most point of the South Island. It's a sign and lighthouse in a sheep pasture that runs down to some cliffs. Someone did some serious marketing - you wouldn't believe how many people were walking through a muddy sheep pasture to get a picture with this sign. The sheep giving us the eye certainly couldn't believe it.
This is the petrified forest of Curio Bay. According to the signs, by the late Jurassic period, Curio Bay was a broad floodplain flanked by active volcanoes which flooded the forests with volcanic debris. The lower parts of the trees were buried and turned to stone. The trunks that lie exposed were carried in by the flood and were partially buried. Due to the very complete nature of this process known as 'silification', the petrified wood and its texture are of an unusually high quality. It looks very much like real wood yet feels just like stone.
Curio Bay is the site of one of the world's finest fossil forests. The platform of petrified stumps, fallen trees and fern imprints are easily accessible at low tide. It was pretty amazing to see.
This is from our beachside hotel at Curio Bay watching the sunrise. I loved this hotel - certainly our favorite of the trip. I wished we could have stayed another night - we arrived too late in the evening to see the penguins come up the beach, and sometimes there are hector dolphins just off the coast. From here we drove back to Dunedin and saw Fernando back to the airport. It was great having Fernando come and visit us. I hope he had as good a time as we did. Maybe this will inspire more family to visit us out here....
This is what happens when you use your feet instead of the zoom on your camera to get close to the wildlife.
Female sea lion posing on the beach at Cannibal Bay.
We saw a lot of these guys at Cannibal Bay in the Catlins. We had gone to Surrat Bay first and were talking it up to Fernando (since we had seen sea lions there before) but when we got there it was empty. Luckily, Cannibal Bay is the next bay and we found sea lions there.
This guy was huge and snoring away on the sand. His fur was a lot lighter than some of the others -- he reminded me of a bear.
This big guy kept posing on the beach whenever anyone walked by -- we joked that he was getting paid by NZ tourism. He was really enormous...I wish I got a photo of someone else in the picture to give you an idea of how big he was. Of course we really didn't want to get too close to him. At one point he opened his mouth as if to growl at us.
The winds near the east coast of NZ are brutal -- southerly gales from Antarctica blow the trees so they end up looking like these on a farm near Slope Point.
And this is Slope Point - the southern most point of the South Island. It's a sign and lighthouse in a sheep pasture that runs down to some cliffs. Someone did some serious marketing - you wouldn't believe how many people were walking through a muddy sheep pasture to get a picture with this sign. The sheep giving us the eye certainly couldn't believe it.
This is the petrified forest of Curio Bay. According to the signs, by the late Jurassic period, Curio Bay was a broad floodplain flanked by active volcanoes which flooded the forests with volcanic debris. The lower parts of the trees were buried and turned to stone. The trunks that lie exposed were carried in by the flood and were partially buried. Due to the very complete nature of this process known as 'silification', the petrified wood and its texture are of an unusually high quality. It looks very much like real wood yet feels just like stone.
Curio Bay is the site of one of the world's finest fossil forests. The platform of petrified stumps, fallen trees and fern imprints are easily accessible at low tide. It was pretty amazing to see.
This is from our beachside hotel at Curio Bay watching the sunrise. I loved this hotel - certainly our favorite of the trip. I wished we could have stayed another night - we arrived too late in the evening to see the penguins come up the beach, and sometimes there are hector dolphins just off the coast. From here we drove back to Dunedin and saw Fernando back to the airport. It was great having Fernando come and visit us. I hope he had as good a time as we did. Maybe this will inspire more family to visit us out here....
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