Relaxing in the sunshine on our last day
We dropped the van off in Christchurch on Sunday, after more than 6000km and 46 days on the road. It was quite a trip - amazing scenery, interesting people, and some splendidly mixed weather. Snow in Invercargill turned to blazing sunshine up at the Mount Cook National Park, where we swam in the Blue Lakes beside the Tasman Glacier. In between we'd had a fantastic time spotting wildlife on the Catlins Coast, Otago Peninsula and Oamaru: sealions on the beaches; elephant seals and NZ fur seals at Nugget Point; Royal Albatrosses at the end of Otago Peninsula; and a special highlight - watching rare Yellow Eyed Penguins waddle ashore after a hard day's fishing from a DOC hide at Roaring Bay. The culmination of our wildlife-spotting extravaganza however was at the lovely town of Oamaru, north of Dunedin, where we visited the Blue Penguin colony. Here we had a tour of the nests, peered into the smelly dark depths to spy the chicks and egg-incubating adults, and later, as darkness descended, watched rafts of penguins coming ashore. There were apparently 256 of them, and we were able to get very close and appreciate their comical-looking behaviour as they headed, exhausted, back to their nest-burrows to feed the chicks. That nicely completed our penguin-spotting odyssey, as we had now spotted all three NZ mainland species in the wild (the other was a pair of Fiordland Crested Penguins at Milford Sound).
The weather turned perfect for our 3 days in the Mt. Cook National Park. Here is a distant Mount Cook reflected in Lake Pukaki.
Freda paints Mount Cook from the shores of the Mueller Glacier Lake
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