April 20, 2006
More sheep...
We love this place. Ever since the beginning of our trip.
Every day we see something completely amazing - nature is extremely dramatic here.
And we don't even need to go out of our way to witness some of the most amazing landscapes that we've ever seen.
For example, the Nugget Point in Catlins, one of the most Southern points on Earth, was more or less on our way.
Another great place we saw was Otago peninsula - some 30min of cycling away from Dunedin city. Getting there was easy, I wish I could say the same about cycling.
We were a bit stupid to go cycling there: steep mountains are everywhere here. We were relying on our Bukit Timah mountain biking experience, but its nothing like that here.
Its up up up up the mountain (for an hour or so) and down down down down the hill (some 15 minutes or so). We ended up walking our bicycles up the steep slopes along narrow grassy paths way longer than we would have liked.
After 3 hours of cycling we crawled down to the Sandfly Bay. It was beautiful, yes, but there was many more kilometers ahead of us.
As there was no helicopter coming to rescue us, we stoically pumped up the mountains again to get back to Dunedin (several happy Kiwi cyclists took us over: "g'day mate!"). So depressing!
There's a lot of beautiful sandy beaches everywhere in the Sounth Island, unfortunately its only about 10C degrees warm and full of sandflies.
So we saw these Cathedral Caves in Catlins.
And fossill forest in Curio Bay.
And the Curio Bay itself, beautiful, isn't it? We kind of completely forgot how it was in Leijonakaupuki. Its been about 2 weeks since we left and I can't really remember how it was anymore.. Its truly a holiday of our lives.
We stay at beautiful remote places (if we're lucky, sometimes they're just remote.. :)
For example, the Hilltop cottage in Catlins had one of the most amazing views that I've ever seen in my life.
The cottage up there is open, unlocked the whole day. If you have a booking, you just pick a room and bring your stuff in. If you see other people's things, you assume that the room is occupied. Its really like going back in time when people could trust each other and didn't need to look their doors.
There were 2 cute sheep crazing (its on purpose, I know that the proper word is grazing.. :) outside our window.
This time it was crazing about a peace of bread, not the grass...
Cool 80s haircut!
We're very happy that we rented a car, not a camper van. Its beautiful autumn here and the sun goes down really early. At 6-7pm it becomes quite dark and really cold (its T-shirt weather during the day in the sun and goes down to some 5C degrees at night). If would have been really sad if we would have had to sleep in a tin can of a camper van with no heating? brrr....
And then there are these amazing mossy forests that we really really like a lot.
Certainly looks like some place from the Middle Earth from the Lord of the Rings?
As I said, we're very happy here. People seem to be very relaxed, friendly and playful (Kaj says they look like they're on a happy pill.. :) For example, this tiger grafitti in Dunedin really looks very friendly and I really liked these parking places for philosphers - everyone got his neat place - Plato, Locke, Humes, Witgenstein.. Bare with me, I'm quite slow updating the blog, as there's so much to do all the time. And when I finally do, there's mostly pictures and "och.." ahhh".. emotions, not much substance. Sorry, I'm in that stage now.. :) There's more about the cool Kiwi lifestyle coming soon!