#newzealand #travel #adventure #mtb #petrolheads

After leaving the castle and Dunedin behind, we took the scenic coastal route onwards to our next destination, Invercargill. Stopping at a #brownsign for Purakaunui Falls, a short walk down a pretty track, over a bridge (I do love a bridge) and down to the falls. We’ve stopped at a few now and this waterfall was quite different from the others we’ve seen. Certainly not as tall, but very impressive and billed as the most impressive falls in The Catlins. It was low and wide with black rock. Not much water flowed over it, but the forest was dense and the contrast between the monochrome falls really set off the vivid green of the forest when the sun hit it.

The Catlins is a quite different landscape to what we’ve been used to. It was all rolling hills and meadows and obvious signs of being very windy, much like Devon. Camp for the night was a place not far up the road from the falls, called Papatowai. It’s a funny thing over here, we’ve found that you can drive for a long while, barely seeing anyone at all and then you pull in to one of these campsites in the middle of nowhere with only a toilet block and sometimes a kitchen, although not always, and the place is jam packed. Unlike the bigger sites with electric, showers, and amenities such as a laundry, these DOC (department of conservation) sites are a half way house between the holiday parks and full on freedom camping. You pick an envelope out of the box, fill in your details, put your money in the envelope and post it back in to a secure box. This site offered a short walk through the trees to where the river met the beach, we managed to get a brisk walk along the tide line, in a sandstorm, before the rain came in. (The line where forest meets sand is really beautiful, the trees grow out at amazing angles over the tidal sands to reach the open sky, the massive trunks are horizontal then turn upwards at the last moment. It appears to defy physics that they stay up at all! :bloke) The rock formations were pretty crazy too. We spent the night tucked up once again, sheltering from the heavy rain and strong winds, feeling sorry for the poor buggers in their tents (I’m sure they enjoyed it in their own strange way :bloke).

Note: You are allowed to “freedom camp” in certain areas, providing you are in a self-contained vehicle, ie: you have cooking facilities “contained within” your vehicle and you do not pose any fire threat by cooking outside. As with Australia, bush fires are a very real threat here and many areas have information boards stating the current level of forest fire risk.

After a very wet and windy night, we got on our way again and stopped at a place called Petrified Forest. Who could resist, with a name like that! It turned out to be a rare phenomenon of a fossilised forest, preserved by silica. Ashy floodwaters submerged these Jurassic era trees, leaving craggy stumps that are only visible 4 hrs either side of low tide. We arrived there just in time, donned our waterproofs, yes it was still raining, and made our way to the beach. Sadly many of the stumps have been pillaged over the years but it was still worth a visit.

(The tide was high in these photos and the surge along the channel on the right was really fierce and made the beach a no go area – that’s why you can’t see the stumps so well :bloke) We didn’t stay too long at the beach as the weather was getting worse and after a brief discussion, the decision was made to miss the next stop on our tour, Slope Point. Now my guide book tells me that Slope Point is the true most southerly point of New Zealand, not Bluff as most people think it is. To reach Slope Point you have to take a 20mins each way hike, through cliffside meadows, ordinarily that sounds nice, however with the weather (rain, force 4 increasing :bloke) a walk was not appealing, so we decided to give it a miss.

We got back in the camper, dried off, got back on the highway and made our way to Invercargill. We had been given a tip to visit a hardware store there called E Haynes & Sons. We were told that it had an interesting automobile collection, in amongst the brooms, bbq’s and lawnmowers. I was expecting a few motorbikes and odds and sods hanging from the walls. What I wasn’t expecting was dozens of motorbikes, cars, cash registers, old tools and the star of the show….the actual motorbike that Burt Munro broke the world speed record on, as immortalised in the film The World’s Fastest Indian, starring Anthony Hopkins. This place was amazing, everywhere you looked there was something else to discover. It turns out that Invercargill is a petrolheads paradise and has several different places to loose yourself in for hours at a time, such as The Classic Motorcycle Mecca Museum and Bill Richardson Transport World, which proclaims to be the largest private automotive museum on the planet. Both bloke and I used to ride motorcycles and my family have always been car crazy, before mountain bikes I was very much a petrol head, so we thought we’d check out the museum the following morning before leaving town.

However, much to our surprise and not as advertised, the sun was out! We decided to take a quick drive to the local beach to see if the surf was any good for bloke to get in the water. It turned out to be a bit much for his capabilities (you can’t surf if the waves are just dumping 🙄 :bloke), so he scratched that idea. what we did find was a bike Park. Hmmmm, Bike Park or motorbike museum?……..knowing that we would spend the next 5 days minimum, without being able to ride our bikes and it having been two days since we last rode…..the bike park won! Sorry petrolheads.

The park was right behind the dunes on a spit of land set aside for outdoor activities. All the clubs were near there: archery, boat, sailing, speedway, horse riding, paintball you name it, they seemed to have it! (The MTB trails were basically a series of 1-3km cross country single track loops, not much climbing but really fast linked berms fun and good for fitness as it has no natural rest point and just wants you to go flat out all the time. 2hrs of that was enough to knock the corners off our energy levels. :Bloke)

From there we decided we to head out to Bluff, it was time to bag our furthest point south claim. The weather was on our side today and we arrived with just enough time to get the obligatory photos taken before the rain started again. There’s not a great deal of much going on in Bluff, it is Invercargill’s port, windswept and more than a little bleak. Located 27km south of the city, the main reason to come here is to catch the ferry to Stewart Island or pose for photos, we didn’t get the ferry. Apart from this famous signpost, Bluff is well known for its oysters and apparently people come from far and wide for the delicacy, but this time of year they are out of season, so we didn’t hang about. We got straight on the road and went off in search of another beach to play on. We were on our way to Milford Sound, we had booked in advance, having heard it gets really busy, and still had time for a stop over somewhere else on the way. Bloke found a little bay called Colac Bay, it sounded cute. It was far from it. The campsite was bloody awful and the atmosphere was very weird. We read some of the reviews the next morning and found one that said “I’d read a review saying the atmosphere was very odd, as soon as I arrived I understood exactly what they meant”. We second that 😄. We’ve been pretty lucky so far and we’ve had a real mixture of places. Some have been really lovely. Some in beautiful surroundings with slightly dubious amenities Some not so attractive, with cracking facilities. This was none of the above – it can only be described as a shithole. This was made worse by the rain not stopping the entire time we were there, and yet despite having showers run by rain water, it had no water! Needless to say, we were up and out early the next morning, eating breakfast somewhere else over looking the beach – which unfortunately had no surf and was too rough for a comfortable SUP. Still, you can’t win them all, we feel pretty damn lucky being here at all and besides, it always makes for a good story. So onwards we went, and we made our way to Te Anau, our last stop before Milford Sound. We really had entered the Southlands now, the roads were empty, the towns small, the sheep plentiful. This is proper farming country. Beautiful in its own way, but I was pleased to be driving through it and not hanging around (the danger of getting ticks was enough to keep me moving! :Bloke).