Syd & Astrid's Down Under Adventure: Curious Marine Life at Curio Bay

After a great trip to Milford Sound and an overnight camp on beautiful Lake Te Anau, we headed to the Southland - south coast of New Zealand. We stopped to do a quite strenuous cave in Clifden where we were crawling, crouching and gripping like spiderman to cave walls to avoid falling into deep pools along the 400m underground dark passages.

The cool thing about a camper van is you can have lunch pretty much anywhere. Check out this sweet setup for a quite bite to break up the journey:

The coast here was wild and windy, so much so that the trees were permanently formed into slanted trunks and branches.

We stopped at the main south town called Invercargill, where they chose not to take down their Christmas decor. We enjoyed some wine at the local brewery there and bought some boysenberry fruit wine called boysen-beery. ;o)

Then we trucked on to the south east coast called 'the catlins' and stayed at a campsite at the end of a peninsula called Curio Bay. This bay is famous for lots of marine life.

No sooner did we pull into the campground and we saw people taking pictures of something. So I hopped out with a camera to check it out and sure enough, it was a female sea lion just coming out of the sea to hang out. She walked right up to me and I was able to get great shots. She wasn't scared of people at all, she just wanted to find a place to pass out for a while - which she did - on someone's campsite for a good 20 minutes!

Following that, we parked our van in a secluded flax patch and walked out to the yellow-eyed penguin cove where the penguins were coming in from a day of hunting in the sea to feed their chicks. Apparently it takes them most of the evening to walk along the beach to their nests in the rocks. It doesn't help when us tourists are trying to take their pictures so it slows their progress. These penguins we saw up close on the rocks had their wings out (at attention) and were probably waiting for papa penguin to come in with more fish.

They were so cute, and it was so neat to watch them hop around. I just wanted to hug one, and squeeze one, and call it my own! Laws prohibit such things of course, so I just ogled from 10m away. ;o(

Lastly, there was one more bay in the park to check out - porpoise bay - that has resident dolphin pods of the rarest breed of dolphins called 'hectors dolphins'. They just bounced around in the surf and were majestic to watch. We wanted to go swim with them but the water (and air) was too bloody cold!

Upon return to the campsite there was another sea lion hanging out on someone's tent fly and trying to catch some zz's.