Part 4 – Caves, Dolphins, and a Petrified Forest

We left Purakaunui Bay campsite in the morning and headed for Cathedral Caves in the Catlins which looked interesting. The caves are a large V-shaped structure which you can walk through at low tide. The weather was still murky and rainy but showed signs of clearing up. We parked up at the car park and walked down to the beach where the caves were. On the way down there were some wonderful gnarly old trees. At the bottom, we were met by a DoC man who gave us the low-down on the caves, to be careful as the tide was not quite out yet, we could certainly get into one end of the caves but the other end was still flooded.

After walking the length of the beach, we got to the caves. We removed our boots and just headed in barefoot, it seemed the sensible thing to do. And it was pretty spectacular, and the echoes of our voices was marvelous. We got all the way into the cave and managed to get almost all the way to the mouth of the other entrance, but occasional surges in the tide were still coming right into the cave, so we had to retreat every now and again. Great fun!

Next stop was to see the Petrified Forest in Curio Bay, and another chance to see Yellow-Eyed Penguins. We arrived in Curio Bay with the weather improving a bit. At least it now was not raining. The petrified forest is pretty cool. It was created by silica being dumped on logs and trees washed there by a flood. You can see the stumps of the trees and even tree rings in the petrified forest. These logs are from the Jurassic age, when dinosaurs were still around, so walking amongst them was fascinating and a little eerie.

We failed to see any Yellow-Eyed Penguins, although we most certainly heard them calling and bellowing in amongst the tall grass at the back of the beach, but the area was sealed off to protect the animals as they are extremely rare, and very sensitive to human interference. So after finishing with the petrified forest we headed up to an observation point primarily to try to see the penguins either nesting, which we couldn’t or to see them return from the sea, which we didn’t. We did however, see some Hector’s Dolphins off the beach in the waves, presumably hunting and feeding, so we have seen the smallest species of Dolphin which is endemic to New Zealand.

After this we headed for Bluff, the southernmost town on South Island. We had to go via Invercargill where we stopped to do some shopping, filled up with fuel and also cooked dinner parked up on the road outside the laundromat! After that we headed for Bluff to spend the night at the campsite in the town, so that next morning we would be up nice and early ready for our encounter with sharks. More on that next time!

Here’s the route we traveled this day.

Cheers