Day 15: The End of the Earth

In case it ever comes up, the difference between an overnight low temperature of minus 5 C and plus 5 C is that at minus 5, you periodically wake up because your head is cold, but you’re otherwise comfortable. At plus 5, however, you don’t have to wear a hat to bed, and with the same number of covers as at minus 5, you wake up at 3 a.m. drenched in sweat. I learned you don’t need the duvet at plus 5 to be comfortable.

The outdoor sleeping arrangements are agreeing with me, however, as the alarm woke me up at 7:15, and I got out of bed at 7:30. Walked over to the really bright and clean showers where I stayed at Moeraki Village Holiday Park and got cleaned up for the day. I had the van converted from sleeping mode to travel mode around 8:45 a.m., then had another breakfast of tea, puffed wheat cereal, and milk. I was packed up and on the road at 9:30 a.m., which I think is the earliest start I’ve gotten on this trip.

My first stop of the day was the Moeraki Boulders, just 4 km north of where I stayed overnight.

These spherical boulders started to form about 55 million years ago, when lime began to form evenly around a pebble or shell buried beneath the sea floor. The lime eventually formed a hard, spherical concretion around the pebble. Once the sea floor was uplifted in (relatively) modern geologic time, the mudstone encasing the boulders was eroded, leaving the spherical boulders as you see. The boulder in the previous photo is slightly taller than me.

There are a number of the boulders scattered over perhaps half a kilometer of the beach:

If you turn around, you can see Moeraki Harbor, across the road from where I camped the previous night:

And if you look toward the shore, there is a shrub that grows in very dense groves on hillsides in certain areas. It is quite spiny with yellow flowers about the size of a nickel, and reminds me of gorse, which I’ve seen in Scotland, although the Scottish variety had magenta flowers. Maybe the Kiwi Master Gardeners could identify it for me?

I left The Boulders about 10:30, heading south. SH 1 curves inland for a while, so there wasn’t much to see other than the green, rolling hills that characterize New Zealand. Since I was on the road early, I stopped at a bakery in Palmerston and bought a raspberry muffin that was my first pastry in almost two weeks. I savored bits of it all day.

Rollin into Dunedin shortly after noon, I purchased fuel, and pushed on to Mosgiel, a smaller town just 10 km further south. I was low on milk, so I bought some groceries, then walked across the street to the public library as the libraries here offer free WiFi access. I posted yesterday’s blog, and called home via Skype, although I wound up leaving a message on the answering machine. It was 8:30 Tuesday night back home, and Karen could have been outside during the cooler part of the day.

Southbound again on SH 1 at 1:40 p.m. At Balclutha, I turned off onto SH 92, the Southern Scenic Tourist Route. SH 92 would add about an hour to my travel time to Invercargill versus SH 1, but SH 92 hugs the coastline through the Catlins and is a much prettier (and less traveled) route. While on SH 92, I stopped to prove that, yes, New Zealand does have sheep. Lots of sheep.

Each of the white dots in the photo is a sheep. If I grazed sheep at the same density back home, I’d have about eighty sheep on Kings Mill. I also learned that sheep will walk away – briskly – from you as soon as you stop the car. There were sheep all along the fence line when I stopped, and by the time I got out of the car and set up the shot, they were all about half a block away.

SH 92 was pretty curvy, and I was averaging about 60 kph, so I knew it was going to be a late arrival in Invercargill. But the views along the coast were quite good, as this view of Tautuku Bay shows:

Around 4:30 p.m., I was still almost 80 km from Invercargill, so I stopped at Curio Bay to evaluate their accommodations. When I arrived, a driving rain started to fall, and a strong, gusting wind started up – so I decided to push on. It wasn’t until I started typing this blog entry that I realized I had neglected to take a photo at Curio Bay, as it will be the furthest south I get on this trip – by about 1 km over where I hope to tomorrow (Bluff, New Zealand).

I drove on through gusting winds and periodic rain, arriving in Invercargill at 6:10 p.m. I got a camp site at the Amble Inn Holiday Park on the east side of town, but just wasn’t up for cooking my own dinner tonight, so I drove into town for a burger and fries. I ate back at camp, and am finishing up this entry about 8:45 p.m. I’ll go back, convert the van to sleeper mode, and hit the sack – I like getting the earlier start.

So tomorrow, I check off the last of my goals for this trip – standing at the end of the earth, facing south with nothing but a lot of water between me and Antarctica. They’re predicting rain, with a low tonight of 3 C, and a high tomorrow of 8 C. But now I start heading west and north again, so except for the one night I hope to spend in the mountains, it should be getting warmer. Good night from the southern end of the earth; I hope I don’t fall off overnight.

Campervan mileage: 418 km for the day