So first we drove up the coastline and were just amazed at how beautiful it was. Its like if the Northwest had big forests that met the Carribean. The beach wasn’t necessarily white sand – but deserted and still pretty nice. Here is a picture of a beach we saw on the way up.
Then we stopped off at another Seal Colony. This one was the best one we have seen because there were all of these babies playing in one of the rock pools! It was cool to see them scooting their bodies all over the place and flopping on each other. Here is great video of what we saw....to be posted later when John can figure things out.
Across the street, we did a short walk out to this waterfall.
The coolest part about this waterfall though, was what we heard from another lady who happened to stop by as we were leaving. Evidently, when the fur seal pups are born, the mothers actually cross this highway and snake their ways through all of this bush to have their babies there and teach them to swim and such! This is quite remarkable considering that the waterfall is about a 10 minute walk from the highway (which borders the coastline). The lady said that in the early spring (November time frame), she came out and saw the babies playing and that they will shimmy their way up the rocks and dirt and dive off the side into the pool! Marian can’t imagine what that would be like to see, but it sounded pretty wild.
Then we headed into Marlborough Country again, which is famous for its wines. Here is where Marian thought of a lot of my Ladenburg relatives and how they would want to be there (particularly Aunt Kathy, Uncle Jim, Uncle Cory, Aunt Nadine.) We were a little timid to try wines because we didn’t want to buy any. However, it became pretty obvious as we went through that people could pretty much care less if we bought something – they were happy for the exposure, and we thinks they seemed pretty confident that we would buy stuff later on. We went to Montana (which goes under a different name in the States), Mt. Riley, and Te Maera Wa. Marian’s personal favorite was a sparkling savingon blanc at Mt. Riley – was SOO good. Actually, the lady there was awesome – told us when we could get it on sale at New World (grocery store) for a better price than her employee discount! Here is Marian tasting wine with her (no staging I promise.)
Oh and one John, because we always want more pics of him
All in all, we had a much better time in wine country than we thought we would. We arrived safely into Picton at another holiday park. While making dinner we struck up a conversation with a guy from Liverpool, UK. He invited us to watch a “horrible” British soap opera in the next room called “Courtney Street” or something along those lines. He said he would be the one cringing in the corner. He was fairly hilarious, as were the other individuals from the UK and Ireland in the TV lounge with him. They all took turns making fun of the show, and we talked with them for a few hours. Then two of them, who had been in Picton a few days, asked us if we wanted to see the glowworm colony. We followed the couple up a little trail once it got dark to see the glowworms. We had a running joke about glowworms because they are advertised nearly everywhere in the South Island but we had neither paid to ever see them, nor ventured out at night to a place where they might be. We felt it was our last major tourist thing we needed to do in the South Island. So there we were. Glowworms! They are pretty cool looking – reminded of never never land or something! On the way out we spotted a NZ opossum! There are 80 million of them in NZ and a big threat and pest control problem! However, the NZ opossum, we have to say, is much cuter than the oversized rats we have at home. You will have to look up a picture on your own. We were shocked that it was such a cute looking predator/rodent, and the guy from Liverpool told us a funny story. Evidently, when he was camping somewhere else with his girlfriend in the South Island they ran into some guys from Denmark, who asked him if he had ever seen the big cats in the New Zealand. The guy from Liverpool had not, so the Denmark guy got out his camera to show him. Evidently, there had been some drinking going on the night these pictures were taken. The guy from Denmark showed him pics of himself holding an opossum in each arm! Later in the film, there were ones of him sleeping with them cuddled up and so on! He kept telling the Liverpool guy, “He was like a big monster! But SOOOOO soft! I kept petting him!” and the Liverpool guy was just shocked and said, “I was like ‘yah, they are actually quite dirty’ I mean I couldn’t believe I was seeing this guy showing me pictures of himself cuddling up with a rodent!” So pretty funny night.
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